"History is undoubtedly our myth. It combines the 'thinkable' and [concrete] origins, according to the mode a society understands itself"--( De Certeau 38)

When beginning a study of the portrayal of actual historical events in Mass Culture, one should be wary about opposing "truth"--that's to say, the accounts of the events to be found in the secondary sources available--which, in the case of Classical Antiquity, have long entered the Western literary canon and are taken to be above criticism to the "lies" told by Popular Culture.

The fact is, as Moses Finley wrote, we cannot--and perhaps never shall--have an actual history of Greece and Rome in terms of definite political events (Finley, Historia Antiga 138-9). As Finley puts it, serious Ancient History must of necessity become Sociology. It must strive to test Weberian models about the general rules of functioning of the societies they study, instead of struggling against the paucity of evidence (Historia Antiga 81). "Classical" accounts -- and the welter of fictions they have spawned over the centuries -- tell us about what each succeeding epoch and author, writing in a given place and moment, thought was supposed to have happened. They tell about the Social History of our own societies. 

Following Finley's suggestion, our main goal here is to apply a sociological understanding to the birth and development of the Roman Empire as a successful media product. Such concept of a "Roman Empire"--developed in fact by the Romans themselves in order to ascertain a separate political identity vis-a-vis the Classical Greeks--was reinvented by Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s and currently remerges in a peculiar and fascinating fashion on Home Box Office's (HBO) series, Rome. The monumental, clean, and heroic "Rome" of the epics now gives way to a "Third World" Late Republican Rome whose colossal apparatus has been drowned by surrounding shanty-towns. Where Hollywood classic epics choose symphonic music, larger-than-life scenarios, and golden lame costumes, HBO chooses percussion, gory battles, and male and female frontal nudity. Watching Rome is an opportunity to reflect upon the shifts that have occurred in the ideological basis of the meta-historical "Rome," and, therefore, about the idea a postmodern social reality has of itself.

II. The Rome Myth on the Screen

When, in the Early Twentieth Century, the burgeoning Cultural Industry got a hold of Ancient History, it did so by means of notions--received from High Bourgeois erudition--about what should or should not be kept on the historical record of Classical Antiquity. That meant open repulsion towards the "extreme democracy" of Classical Athens, and idealization of the "sound," "mixed government" of Rome.

However, as classic scholar Martin Winkler has asked, isn't the depiction of Imperial Rome in most Hollywood filmic accounts a negative one--a pageant of might and vice, with lust, perverse behavior, crucifixions, and gladiators? Wasn't Rome perhaps taken as an anti-model of politics, a forerunner of fascist Germany?  That depends. Filmic portrayals of an "evil" Rome are a subgenre in the whole corpus, as they concern themselves with a "history" of the birth of Christianity rather than with the Roman "history" proper. However, as much as such accounts revile Roman persecution of Christians as evil, they never take the further step of reviling "Rome"--that’s to say the general idea of Empire--as being in itself "evil."

The examples given by Winkler while pursuing his Imperial Rome equals Nazi Germany equation--Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, King of Kings, The Robe--are mostly from the 1950s, i.e. post-World War II films, which make the hypothetical equation trite: there was no reason to depict an allegorical Nazi Germany when one could – and did – deal with the real one. What such movies were concerned with were their contemporary settings, that is, the ongoing Cold War. American 1950s “Roman” movies never extol Empire as such, but a morally regenerated empire.

Many of Hollywood's "golden age" epics--Quo Vadis, The Robe, Ben-Hur--dealt with conversion to Christianity. As the 1960s approached and the death of the Hollywood epic seemed imminent, more unconventional approaches became more frequent. Let us pick two examples of these latter day epics here: Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 Spartacus and Anthony Mann's 1964 The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Against the backdrop of a reactionary pageant, Spartacus is an early striking exception: after all, it is a tale of a struggle for freedom in a vicious slave-owning Rome, taking as its raw material a novel by Communist sympathizer Howard Fast and having as chief scriptwriter the "blacklisted" Dalton Trumbo.

The name of the Thracian gladiator had by the 1960s already become''at least since Rosa Luxemburg's day--a handy label for all things "Left." However, a name is not everything. Especially because the original historical episode, to begin with, was already very much of an exception: Spartacus's uprising was less of a rebellion of the downtrodden of the Earth than of an upheaval among a relatively privileged stratum of the entire slave class[1].

Although not as widespread as commonly supposed (chattel-slaves were expensive), Ancient slavery was nonetheless everyday life--a dimension Spartacus conspicuously lacks. The filmic Spartacus' surprised fury ("I'm not an animal!") in discovering himself the target of his master's voyeuristic pleasure could be seen more as a response of a nation quite uncomfortable with gay sexuality than a case of verisimilitude. By making sexual abuse--as opposed to being worked to death in a mine or a galley--the lynchpin of slavery, the film is concerned with the idea that political power somehow carries with it the sadistic idea of doing as you please towards the lower classes, something that made the rulers of Rome "unspeakably decadent" for the American audiences (Harris 42). 

In its depiction of the legitimacy crisis of the Roman Empire, Spartacus stands in stark contrast to the swan song of The Fall of the Roman Empire.

We are at the close of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, who has spent the last few decades in constant warfare against Barbarians and decides to settle things by means of a conference of Roman top brass and client kings in a frontier castle. Both Marcus Aurelius as well as his right-hand man, the general Livius, are dyed-in-the-wool Stoics who want to make the world safe for some kind of Roman Bureaucratic order. Marcus Aurelius wants to settle things by disowning his son and heir apparent--the ambitious, immature Commodus--proposing Livius instead as his successor, and at the same time to marry his daughter (and Livius' paramour) Lucilla (Sophia Loren) to an Armenian prince. Livius decides to dutifully acclaim Commodus as "indubitable Caesar," leaving Lucilla no alternative than to leave for Armenia[2]. Again, what we have here is a selective reading of the past and of past ideology: not all Late Roman Christian thinkers were Imperial enthusiasts; St. Augustine regarded empires as being indifferent from the viewpoint of the Eternal Life.

When the concept of the Ancient epic resurfaces in the early 21st century, it does so precisely by means of a remake of this particular movie.  Ridley Scott's 2000 Gladiator resurrects all of The Fall's reactionary certainties: the Civilization vs. Barbarism backdrop, the Good Ol' Times nostalgia, the cult of the Best People in the Highest Place. The difference being that Gladiator does so in a more aggressive, warmongering, jingoistic, (neo)conservative key. At the same time, it brings a measure of "family values": "Livius," renamed Maximus, wants to avenge the slaughter of his wife and children, Lucilla is a widow caring for her infant son.

But the portrayal of Antiquity by the epic is never arbitrary or haphazard[3]: Spartacus can be seen as a reassessment of bourgeois liberties in the wake of McCarthyism, The Fall proposes Empire as the pivot of a multilateral and peaceful international hegemony, Gladiator starts with a gory battle scene which could be interpreted as a way of conveying that Empire can do as much as it pleases. But what about the successful HBO series Rome?

III. Rome at Home: The HBO Series

In the depictions of Ancient History made by the modern Cultural Industry, the socio- political backdrop always begins by stressing the sharp divide between, on one hand, slaves as opposed to free men and, on the other, Barbarians as opposed to Greeks and Romans. These divides were actually regarded by the Ancient world as marginal to political life proper, which revolved upon the opposition within the citizen body between the well-to-do and the common citizens--an opposition that nourished civil strife during most of Classical Antiquity. As Marx had already noticed in the mid-Nineteenth Century, Ancient society had an exclusive character, in that the meaningful, consciously acknowledged part of class strife was that "fought out within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor" for distribution of the economic surplus as well as for means of political expression (18^th Brumaire 144-5). Slaves and "Barbarians" made only the backdrop, the purely economic "base" over which the main contenders laid their political claims. For us, such a reality would never appear as "inspiring"; it would instead seem as being asked to take sides between vultures and jackals wrangling over a carcass. The fact that Rome decided to follow this Ancient outlook is a sign that, in the series, the awareness of a social divide between "us" and "them" fades before the awareness of a politico-ideological fissure "in our own midst."   

Therefore, it is not the least merit of the HBO series to begin exactly by offering us a Late Republican Rome that does not pretend to "inspire" us. And that’s precisely the springboard of the entire series: a feel of repelled strangeness that slowly becomes perhaps recognition? The opening of every episode plays with that idea: we are offered a full POV tour through the winding back streets of a Roman town, plus a World Music score (percussion instead of symphonic, a medley of vaguely "ethnic" tunes instead of neo-Wagnerian bathos) thrown into the bargain. But, as we go on through the maze, the graffiti scrawled on the walls begins to move and to become ever gorier and more pornographic; mock historical erudition becomes a kind of Freudian nightmare--so much Freudian in that they play with the idea of the unheimlich as a blend between the familiar and the uncanny[4]. After all, we have seen such dead alleys and graffiti already--in some Third World city? Or in the periphery of a globalized metropolis? What the opening plays with is the idea of a society deeply divided between a monumental outer shell and an ill-hid, squalid underbelly.

The plot-structure of Rome is a two-level one (Nelis): on one side, there are the "actual" historical figures (Julius Caesar, his kin, friends, and political adversaries); on the other, the lower class characters, which are also "historical," if in names only: the two legionnaires Vorenus and Pullo, two names without actual biographies taken from Caesar's De Bello Gallico. Vorenus and Pullo can be seen as "ideal types" of the Late Roman Republic common soldier, ideologically--and personally[5]--tied to their general and sharing in the same exploitative psychology, believing also in their right to spoils at a descending level[6]. They are not exactly good guys, they do not oppose their leaders' ideological mind frame; on the contrary, they partake actively of it. At the start of the series, Vorenus is a "petit-bourgeois" and respectable centurion, a sympathizer of the Senate, while the thuggish Pullo is a Caesarian and as such a popularis. However, their relative positions toward each other change as the series goes on. 

As the first episode of the series (The Stolen Eagle)[7] begins, we're at the close of Caesar's Gallic Wars, with an approaching civil war between Caesar and the Senate, triggered by the death at childbirth of Caesar's daughter Julia, who was married to Pompey the Great. Pullo is at an army jail for a breach of discipline by breaking ranks in battle[8] and Vorenus is already thinking about making a fortune after discharge by selling his part of the Gallic booty--slaves--in Rome. When Caesar's legionnaire eagle is stolen by Pompey's agents, however, Pullo and Vorenus receive the errand of finding it. They accomplish the mission with flying colors, by rescuing Caesar's grandnephew Octavian, who had received from his mother, the scheming Atia[9], the task of presenting Caesar a first-class horse she had purchased at a bargain in bed from her lover Timon[10], a Jewish horse trader and occasional hit man.

As the story-lines are set, we are left with a sordid set of characters, each tied to his shady motive. The presence of Timon reminds us, by means of an unintended paraphrase of Marx, that here the ideal Roman is the real "Jew" (Jewish Question 240)--that the Civic ethics of an idealized Classical Antiquity, when translated into practice, becomes impossible to tell from the ethics of a horse-dealer, that is, a bourgeois in the bud. In other words, the civic man of Antiquity announces the modern business man.

The tragic element of the story is that most of the main characters, primarily moved by their greed, will willingly walk into a trap to their undoing. Caesar wants political power; Atia the position of eminence grise--either by having Octavian as Caesar's heir-designate, or by means of her infatuation with Caesar's aide Mark Anthony; Vorenus to better his family's fortunes. Each shall be flatly denied their ambition by actively pursuing it. Ironically, Pullo, the commoner who always "goes with the flow" along the entire series, is the only one to achieve anything positive at the end.

The series portrays the Roman domestic politics following the traces of a controversy deeply fought in serious historiography: whether Roman home politics concerned itself only with family-feuds inside the ruling oligarchy (the so-called prosopographical approach--Badian, apud Sainte Croix 351) or whether it was concerned somehow with issues relating to the concrete interests of the common people (land reform, the corn dole, the sharing of the profits of Empire). The HBO Series tacitly accepts the teachings of the latter modern school: independent of the personal motives of the Roman upper-class reformers (the Gracchi brothers, Marius, Saturninus, and, last but not least, Caesar), the fact remains that they nevertheless built their actual careers by somehow politically connecting with the lower classes, with their "real grievances and genuine discontents" (Brunt, apud Sainte Croix 352). That's the actual gist of the series: to portray the connection between the higher ones as a "class for themselves" and the lower ones as a class merely "in themselves."

That explains the role played in the series by Pullo and Vorenus, who are, at the same time, very self-conscious of their class position.  Of course, there are differences between the two: Pullo is the member of the plebs who has no other thing to do--when not enlisted in the army--than to ask for bread, circus, and the occasional odd job as a cutthroat[11]; Vorenus is the respectable, emerging member of a future imperial bureaucracy[12].  Nonetheless, both are but pawns of the greater strata in that they depend on the ruling elite to foster their agenda. It's not surprising that, in the series' second episode, it is Pullo, who attaches himself to Caesar--and Octavian--immediately and unwittingly, who has the upper hand over Vorenus and his ineffective sympathies for the Senate[13]. Since it's the greater classes who set the agenda, it's far better to side with them without second thoughts.

Caesar and his associates--Mark Anthony and Octavian, the right-hand man and the emerging heir-apparent[14]--are portrayed as being in every bit as scheming and corrupt as their political adversaries, from whom they differ only in that they offer the opportunity of a more "open" consensus, rife with career possibilities thrown open to the lower ones. Caesar in the series stands for "hope and action" and "paradoxically not at all in a legal way, the promise of change and basic justice" [emphasis added] (Nelis). In fact, if Caesar represents justice, it's exactly in virtue of his flouting of the existing legal order, which is presented as a narrowly-based consensus offering the lower classes no opportunities.

Slowly, but no less surely, Pullo and Vorenus are able to enter into Caesar's service on the eve of the Civil War. Vorenus briefly steps out of the army, but has to beg Mark Anthony to be reenlisted when most of his booty-slaves die from dysentery. Our duo, therefore, cross the Hadriatic with reinforcements to Caesar's army in the eve of the battle of Pharsalus in Greece, are then shipwrecked off the Greek coast, cross into Greece by swimming over a buoy of decaying corpses (no pieties lost here), and cross into the defeated Pompey's retinue. After saving Pompey out of respect from being killed by his Greek guides, they return to the Caesarian headquarters, and after being rebuked by Caesar in person for not having handed over his adversary, they cross into Egypt, where Caesar receives Pompey's head as a gift from the boy-king Ptolemy.                             

In the series' eighth episode, Caesarion[15], the plotline and conventional history fall apart, as Caesar, while in Egypt, is fooled into acknowledging as his the child sired with a junkie Cleopatra by the thuggish Pullo--an apparently outrageous development a serious historian would find hard to accept[16]. But then, in the absence of unconvertible facts, in both cases what we have are not facts, but morals: when Plutarch chose to tell of the famous Cleopatra-in-a-carpet story--whether it was real or not--he was trying to stress the fact that Cleopatra was a dangerous woman and enemy of Rome. When the scriptwriter of Rome chose to show Caesar fooled, what he was trying to do was, perhaps, to add into the idea of mutual duping that is central to the series: for Caesar--who does not appear subsequently to have been adversely affected by his "cuckolding"--the birth of Caesarion is a convenient fact, irrespective of his actual paternity[17]; and Pullo's role in the story is only that of a handy tool.

Caesar's undoing in the series will come strictly out of his connections in high places: being a lover of Servilia, the mother of his impeccable adversary Brutus, he's forced to send her away in order to avoid his wife Calpurnia's displeasure after Atia has made the affair public by having her faithful Timon cover the walls of Rome with pornographic graffiti. Servilia not only engraves Caesar's and Atia's names onto leaden plaques, vowing them to the vengeance of the lower gods[18], but also begins plotting against him. Among other things, she starts a sexual affair with Octavian's sister Octavia, by means of which she comes across a valuable piece of information: that Vorenus' wife Niobe, during her husband's absence in Gaul, had begotten a son from his brother-in-law, a son she is making pass as Vorenus' grandson. This piece of information lies dormant in Servilia's head, only to be activated when Caesar, upon returning victorious from his campaigns, decides to shore up his sway over the Senate by creating senators out of his most faithful creatures[19]--among them, Vorenus. It is then easy for Servilia to pit her son Brutus against Caesar and, as the Ides of March, 44 BCE, arrive, to distract Vorenus out from his place as Caesar's covert bodyguard in order to have Caesar butchered in the floor of the Senate-house[20] .

The first season ends, therefore, in tragic confusion: Caesar expiring in a pool of blood, Atia and Octavian humbled before a gloating Servilia, Vorenus grieving before the corpse of his suicidal wife. Something vaguely akin to a happy ending is reserved solely for Pullo: the final shot of the final episode sees him finding solace in the countryside with the slave girl he has long been infatuated with, and who forgave him after he killed her lover. But then, what is the meaning of all this?

Of course, we're before a work in process, as the second season began broadcasting on January 2007. But we can expect the following season not to shy before all that the sordid elements in the post-Caesar Roman History--as already there was a forewarning of Cicero's ultimate fate, when Mark Anthony warns him that "If I ever again hear your name connected in murmurs of treachery, I will cut off your hands and nail them to a wall"[21].

We are a far cry from the well-ordered and thoroughly aristocratic Rome of previous Ancient epics. What we have here is an attempt at portraying the efforts of a Populist dictator to rule "above all classes," and eventually failing. Rome-as-the-land-of-opportunities fades before Rome-as-the-bearer-of-ancient-privilege.  Politics as trustee has failed: what is left to the lower segments is the usual alienation, while the higher ones pursue their endless and bloody bickering. In this post-modern "Rome," the very idea of even a little progressive movement that could bring the lower ones onto the stage--even in a subordinate capability--has failed[22]. And with it, more than the historical Ancient Rome, it’s Rome as a symbol which is brought to book.      

IV. Some Final Remarks

A representation of an historical event is not commensurate with the event as a thing in itself:  Oliver Stone dixit (Carnes 306-7). In one interview, the maverick filmmaker, rebuked by his historian interviewer about the endless attempts in his films to "rationalize" actual political events by means of some conspiracy-theory, answered pointedly:  what is the point of going after "hard" facts in themselves – when the final result is only to stand aghast and awestruck before the conflicting evidence? 'The past' in itself is a kind of nonentity, a collection of events that begin to be rationalized, distorted, misremembered… just as they happen, and Stone was undoubtedly right in pointing out that events so "close”"to us as Watergate and the workings of the Warren Commission are already shrouded in mystery, in that telling "what really happened" around them is in many ways an ideological issue and not a fact-finding one.

Let's think, for instance, about two existing persons--the Roman centurions Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus. For two thousand years, those two names were unable to generate but the faintest echo in serious History, as well as on any fictional account inspired by the same History. Suddenly, in the early 2000s, they sprung onto an American TV series with their biographies padded up in order to allow them to appear as the ideal types of the Roman commoner of the Late Republic. Why on this precise moment?

We should bear in mind that Rome, the TV series, was in all likelihood not conceived as a revolutionary approach to audiovisual History lessons, but rather as another installment in HBO's long-running tradition of better-quality entertainment for the small screen. HBO has been associated with excellent writing, directing, and acting, superior production values, and an approach to so-called "difficult" topics that tend to leave little to the imagination. HBO subscribers over the years have witnessed fashionable single women openly discuss masturbation, lesbianism, and anal sex on Sex and the City, an autopsy on an infant and graphic homosexual intercourse in the premiere episode of Six Feet Under, a mafia don discussing his issues with a shrink on The Sopranos, a black man being burned in graphic detail on Carnivale. These excesses have clearly never hurt the reputation of the shows, which have gathered consistently favorable reviews from critics and countless awards.

But, until now, anyone who felt the need to spin a tale about Roman history on the screen, big or small, ended up telling a tale about leading people--be such people a Roman emperor or senator, a co-opted Jewish aristocrat, even a Thracian gladiator turned something between a "premature" Stalinist chairman and a trade-unionist; but the heroes of such epics were always leading people, as it was felt that such people summarized in and by themselves all one needed to know about Roman History.  But things have taken a new turn.  It was precisely for bringing anonymous subjects and common life to center stage that the so-called reality shows became a very effective and profitable counter-programming to both dramas and comedies in prime-time worldwide. Turning ordinary people into celebrities overnight and supposedly providing access to the most private and intimate dimensions of people's lives (famous or infamous), reality shows imposed new patterns to media as whole. And if the primary aim is to gain new subscribers, it does not come as a surprise that HBO chooses a hybrid format that allows the best of two worlds: an up-close view of the elite's bedrooms and plebeians turned into heroes.

One could also finish with a more politically biased interpretation: choosing two common plebs as the heroes of a story may be seen as prompted by the awareness of a legitimacy gap between the "leading ones" and their "followers," such a gap having to do with the awareness (for the Empire "plebs" of today) of being in the middle of an updated version of Caesar’s Gallic Wars--the welcome accretion of a huge province to civilization that is instead becoming the unwelcome refurbished version of the Emperor Trajan’s Parthian Wars in the Second Century CE. As we know, that was when the Roman army took Babylon and Trajan sailed down the Persian gulf, only to realize at his return that "all the conquered districts were thrown into turmoil and revolted, and the garrisons placed among the various peoples were either expelled or slain"[23].

But maybe what we have in Rome is a mix of these two things: whenever, in actual History, we have a crisis in the ruling ideology, this overall "shell" most of times does not "explode" outright but "cracks up"; in the process, what remained previously hidden comes to the fore, namely ordinary everyday life. In a certain way--all historical differences notwithstanding--what HBO's Postmodern Rome expresses is something akin, in spirit, to the world of Late Antiquity, when Marcus Aurelius's contemporary, the orator Aelius Aristides, published endless speeches about his visits to various Aesculapius's sanctuaries in order to seek some sort of medico-religious therapy for his bowels-troubles (apud Veyne 192-3). It is the world of the psychologist and the mantra already; but, looking with hindsight, it was also a world that already witnessed the crisis of the Ancient World and the Fall of the Roman Empire.

What counts here, is that the idea of an actual oppression as chief evil has faded before the feel of alienation, prompted by the absence of a credible ruling ideology--and that's perhaps the hub of the matter.      

Works Cited