Hbo Series: Rome

[Ludovicus]

There's been some interesting discussion here about material objects, dates, and geography. What do people think about the veracity of the relationships in the series? The torture scene in Cloaca Maxima was brutal but believeable. On the other hand, Vorenus's relationship with his wife seems too nowadays, egalitarian. Characters seem too confrontational, too eager to get it off their chests. This seems very North American, not what one does in most other cultures where indirection is valued. In Rome of that era I imagine that there were many spies and that common sense made people more circumspect about what they said, especially outside the home. What do people think about the behavior patterns in the series?

Edited October 1, 2006 by Ludovicus

[M. Porcius Cato]

That's an interesting question--how did Romans really interact? Looking at Plautus, Catullus, and Cicero, I'd say that the Romans were pretty loose-tongued. One senator (according to Suetonius, I think) used to enter the senate house greeting Pompey "king" and Caesar "queen". Not exactly a set piece of what you delicately called "indirection."

 

Do you have any evidence suggesting otherwise?

[Ludovicus]

That's an interesting question--how did Romans really interact? Looking at Plautus, Catullus, and Cicero, I'd say that the Romans were pretty loose-tongued. One senator (according to Suetonius, I think) used to enter the senate house greeting Pompey "king" and Caesar "queen". Not exactly a set piece of what you delicately called "indirection."

 

Do you have any evidence suggesting otherwise?

 

 

My understanding about the traditional Roman "familia" is that the father held life and death power over all. The conversations between Vorenus and wife seem from another culture's patterns, namely ours in the West. Specifically, his concern about her love for him seems more a feature of romantic love, a notion probably of modern times. While there is ample evidence that many Roman married couples lived lives of deep mutual respect, I can't remember ever reading about romantic love in marriage.

 

I know Southern Europe and Latin America. Indirection is a tool for navigating life so full of possible conflicts with negative outcomes. It's not that people in these places are timid or don't have a view, it's just that "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." There are limits. Once they are passed, tempers flare and hard words and more are used, but it takes a while before these limits are reached. There are also concerns about the risk of losing face in confrontations.

 

Now back to Rome--with all the killing going on, with lists of assassination targets being drawn up by all sides in the conflicts, it seems that characters being dramatically honest, as in the scene between Erastes and Vorenus, seem culturally false.

Edited October 2, 2006 by Ludovicus

[M. Porcius Cato]

Yes, I understand the reasoning from modern cultures that have some similarities to ancient Rome, but what is the ancient evidence that Romans weren't candid and even confrontational?

 

We have written records of what people said to one another in private correspondence, plays depicting how they spoke with one another, poems that reflected thoughts intended for a wider audience, and biographies. All of these sources include frank, candid, sometimes intimate and very often confrontational personal exchanges.

 

After reading Terence's Woman of Andros or Propertius' poems about Cynthia or Cicero' letters to Atticus, I don't see why anything in the HBO Rome should seem out of place.

[phil25]

Modern audiences would not take to realistic depictions of ancient (or other modern) cultural norms. We need what is familiar - at least that is the conventional wisdom in the film industry.

Costumes, sets, dislogue and patterns of behaviour will all roughly equate (or conform to) the style of the day in the "west". Anyhting else would be seen as too risky and unsafe.

 

Let's see how Mel Gibson's new Mayan epic - using a Mayan dialect I gather - fares at the box office and with "critics".

 

I don't see it as impossible to depict Roman values and relationships on screen - but it would require a lot of explanation That is why, in ROME, as I see it, the producers gave us a simplified take on Roman religeon, ignoring Caesar at Pontifex Maximus. yet it gave glimpses of how strange Roman religious rites would probably seem to us - the bargaining with the gods, the bull-slaying ritual, Antony's vigil, etc.

 

It cheated too on the family - probably correctly it saw the dramatic posibilities in a long separation between Vorenus and his wife, but avoided th complexities of the fact that a soldier could not marry. That said, literary licence probably allows that diversion from the accepted position becayse can we be sure that NO Roman soldier was ever married in that period?

 

On political relationships, I don't see invective as an alternative to "indirection" - it could as easily be used alongside it - to divert attention. How does the Pompey/king fit, if it was said wittily; or with humour? Or was said by a friend? A heated argument might occur between friends with Latin (or any) temperaments; but could also occur between two men one of whom is secretly plotting against the other.

 

Finally,to depict a past culture in completely realistic detail could cause offence - to ethnic groups (if shown as slaves or brutalised, demeaned or humiliated); to woman (whose status has changed); to those who dislike violence; even to those who see the past with liberal or rose-tinted spectacles on.

 

Commercial film directors will always steer a careful course.

 

But even if they did not - our view of the past, even of professional historians - is only a perception or an interpretation. It changes over time. Who is to say the film producers are, on balance, not as correct as the Regius Professor of History at Oxford (senior academics have their flaws too)?

 

Phil

[DecimusCaesar]

Finally,to depict a past culture in completely realistic detail could cause offence - to ethnic groups (if shown as slaves or brutalised, demeaned or humiliated); to woman (whose status has changed); to those who dislike violence; even to those who see the past with liberal or rose-tinted spectacles on.

 

I agree with Phil.

 

It is often been said that audiences don't want to see 'Ancient Romans' in films and TV shows but that they want to see 21st century men and women in costumes. If the characters were more reserved and avoided conflict, then it would not be considered a good drama. Most people would have just seen the domestic scenes in 'Rome' as a dull history documentary about a retired soldier who has become a shop clerk and his wife who tends the home. If the characters did not show their emotions then the film makers might have to do like David Lynch did with 'Dune' - Have the characters thoughts read out, which would be a very bad idea.

 

Personally I have always thought that the Romans were more open with their feelings than us (The poor at least...I couldn't imagine the rich being the same way) so I personally believed that a lot of them might have been similar to Vorenus or Pullo.

 

They did hint at the 'Pater' being the ruler of the household in the series - Vorenus argues with Crito about his impregnating his daughter "She is my Property!" he shouts, something that many modern audiences might have found distasteful or strange. There is also a hint that Vorenus has the right to kill Niobe if he found out she had an affair, again it shows the power of the father over the household.

Edited October 2, 2006 by DecimusCaesar

[Pantagathus]

I totally agree with Cato on this.

 

I tend to feel that any similarity we see in the series to 'modern' behavior is because in essence, human beings haven't changed very much since the dawn of civilization. It's just language, some laws and tools we have at our disposal that have changed...

 

Implying that these Pleb's lives were bound to be dull and boring in actuality is derisive modern prejudice; because I personally have yet to come across any evidence to support that we should honestly believe it to be so.

[phil25]

I think that people in the past - while in some senses using the same emotional palette as us - would feel and act in wholly alien ways to those to which we are accustomed, with a very different frame of reference and experience.

 

Take the Romans - it was a brutal and brutalised world. there was no Christian gospel of love to ameliorate the code of values or morals. Linking to something I'll perhaps discuss later - how would people in modern society feel about exposing a daughter to die or be claimed by another. That might be something that might happen in a Third World country, but not I think in the "West" (and I discount children abandoned in hospital or church doorways where a desperate mother KNOWS they will be cared for).

 

Slavery (as more modern societies have shown) does something to the slave owners and the slaves. It changes attitudes to humanity, maybe dehamanises.

 

The massive rates of child mortality must have done something to a parent's (especially a mother's )psyche - see above on exposure.

 

Arranged marriage (especially older husbands and VERY young wives), the expectation of many to die amazingly young - especially women in childbirth - surely changed their outlook.

 

No - I'm afraid i don't think we would understand Romans emotionally at any more than a basic level. We would be left shocked and scandalised by their behaviour and their attitudes.

 

Hollywood, and to a lesser extent romatic novelists, as I so often say, have much to answer for!!

 

Phil

[DecimusCaesar]

Implying that these Pleb's lives were bound to be dull and boring in actuality is derisive modern prejudice; because I personally have yet to come across any evidence to support that we should honestly believe it to be so.

 

I'm sorry I should have elaborated more. I didn't mean to say that the lives of the plebs were boring, it was that if you take away conflict in a tv drama like Rome, many people would see it boring. If Vorenus would not argue with his wife, almost come to blows with Pullo and get into scraps with Erastes Fulman then a lot of people would not have been interested. As terrible as it sounds, it seems that conflict gets people's attentions and keeps them interested.

[Pantagathus]

No - I'm afraid i don't think we would understand Romans emotionally at any more than a basic level. We would be left shocked and scandalised by their behaviour and their attitudes.

 

Maybe you Phil, but not me. 'Western' modernity has not melted away my capacity for understanding and empathizing with ancient or contemporary hardship, strife and difference of value systems.

[M. Porcius Cato]

Phil's argument that Romans had some radically different psychology appears to rest on a notion about human nature that I hotly contest--namely, that human psychology is some cultural construction rather than a fact of nature. In my view, social conflict and intimacy are as natural to the human condition as singing and flying are to the canary condition. Moreover, I've already listed a number of textual sources in support of my claim.

 

Where is this evidence that slavery and infanticide changed Roman psychology? I don't see any at all. In fact, if you look at Terence or Plautus, it's quite clear that the Roman mind was not so warped by the holding of slaves or infanticide that they failed to appreciate love, intimacy, conflict, and all the other emotions that can be found in every culture on earth.

[Primus Pilus]

Then we must differ Cato.

 

Nothing in 40 odd years of fairly persistent and serious historical reading makes me in any way inclined to agree with you.

 

I split this thread and screwed it up, so I'm quoting part of Phil's post here.

 

Lets get back to the relationships in the show rather than gentle chiding or bickering.

[Cohort]

[Marcus Caelius]

I think that people in the past - while in some senses using the same emotional palette as us - would feel and act in wholly alien ways to those to which we are accustomed, with a very different frame of reference and experience.

 

I disagree. While there would be differences, of course, I believe the difference between, say, modern America and South African bushmen is far, far greater. After all, we're talking about a human society, here, not something on Zeta Reticulae, and humans are humans. Rome was a different society, yes, but the temporal distance is no more "distorting" than would be a geographic distance and, after all, Roman society was the ancestor of our own. The differences are magnified by the similarties.

 

...there was no Christian gospel of love to ameliorate the code of values or morals.

 

So what?

 

I must first caution you that you've struck a nerve. I, myself, am a non-believer, and I quarrel with the idea that you must be a believer of any sort in order to have an ethical, moral or social referent.

 

As to Christianity "ameliorating" Roman society, I believe it is not too far-fetched to argue that Christianity was responsible for destroying that part of the Roman ethos that made possible the very construction and maintenance of society. In short, I hold that Christianity destroyed the Roman spirit and turned the people into something the Founders would have scorned, and maybe even something the Founders would have conquered.

 

Slavery (as more modern societies have shown) does something to the slave owners and the slaves. It changes attitudes to humanity, maybe dehamanises.

 

Getting back to Christianity, the early Church had no problem with slavery. I believe it's in Philemon where Paul urges a slave to return to his master and render faithful service. If slavery dehumanizes, the early Christians were just as dehumanized as were the Romans (given later developments, maybe they were even more dehumanized).

 

The massive rates of child mortality must have done something to a parent's (especially a mother's )psyche -

 

No more so than in 19th century western United States, or in any other society that has not had access to late 20th century medicine.

 

Arranged marriage...

 

...has been the norm throughout history and, when numbers are taken into account worldwide, may still be the norm.

 

No - I'm afraid i don't think we would understand Romans emotionally at any more than a basic level. We would be left shocked and scandalised by their behaviour and their attitudes.

 

Shocked and scandalized, yes, but no more than the Victorians would be shocked and scandalized by us. And understanding would occur to anyone who actually sat and studied the differences.

Edited October 29, 2006 by Marcus Caelius