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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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Posted on 10/30/2005 1:05:06 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Ancient Rome provides a handy non-offensive stereotype for us to define ourselves against
The best way to judge a modern recreation of ancient Rome - in film or fiction - is to apply the simple "dormouse test". How long is it before the characters adopt an uncomfortably horizontal position in front of tables, usually festooned with grapes, and one says to another: "Can I pass you a dormouse?" The basic rule of thumb is this: the longer you have to wait before this tasty little morsel appears on the recreated banquet, the more subtle the reconstruction is likely to be. On these terms Rome, the new joint HBO-BBC series, does not do badly. It is not until at least 30 minutes into the first episode that anyone pops the dormouse question.
It is a cliche among modern critics that public fascination with ancient Rome is driven by politics and imperialism. Rome now equals America, as once it equalled Britain. So in watching the rise and (crucially) fall of the Roman empire, we can enjoy some entertaining analysis of contemporary superpowers - as well as indulging in the gratifying thought that their dominance too will one day end. Occasionally, this is very obviously the message. Robert Harris was clear enough that his Pompeii had something to say about the modern United States. American viewers in the 1970s certainly took the seedy court politics on display in the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves's I Claudius as an allegory of Nixon's White House - a parallel which may possibly have been in the mind of the film-makers, but hardly of Graves himself (who wrote the original books in the 1930s). Certainly too, though with a different political tinge, Mussolini invaded Abyssinia against a backdrop of Italian movies celebrating the ancient Roman conquest of Africa and the heroic exploits of Scipio Africanus.
But as the dormouse test hints, it is not only geopolitics that is on the agenda of our recreations of Rome. There are dietary habits and the rules of consumption, for a start; but also sex, religion, luxury and cruelty - in short, cultural difference in all its many forms. For more than 200 years we have read about and watched make-believe Romans eating strange unpalatable delicacies in a position we associate more with sleeping; making themselves sick between courses in order to stuff in yet more (the old vomitorium joke); killing human beings for sport; and enjoying indiscriminate sex on the lines of a modern goat.
Alma-Tadema's marvellously decadent Victorian painting The Roses of Heliogabalus captures this nicely. A group of typically prostrate diners (guests of the emperor Heliogabalus) is surrounded by the usual Roman cuisine, and all the while is being smothered to death - literally - by a vast shower of rose petals. The message is not simply that Roman luxury was a life-threatening vice, but that the Romans ate the wrong things in the wrong ways, with disastrous consequences.
Why do we choose the Romans for these cultural displays? Partly because they are sufficiently familiar, and like ourselves, to be manageable; but sufficiently unlike us to be interesting. Not to mention the fact that, thanks to the Roman invasion of Britain, they even have a foot in our own home territory and can almost play the part of our own ancestors. This is where they score over the ancient Greeks. It is simply impossible to imagine what those white-robed intellectuals did at home, or that they were ever like us at all.
The answer is partly too, of course, that the classical world has always offered a convenient alibi for enjoying sex and violence. To have two actors on primetime television indulging in prolonged and (almost) full-frontal sex would normally be classified somewhere on the spectrum between titillation and pornography. Take exactly the same actors doing exactly the same thing, but pretending to be Romans - and it suddenly becomes legitimate, educational even. At the very least it is clothed in the respectability of classical culture. Many a 19th-century gentleman's study paraded a raunchy Alma-Tadema nude, safe under the fig-leaf of classicism. The new Rome series has an awful lot of bonking dressed up as "an authentic glimpse of the ancient world".
But there is also, I suspect, a particularly 21st-century imperative behind the rash of recent "Romes", from Gladiator on. In the world of publicly sanctioned multiculturalism (excellent, in many ways, as that is), popular representations of cultural difference have become increasingly dangerous and heavily policed. All the old ways of celebrating "our" identity against the peculiar habits - often the eating ones - of the outside world now seem a bit risky.
A BBC series which presented the French as garlic-reeking gluttons, tucking into frogs' legs and snails, or the Germans as a load of jack-booted cabbage eaters, might not end up with a prosecution but it would certainly prompt an appearance from the relevant ambassador on the Today programme, lamenting our dependence on these worn-out stereotypes.
This game of defining ourselves against the habits of the "Other" is a very old one indeed. The Romans did it against the Greeks (a load of over-perfumed intellectuals), the Greeks against the Persians (effeminate despots). We are now finding it much safer to look to the remote past - the recent past is, of course, another matter - for our anti-types. For that past cannot answer back, has no government machinery on its side (or not usually), and you can do what you like with it. If they were portraying a modern religion, the lurid, blood-soaked representations of Roman paganism in the new Rome would probably end with the director up before the beak on a charge of "incitement to religious hatred". As it is, it's only Rome, so it doesn't count.
But what of the dormouse test? Did the Romans themselves pass it? Did they actually eat them? There is here an uncomfortable historical truth for many a modern film director. Unsuccessful and temporary as the ruling almost certainly was, the Roman senate banned the eating of dormice in 115 BC. And as for the vomitorium, it was not a handy place for Roman over-consumers to make room for another course: it is the name given to a passageway through which the audience "spewed out" of the amphitheatre.
· Mary Beard is professor of classics at Cambridge University; Rome starts on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9pm
lol
reminds me of a line I heard in the 70s. There were 98.9% of US houses with indoor plumbing and 99.6% with TVs. So there was more crap coming into the home than capacity to carry it out.
I won't lob a scimitar at you...
;o)
If I went 'round saying I was an emperor because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
They gave us garum, a great fish sauce, and a number of useful political precedents.
Now let's think about what they spared us. Etruscan kings. Carthaginian culture. Mithraism. And more inbred descendants of Cleopatra and Ptolemy.
The Roman aqueducts were about 1000 years ahead of their time...
I discontinued HBO a long time ago. There seemed to be more sex and violence, but I found that less disgusting and less offensive than the perversion of truth by network TV.
Robert Graves was not only a poet and an expert on mythology ( not to mention the forerunner of what Joseph Campbell did become, decades later ), he was also a writer who delighted in writing fiction, fiction based on Greek and Roman myths and poems, with lots of historical facts thrown into the mix. Unlike his contemporary and fellow author, George Orwell, Graves' fiction was just that...FICTION, to be read and enjoyed, without any roiling, present day political overtones nor undertones.
This article is just supercilious poppycock.
Actually cement goes back much farther..
The egyptians used cement..
What the romans contributed was the addition of "aggregate", i.e., gravel, etc.. to the cement..
In other words, Romans invented CONCRETE..
Some other interesting things they did with this building material..
They added other minerals, like pumice, to make a water proof concrete.. Then used it to make their shipping docks, canals, and fisheries...
They used Forms, to cast the concrete in a desired shape..
Another additive was wheat gluten.. It acted as an adhesive, allowing the concrete (or cement) to stick to a surface better..
Amazingly, it also increases the life of the concrete/cement as well..
Interestingly, the Chinese used rice paste in exactly the same way.. as an adhesive additive to cement..
Parrallel technologies developing in two seperate societies, thousands of miles apart..
Oh, what a giveaway! Did'j'hear that, did'j'hear that, eh? That's what I'm all about! Did you see 'im repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?!
</convenientchangeofcharacter>
;o)
Roman noses ane the origins of our "Pagan" holidays.
Or America, for that matter.
At her height, Rome embraced between a quarter and a third of the world's population, and was surrounded by regions so weak and poor that the Romans actually rejected admission into the Empire of many tribes and territories.
Geographically, the Romans welded together a practically impossible array of tribes and cultures. America has that effect because of immigration, but immigrants (other than black slaves) are in the US voluntarily. Incorporating whole vast regions and cultures root, stalk and branch is a different thing.
The American influence and power are great, but they are not comparable to what Rome was within its world.
There's never been anything like Rome.
"Bathing!! The Roman baths are everywhere. They were important.
As you see, the Romans didn't spend much time in Gaul."
Actually, soap was invented by the Gauls and was something the Romans were introduced to in their interactions with the Gauls. Before Gallic soap, the Romans used olive oil.
which was definatly nice while i was in the military, rarely had to get off the beaten path. when i was living in england, unless i was driving, i would get sick if i wasnt on a roman road, they were the only roads that were straight!!!
Spartacus?
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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