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
It's funny that you mention this, that's the impression I get as well - and it makes me Thank the Lord for the rise of Christianity. I shudder when I think what the modern world would be like without the teachings of Christ.
For every Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius, you get a Commodus or Nero.
I'll keep our flawed Repulic for a little while longer.
Just about every professional military force today can trace their structure, training, discipline, organization, symbols, values, etc., to the Roman legions.
I think the spread of Christianity was unintentional and much of Rome's technology came from the ancient Greeks.
I have a better question. Other than write a bunch of worthless tripe about how Mary Beard hates Western culture and thought, what has she given us?
Yes, a little longer. I'm not ready to anoint a dictator yet. :)
"What have the Romans ever done for us? Name one good thing Roman rule has brought us?"
A small voice in the back says:
"The aqueducts"
Then other voices start adding
"Roman roads, rule of law, modern medicine, schools etc".
"Yeah, well outside the aqueducts, the roads, rule of law, schools, modern medicine, civilization, what have the Romans ever done for us"?
Rome's Technology came from the Greeks? I would grant that the basic mathematics, algebra, and calculus may have come from the Greeks, but it was the Roman Engineers that applied them to real world problems and tamed the natural world. I never heard of any 60 mile GREEK aqueducts.
I recently learned from a documentary though that the Romans didn't have the calculus skills to survey bends in their roads, so they went straight as an arrow and then turned 90 degrees, and still do on the old Roman Roads in England and elsewhere.
"Beulah, peel me a dormouse"
LOL! Well done. I'm glad I checked before I posted the same thing. Freepers are always quick with Monty Python bits.
I myself count the spreading of foie gras production from the Egyptians and Greeks as a very important Roman contribution to our world also. ;-)
The question is not, what have the Romans done for us, but what can we do for the Romans? Or even better, what will our children´s children say about what we will have done for them?
One thing I read in Durant's books is he thought Rome declined because technological advancements were eventually suppressed in order to preserve jobs.
learning from their mistakes. They had open borders, got lazy used cheap labor to do work and eventually collapsed on it's own accord.
But their problem weren´t cheap workers from the south, who legally or illegally entered the Empire. Their problem were uneducated, rough fighters from the cold North, entering and destroying their cities. You better watch out America, Canada might be more dangerous than you imagine. :-)
I thought she was indicating the brush with which film and television producers seek to paint conservative U.S. administrations. Of course Nixon wasn't a conservative. He in fact scorned, in private, the conservative branch of the Republican party.
We as a nation have enemies from everywhere. Our elected officials are foolish thinking we do not have to protect our borders.
Radiant floor heat......
As you see, the Romans didn't spend much time in Gaul.
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