Empire: Caesar’s Will

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Ancient Rome, Brutus and Cassius, Emily Blunt, Empire, Jonathan Cake, Julius Caesar, Movies I Hate, Octavian/Augustus, Roman Republic, Santiago Cabrera

Empire  is quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever watched on ancient Rome. I’ve gotten freshman term papers on ancient Rome that were way more interested in the facts than this piece of crap is. But I’m getting paid to review it, so I need to do another post on it. Please bear with me.

The plot of the series turns on the question of who Caesar’s heir will be. At the start of the series, Caesar (Colm Fiore) is correctly positioned as the dominant man in Rome, although it’s not explained how or why he got there, except that the crowds of Rome love him. Early on, Brutus (James Frain) and Cassius (Michael Maloney) comment that Caesar wants to be both king and god, statements that are fairly accurate for 44 BC. When Caesar is assassinated in the Senate chamber, he tells Tyrannus (Jonathan Cake) that his heir is going to be Octavius (Santiago Cabrera), not Mark Antony (Vincent Regan). This comes as a surprise to everyone, including Octavius, who was under the impression that Caesar despised him. Brutus and Cassius are desperately trying to get Caesar’s will so they can quash this, while Cicero (Michael Byrne) and Camane (an utterly wasted Emily Blunt) are doing everything they can to disseminate the will so that everyone in Rome will know the truth, so that the Senate will have to…make Octavius king maybe? Something like that. I’m not sure the series knows, but who cares? It’s only the main plot of the whole goddam thing.

The reality is, surprise surprise, different. Julius Caesar had no surviving children, despite three marriages, but his sister Julia did have a grandson, Octavius, who was the logical person to make his heir. So late in 45, Caesar wrote a will that adopted Octavius and bequeathing him about 75% of Caesar’s considerable fortune. The will would have been given to the Vestal Virgins, who were responsible for keeping wills, and would not have been publicly announced until after Caesar’s death. It is not known if Caesar told Octavius about the contents of his will, but it seems to me highly unlikely that the will would have been a surprise to Octavius; he was the obvious choice of heir being Caesar’s closest male relative, he was a canny and astute politician (as his entire political career demonstrated) who must have known what his position in Roman society was, and Caesar was smart enough to have recognized that he would have to groom Octavius as his successor (although he certainly didn’t foresee getting murdered just a half-year after making his will). Additionally, as soon as news of the assassination reached Octavius, who was in Apollonia on the west coast of Macedonia at the time, he immediately began to act like Caesar’s heir, ordering that Caesar’s war-chest be sent to him in Apollonia. If he was unaware of his status as heir, it’s improbable that he would have done this.

However, the series’ assumption that Octavius found his designation as heir a surprise is not an entirely outrageous one, because we have no formal evidence that he was told about it before Caesar’s murder. So I’ll reluctantly give the series a pass on this one.

(A short aside about names is necessary here. When he was born, he was given the name Gaius Octavius, since his father was from the Octavian gens. Upon his adoption, he legally became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, the ‘an’ element signifying that he had been adopted out of the Octavian gens. After he achieved complete domination of the Roman political world in 27 BC, he was given the agnomen Augustus, which he consistently used down to the end of his life. There is no evidence that he ever actually styled himself Octavianus (although some of his opponents did). He preferred to refer to himself as Caesar and later Augustus Caesar, using the formal ‘Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus’. However the universal modern historical convention is to call him Octavian (the anglicization of his name) for the period between 44 and 27 BC and then Augustus thereafter. Since his adoption was posthumous, the series is technically correct to call him Octavius, even though pretty much no one today ever uses his birth name unless they’re being super-precise.)

Octavian, being posthumously appalled by this series

 

According to Roman law, a posthumous adoption only applied to inheritance of property. Caesar had no legal way to pass on any of his formal political power or office, any more than John Kennedy could have bequeathed his presidency to one of his children, since in the Republic, all political offices were subject to public election and were not personal property. So what Octavian was technically inheriting was his adoptive father’s wealth and his name (since posthumous adoption typically required the adoptee to accept the adopter’s name). Informally, Octavian was inheriting the enormous goodwill the Roman crowd had for Caesar as well as the prestige of now belonging to perhaps the oldest and most glorious of all Roman gens. Since the anger of the crowd pushed the Senate to immediately declare the dead Caesar a god (something that Caesar seems to have been angling for already in the last year of his life), Octavian also acquired the huge and unprecedented clout of being able to style himself Divi Filius, ‘son of the god [Julius]’. In order to achieve his father’s political power, however, he was going to have use that inherited wealth, prestige, and goodwill to fight his way up to political power, especially because Mark Antony was the clear successor to Caesar’s military authority, since he was essentially Caesar’s lieutenant and an experienced soldier, while Octavian had no military experience to speak of, being only 18.

Whether his adoption surprised him or not, Octavian immediately moved to capitalize on the opportunity the adoption provided. As noted, he took charge of Caesar’s war-chest, sailed to Naples, and traveled north to Rome, collecting political support and a modest army along the way. He demonstrated a solid understanding of Roman politics, contacting key political figures for their support; he decision to land at Naples allowed him to meet up with Cornelius Balbus, one of Caesar’s most important supporters. At no point did he ever betray any sense that he was doing anything other than acting on his full legal rights as Caesar’s heir.

In Empire, however, Octavius is a cloth-headed idiot. When Tyrannus tells him that Caesar has named him his heir, Octavius initially refuses to believe it, and refuses to leave Caesar’s villa outside Rome until his mother warns him that he’s in a butt-load of danger and Tyrannus can protect him. Tyrannus insists on fleeing Rome entirely with no money or guards or anything else. The next morning, however, Octavius wakes up before Tyrannus, and rides back to Rome to see his girlfriend, some skank whose father is a senator but who immediately betrays him to the gladiator/soldiers who are looking for him. He gets chased, Tyrannus rescues him by magically knowing where he is, and Cicero gives them a list of supporters to track down. Then they ride out of Rome again. All of this is a real disservice to Octavian, who ranks among the savviest politicians in the history of the world.

Octavius and Camane, wishing they weren’t in this series

 

Brutus and Cassius, meanwhile, are torturing Octavius’ mother for the will, intimidating Cicero, and threatening the Vestal Virgins. They are having trouble with the crowd, which catches them trying to smuggle Caesar’s corpse out of the city, and seizes the corpse and burns it, which outrages Octavius even though it’s basically the way elite Roman funerals worked. Camane orchestrates a plan to produce dozens of copies of Caesar’s will and nail them up all around the city so everyone will know that Brutus and Cassius are dicks. They respond by lighting Rome on fire, which seems like something of an over-reaction, given that if the city is destroyed, there isn’t much of a Roman state for them to govern. Then they send an assassin after Octavius, but Tyrannus spots him because apparently in ancient Rome only assassins carry gladiator swords that are actually late medieval short-swords.

Then Octavius and Tyrannus run off to visit Senator Magonius (Dennis Haysbert), a black man who has a northern Celtic name at a time when senators were only drawn from Italy. Magonius refuses to give the gladiator/soldiers his legion (despite the fact that legions were only given to sitting or just-stepped down consuls at the authorization of the Senate). So, despite the legion Magonius owns, the gladiator/soldiers decide to make him a slave because in times of political unrest, historical accuracy is always the first casualty.

Brutus and Cassius with some woman who might be Servilla

 

Oh, and evidently because apostrophes haven’t been invented yet, the subtitles telling us where things happen never use apostrophes. So scenes take place at ‘Julius Caesar Villa’ and ‘Vestal Copy Room’.

You can do this, Andrew. You’re getting paid for this.

Want to Know More?

Well, if you insist, you can find Empire on Amazon.

There are lots of biographies of Augustus. The one I have on my shelf is Pat Southern’s Augustus.

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Empire: God Help Me

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Ancient Rome, Colm Fiore, Emily Blunt, Empire, Jonathan Cake, Julius Caesar, Movies I Hate, Roman Republic, Santiago Cabrera

My review of I, Claudius inspired one of my readers, Victor, to make a generous Paypal donation and request that I review the 2005 ABC miniseries Empire, which, like I, Claudius, deals with the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. So you’re going to get a few more posts on Ancient Rome.

And hoo boy does the first scene promise a strong contrast with I, Claudius. Whereas Robert Graves was at pains to mine the historical sources for the facts, this show promises to mine absolutely nothing except old clichés. The show opens with a gladiatorial combat that works overtime to avoid anything resembling fact. The two fighters, one of whom is named Tyrannus (Jonathan Cake), are equipped with gear that is almost entirely made up; he gets two short swords because that means he’s cool. The scene repeats the nonsense that gladiatorial fights always involve the death of all but one fighter. And then after he defeats his opponent, more gladiators surprise him and he has to fight them to the death too. I’ve already discussed everything wrong with this scene in a review of a different movie. (What makes this even worse is in a later scene, Tyrannus correctly describes how a Thracian gladiator is equipped.)

Then we cut to the ‘Vestal Temple’, where Camane (Emily Blunt), a virgin priestess, is praying in front of what is clearly a statue of naked Aphrodite, which is sort of like having a statue of a porn star in a Catholic convent. But she’s making a sacrifice of flower petals, so I guess that makes everything chaste. Octavius (Santiago Cabrera) asks her if “her gods” ever answer.

The show also doesn’t care about giving its characters real names. ‘Tyrannus’ is apparently his birth name, and his son is named ‘Piso’, which isn’t even a given name (it’s a cognomen). And what the fuck sort of name is Camane? It doesn’t even sound Latin! And instead of ‘Octavian’ (short for Octavianus), the kid’s name is Octavius.

Unsurprisingly, the costuming isn’t very accurate either

Then Julius Caesar (Colm Fiore) asks Tyrannus to be his personal bodyguard, overlooking the fact that he has guys like Mark Antony to protect him, and also overlooking the fact that in 44 BC, Caesar is the dictator, which comes with a staff of 24 lictors, who were also essentially bodyguards.

We’re only 20 minutes into this thing and I already I hate it.

Then Camane milks the ceremonial goats (wtf!) and they give only blood, which means bad things are coming. She has to warn Caesar for some reason, but the Chief Vestal tells her to forget what she’s seen, maybe because she knows there’s no such thing as ceremonial goats.

Then Piso’s mother buys something for “three cents” and it becomes clear that the film isn’t even trying. Piso disappears in the market place, and I see a whole lot of manpain coming for Tyrannus.

The Praetorian Guard exists, even though it won’t be created until there are emperors, since its job is to protect the emperor. Camane warns Caesar, but he declares that he’s lived his whole life in defiance of the gods, so he’s going to ignore the omen. Then he gets into a positively absurd-looking carriage with pillars, a couple centuries before the first thing that might be called a carriage will be invented.

Tyrannus is running around the marketplace looking for Piso, because Caesar, having commissioned him to be his bodyguard, has promptly left Rome without him.

Victor, could you make another generous donation? I think this miniseries qualifies for hazardous duty pay.

Then the Senate gaks Caesar and the assassins who are trying to kill Tyrannus tell him that it was all a distraction, which is really nice of them if you come to think of it, because it means he can run to the Senate house and find Caesar dying, who tells him to protect Octavius. And then Mark Antony (Vincent Regan) shows up and claims Caesar’s crown.

For Colm Fiore, this counts as a mercy killing, because he doesn’t have to keep appearing in this turd

Mark Antony is pissed because the senators asked to shake his hand without washing the blood off theirs first. This turns out to be a faux pas on the Senate’s part, because they don’t have an army and Antony does, so they have to raise an army of gladiators, led by General Rapax (Graham McTavish), who you know has to be a bad guy because his name is Rapax.

The show has by this point forgotten that Tyrannus is a slave because he’s just running around freely, giving Piso’s mother money to sail away from Rome, and so on. Having ridden back to Rome to protect Piso and his mother, Tyrannus then has to fight a dozen soldiers/gladiators so he can get horses to ride away on. This show can’t even keep track of its own material from one moment to the next, much less know anything real about stuff that happened 2,000 years ago.

Oh, god, make this stop, please!

Mercifully, this turns out to be the end of the first episode.

 

Want to Know More? 

No, trust me, you don’t.

Boudica: The Right Story, the Wrong Script

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Agrippina the Younger, Alex Kingston, Andrew Davies, Boudica, Emily Blunt, Nero, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Warrior Queen

When I discovered that there was a film about the Celtic queen Boudica starring Alex Kingston and Emily Blunt, I got really excited, since they’re both actresses I like a lot. Sadly, even their combined acting skills weren’t enough to save this not-very-well written film.

Trigger Warning: This post discusses rape.

The US version of Boudica

The Historical Boudica

Everything we know about Boudica and her famous rebellion against the Romans derives from two Roman historians, Tacitus (who mentions her in two works, the Agricola and the Annals) and Dio Cassius. Tacitus got his information from his father-in-law, Julius Agricola, and so his accounts are generally considered more reliable than Dio’s, which only survives in a summary.

The Romans conquered lowland Britain in 43 AD, while Claudius was emperor. During the conquest, they allied themselves to King Prasutagus of the Iceni, a tribe that occupied roughly modern Norfolk. Apart from a brief rebellion against the Romans in 47 AD, the Iceni were faithful allies. Prasutagus made a will in which he left his kingdom jointly to his two daughters and to Rome.

Unfortunately for the Iceni, when Prasutagus died, perhaps in 60 AD or a little before, the Romans chose to ignore this arrangement and directly incorporate the Iceni into the Empire. A number of the Iceni were enslaved, his queen Boudica was flogged and his daughters raped.

In 60 or 61, when the Roman governor of the province, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was leading a campaign in modern-day Wales, the Iceni and other British tribes rose in revolt. They conquered the poorly-defended Camulodunum (modern Colchester) and completely destroyed the town. The 9^th Legion attempted to intervene, but the Iceni almost completely destroyed the legion as well.

Suetonius made the strategic decision to not try to defend Londinium (modern London), and as a result the Britons brutally sacked it, impaling the noble women of the city on spikes with their breasts cut off and sewn into their mouths. The city of Verulamium (St Albans) suffered a similar fate.

The basic route of Boudica’s rebellion

While Boudica was sacking these towns, Suetonius was gathering his forces, and the two forces eventually met at an unknown location, probably in the West Midlands. Boudica’s forces appear to have severely outnumbered the Romans, but Suetonius took up a strong defensive position and (at least in the surviving Roman accounts) employed superior tactics. The result was a devastating defeat for the Britons.

Exactly what happened to Boudica is unclear. In the Annals, Tacitus says she poisoned herself, while in the Agricola, he says only that the rebellion fizzled out, but says nothing of how she died. Dio Cassius says she fell sick, died, and was lavishly buried before the Iceni were defeated. Given that sudden illness was often suspected to be due to poisoning, the two accounts are not incompatible. But it seems fairly clear that Boudica survived the battle and died sometime afterwards. The ultimate defeat of her people was probably due to a combination of the loss of her leadership and their loss at the main battle of the rebellion.

English interest in Boudica grew considerably in the later 19^th and 20^th centuries, when she was celebrated as something of a noble savage and a warrior queen (her name, coincidentally, means the same thing that ‘Victoria’ does, which naturally made her a popular metaphor for Queen Victoria.

The Westminster Boudica

Boudica

Boudica (released in the US as Warrior Queen, 2003, dir. Bill Anderson) is the story of a scriptwriter, Andrew Davies, who is much better at adapting other people’s work than he is at writing his own original scripts. Overall, the script feels like it was written by a college student who took a script-writing class as an elective. Agrippina actually utters the line, “You’re magnificent in your wroth, Nero!” No one ever utters the word ‘wroth’ outside of crappy scripts.

The film follows the basic outline of Boudica’s story, although it doesn’t really provide much context for the events. It begins while Prasutagus is alive (although he seems much younger than the historical king would have been), and more or less ends after the battle with Suetonius, without any clear explanation of what happened to Boudica. So the film generally gets the basic facts right. The problem lies mostly in the way the script is written, rather than what it presents as facts.

The film can’t really decide how to handle Celtic women. It wants them to be clichéd ‘fiery-haired Irish women’, and at the start of the film Boudica (Alex Kingston) seems to already be a warrior, as if this was normal for the Celts (which it wasn’t; Celtic women were expected to stand on the sidelines at battles and shout encouragements to their husbands rather than fighting on their own). But Arcon, the leader of another British tribe, ridicules the idea of female leaders. The script is using this as a way to generate some dramatic tension, but it feels like Davies is trying to eat his cake and have it too—the Iceni have female warriors and queens, but the other tribes don’t.

Kingston as Boudica

The characters also speak in a very modern style, making references to ‘economies of scale’ and the Iceni wanting to ‘be left alone to follow their religion’ and things like that. The uncharitable interpretation would be that Davies simply can’t write his own dialogue, but given that he’s written a number of well-received adaptations, let’s be more charitable and suppose that he was trying to imitate Robert Graves. In Graves’ I Claudius and Claudius the God, the Romans speak in deliberately anachronistic ways. Graves was trying to cut through the fussy archaic language 19^th century writers often employed to make Roman characters sound old-fashioned and make his characters more immediate to the audience. Sadly, Graves was a brilliant author and poet, and Davies isn’t. So his characters just get to say tinny dialogue.

Both Tacitus and Dio give versions of the speech Boudica said before the final battle (both versions certainly invented), but, as always happens, the script-writer decided he could come up with something better, and wound up with something more clichéd instead. It’s maddening to see so many interesting historical speeches abandoned in favor of modern crap.

As already noted, the film’s dialogue is generally pretty bad, so bad that even solid actresses like Kingston and Emily Blunt (who plays Boudica’s daughter Isolda) can’t do much with the lines they’re given. But the film doesn’t stop at bad dialogue. It just employs so much silliness, it’s depressing to realize that Davies wrote this as a serious script, with multiple drafts.

In an apparently attempt to generate tension, the film includes several scenes set at the Roman court. These scenes don’t actually go anywhere; they could easily have been omitted without affecting the overall narrative, but that would have made for a much shorter film. The script ignores the issue of messages taking months to travel between Rome and Britain, so the Roman court gets word of things that seemingly just happened in Britain, and orders are sent out that influence events immediately following. That’s a minor sin. But the film also just ignores all plausibility. Agrippina (Francis Barber) actually poisons Claudius in the middle of his court, and everyone just ignores the fact that he’s just mentioned how strange the drink she’s giving him tastes.

This film wants you to know how decadent Nero (Andrew-Lee Potts) is. He’s way too much eye shadow and purple neckerchiefs decadent. He’s French-kissing his mother in front of the imperial court decadent. He’s violently boning his mother decadent. He’s filling his court with people whose main job is to lounge around the imperial court having sex decadent. He’s poisoning his own mother and then stepping over her corpse decadent. Did I mention he’s decadent?

And for some reason all the Romans except Nero wear their togas indoors and pinned at the shoulder. Given that the toga was a cloak wrapped around the body when the wearer was outdoors, this is the equivalent of wearing your wool coat inside and stapling it shut so it won’t accidentally fall off. Oh, and the Romans wear pants under their togas, even though pants are basically a Germanic fashion introduced centuries later.

Boudica does a lot of pointing with swords in this film

Also, apparently the main reason Boudica’s rebellion was so effective is because she had a crack squad of Commando Urchins. These pre-teen kids are holy terrors who are well-versed in guerrilla tactics. They rob the Roman proconsul (actually shouting “nyah nyah” as they do so) and beat up his body guards. They tunnel under a Roman statue and cause it to collapse (and then climb out of the hole it just fell into), and they tunnel behind a group of Romans in a shield wall and ham-string them. Then they crawl through the ranks of another shield wall (because the soldiers are too stupid to notice them) and decapitate the proconsul. It seems clear that the reason Boudica lost her battle with Suetonius is that she forget to send in the Commando Urchins.

These Romans would have trouble defeating the Romans in Life of Brian

The movie also forgets that it’s supposed to be historical. Magior the Shaman (Gary Lewis) periodically works actual magic. He is constantly prophesying accurately. He shows one of Boudica’s warriors a vision. He throws things into the water and then makes them burst into flames. He levitates a sword out of a pond, and at the end of the film, he apparently turns Isolda invisible or teleports her away so the Romans won’t kill her after Boudica’s defeat. It’s nice to add magical touches because everyone knows that the Celts are all mystical and cool and whatnot, but let’s try to remember that the story is supposed to have actually happened.

And, for reasons that are never explained, Isolda can read Latin, even though all the other Iceni are illiterate. Maybe her Roman soldier boyfriend taught her in the few spare minutes they had together before things all went wrong.

It’s Not All Bad, Is It?

The film does have a few good qualities. Both Kingston and Blunt do their best with crappy material, and in a few scenes they really succeed. The scene after Boudica is flogged and her daughters raped is particularly effective. Boudica forces herself to stand up, repeatedly saying “Get up!” and as she unties her daughters, she tells them the same thing. Their struggle to be strong in the face of their trauma is quite moving.

The film also fully acknowledges the emotional impact of the rape. Isolda struggles to make sense of what has happened to her and contemplates suicide. She chooses to fight alongside her mother, hoping to die. But after the battle, when she wakes up injured but alive, she tells herself “Get up!” After Magior spirits her away somehow, the film ends with a shot of Emily Blunt as a modern Londoner, with the clear suggestion that Isolda was a strong survivor whose blood and spirit now run in English veins. As I’ve remarked in a previous post, I’m not a big fan of the ‘strong woman raped’ trope, but this film makes it work better than a lot of others I’ve seen, mostly because it explores the aftermath of the trauma without resorting to the ‘man-hating she-devil’ cliché.

The final battle is more realistic than the first one. The film takes some effort to show Roman tactics in a way that makes clear why the Romans ultimately defeated the Celts (although the film shows the two sides as roughly equal).

All in all, this isn’t a very good film, either as history or as story. It gets the basic facts right, which is certainly commendable, but it gets so much of the supporting details wrong that it loses the forest for the trees. The Romans are decadent to the point of cartoonishness. I would love to see what Alex Kingston and Emily Blunt could do with this story if they were given a solid script to work with. Just like Boudica’s rebellion, I have to regard this film as a lost opportunity.

Note: Her name is spelled a couple different ways. ‘Boudica’ and ‘Boudicca’ are both common; Tacitus uses two Cs, but other sources have only one, so both are basically correct. In the 19th century, a fashion arose to spell her name ‘Boudicea’, but that appears to be based on a copyist’s error during the Middle Ages.

 

Want to Know More?

Boudica is available under its US title, Warrior Queen.

Our sources for Boudica’s revolt are chiefly Tacitus’s Annals (Penguin Classics) and his Agricola, available in Agricola and Germania (Penguin Classics). Of these, the Agricola is probably the better choice for understanding Roman Britain, since Agricola, Tacitus’ father-in-law, was governor of the province.

Graham Webster’s Boudica: The British Revolt Against Rome AD 60 (Roman Conquest of Britain) focuses on Boudica’s campaign, filling out the somewhat scanty historical sources with evidence from archaeology, while Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin’s Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queenis more concerned with her posthumous reputation.