I, Claudius: The Problem with the Series

Tags

Agrippina the Younger, BBC, I, Claudius, Jack Pulman, Livia, Messalina, Robert Graves, Roman Empire, Shiela White, The Julio-Claudians

I have very fond memories of watching I, Claudius with my parents when it first ran here in the States, and again in the late 80s with my father when I was in college. But watching it more recently, with 30 years of experience thinking about the position of women in society and how they are depicted, I noticed something troubling that escaped my younger selves.

It’s really misogynistic.

In order to see what I mean, let’s run down the female characters in the series (omitting a few women who only appear in a single scene):

Livia, Augustus’ wife and mother to Tiberius and Drusus: the chief villain of the

piece

Julia, Augustus’ daughter and Tiberius’ wife: commits multiple adulteries

Antonia: Claudius’ mother: stern, conservative, has contempt for her own son

Livilla, Antonia’s daughter and Castor’s wife: falsely accuses Postumus of rape,

drugs Castor so she can commit adultery, then poisons him

Agrippina the Elder, Julia’s daughter and Germanicus’ wife: strident foe of Tiberius

Plancina, wife of Piso: accused of poisoning Germanicus, she tricks Piso into

committing suicide

Martina: poisoner who corrupts Caligula and gets him to murder his father

Aelia Paetina, Claudius’ second wife and sister of Sejanus: enters into a loveless

marriage with Claudius

Drusilla, sister and concubine of Caligula: plays into Caligula’s madness

Messalina, Claudius’ third wife; commits multiple adulteries and manipulates Claudius

Scylla: prostitute with whom Messalina competes to see which of them can exhaust the

most sex partners in a night

Domitia, Messalina’s mother: tries unsuccessfully to rein in her daughter

Calpurnia: prostitute who genuinely cares for Claudius

Agrippina the Younger, Claudius’ niece and fourth wife: manipulates and poisons

Claudius, commits incest with her son Nero

Agrippina the Younger

When you look over the list, these women fall into several fairly obvious groups:

The Manipulators: Livia, Livilla, Plancina, Messalina, Agrippina the Younger, and

maybe Drusilla

The Bad Wives/Sluts: Julia, Livilla, Messalina, Plancina, Aelia Paetina, arguably Agrippina the Younger, the prostitutes Scylla and Calpurnia are honorary members here by virtue of their occupations

The Bad Mothers: Livia, Julia, Antonia, Agrippina the Younger

The Poisoners: Livia, Martina, Livilla, Plancina, Agrippina the Younger

The only women in the show who are entirely proper, guiltless women are Agrippina the Elder and Domitia. Agrippina the Elder (Fiona Walker) features almost entirely as a foe of Tiberius, repeatedly denouncing himself to his face for his role in her husband’s death. While clearly virtuous, her constant strident arguments make her seem rather foolhardy, and the show makes no attempt to make her likeable in real fashion. As a child, she mocks Claudius. On the other hand, Domitia is really only in the show to give someone for Messalina (Shiela White) to play off of when Claudius isn’t around. She’s virtuous, but only gets 2 or 3 scenes. Similarly, the basically likeable Calpurnia only appears 2 or 3 times and has only a single function in the story, to tell Claudius (Derek Jacobi) that Messalina has committed bigamy. Drusilla is essentially Caligula’s victim, but she moves from playing into his madness because she’s afraid of him to playing into his madness because she enjoys the power.

Antonia (Margaret Tyzack), Claudius’ mother, also needs special discussion. She’s a very conservative woman, the embodiment of traditional Roman feminine values. She’s utterly faithful to her late husband Drusus, a strict disciplinarian to her children, and rigidly moral. That’s admirable, and the show gives her scenes with Julia that demonstrate her basic decency. But her strictness makes her a rather grim mother. When she learns that Livilla (Patricia Quinn) played a role in destroying Postumus, she locks Livilla in a room, sits down in front of it, and waits until Livilla has starved to death, punishing both of them simultaneously. She has little but contempt for Claudius’s clumsiness and perceived stupidity, even later in life when she realizes that he’s not really so stupid. She tells Julia she doesn’t love him when he’s just a boy. Her final act is to tell Claudius that she’s going to commit suicide. By Roman standards, she virtuous, but by 20^th century standards she’s an awful mother, and her repeated insults toward Claudius, the hero and audience identification character, render her essentially unlikable.

Tyzack’s severe Antonia

Some of these women have positive traits. Livia is clever and sharp-tongued, Julia is witty in a catty sort of way, Antonia is morally upright. But over and over again we get female characters who are essentially bad women. Only Agrippina the Elder and Domitia can pass muster by the simultaneous standards of ancient Roman and 20^th century British society. The former is unlikable and the latter is unimportant. The show’s major female characters are a long parade of misogynist stereotypes.

To make matters worse, only a few of these characters are given complex motivations. Julia and Antonia get enough screen time so that we can see them as full personalities. Livia is highly complex, but her real motives aren’t fully clear. If she’s motivated by maternal love, why does she have so much contempt for the son she wants to make emperor? Sian Phillips makes the character work, but I’m not sure Livia is actually written to be the full person Phillips makes her. Livilla and Messalina come across as just manipulative and slutty from start to finish. Agrippina the Younger is basically one-dimensional power-hunger made flesh.

One reason for the thinness of most of the female characters is that as the show goes on, it stops developing characters over the course of several episodes. Instead it introduces them only when needed for the plot. Drusilla is barely even seen before Caligula becomes emperor, which means her only scenes are played in the shadow of her brother’s madness. Agrippina the Younger literally only appears in the final episode. So the characters introduced at the start get development over several episodes, while the later characters just sort of walk on, say their lines, and walk off. As a result, we get little sense of who they are as people.

Livilla, slutting it up with Sejanus

 

Unfortunately, as Robert Graves and screenwriter Jack Pulman write it, the story of the Julio-Claudian family is one of female malice poisoning male virtue. Most of the male characters are basically decent men ruined by the women in their lives. Livia manipulates everyone around her. She twists Augustus’ good intentions into a despotic monarchy with her determination to make her unwilling son Tiberius his successor, she tricks Lucius into betraying his own mother, and she corrupts Livilla along the way into ruining Postumus. Tiberius’ harshness as emperor is substantially due to Livia’s destruction of everything he loves. Plancina and Martina conspire to poison Germanicus, and Martina corrupts the young Caligula by telling him that he’s a god in human form and making him her accomplice in her crimes, while Plancina ultimately becomes Piso’s undoing by persuading him to stop fighting the charges against him; she tricks him into suicide by promising to kill herself with him and then failing to do so. Once Caligula is dead, there are no males left alive in the family other than Claudius and Nero, and that’s because Livia has killed them all. Claudius’ decency is constantly hammered down by the horrors he witnesses, including his mother’s suicide, and the last person he truly trusts, Messalina, utterly and shamelessly betrays him. He marries Agrippina the Younger knowing she’s a viper, and she proves true to character and poisons him exactly as he plans. The few decent female characters are minor players in this story.

Robert Graves authored the decidedly pro-female White Goddess, a poetic celebration of female divinity, so it’s surprising that he would tell a story that is so misogynistic at its heart. Part of the issue is that Graves’ source material is profoundly hostile to the Julio-Claudian women. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio all considered female exercise of political power abhorrent and evidence of moral deviation from other standards of propriety. They attack most of the Julio-Claudian empresses as being abusive with their political power and sexually insatiable to the point of unfaithfulness, two charges that are essentially flip sides of the same coin for Romans.

Messalina with her son Britannicus

 

Because our sources for this period of Roman history are so dominated by these three authors, it is challenging to understand what might be underneath these hostile characterizations. Their depiction of Messalina is perhaps the most obvious example of this. As Tacitus and Suetonius describe her, Messalina manipulated Claudius easily, so that he completely failed to see her many adulteries. Cassius Dio claims that she forced the matrons of Rome to prostitute themselves in the imperial palace and rewarded their husbands with political promotions. She persuaded her lovers that Claudius knew and approved of her affairs, so that men were reluctant to refuse her advances. Juvenal, a Roman satirist of the early 2^nd century, claims that Messalina was so eager to engage in sex that she used to sneak out of the imperial palace, go to a brothel, and work there under the name Lycisca (‘wolf girl’). She supposedly competed with another prostitute to see which of them could exhaust the most lovers in a single night. Most shockingly, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio all claim that she bigamously married one of her lovers, Gaius Silius, while Claudius was out of town, down to signing a marriage contract. Claudius’ appalled servants persuaded the prostitute Calpurnia to tell Claudius about Messalina’s betrayal, and then persuaded him to execute her before she could manipulate him into forgiving her.

These stories are hard to credit. The only source that any of the historians acknowledge is the memoir of Agrippina the Younger, whom Messalina reportedly hated and persecuted. Since Agrippina succeeded Messalina as Claudius’ wife and needed her son to displace his children by his earlier wives, one can imagine that this memoir might not be particularly honest about Messalina. The idea that Messalina turned the imperial palace into a brothel without Claudius noticing is hard to believe, and it’s worth pointing out that almost the identical story is also told of Caligula. No one takes Juvenal’s charges as truth; he notoriously invented all sorts of slanderous stories to lob at men and women he disliked, and while his poems make for fun reading, they have to be taken with more than a grain of salt. The idea that Messalina thought she could get away with bigamy is hard to imagine, since her entire position was based on her status as Claudius’ wife. If the story is anything other than fabrication, there must be more to it than the facts that have come down to us.

White’s Messalina at the sex contest

 

What lies underneath all of these accusations is that idea that Claudius was a bad ruler because he was blind to such outrageous immorality taking place in his own household. That’s generally how the Roman historians depict Claudius; he’s not such a fool as everyone thought before he became emperor, but he was somehow an even bigger fool than that, because he was the puppet of his wives and his domestic servants. So these stories are not likely to be true; they’re intended to besmirch Claudius by painting his wife as an immoral whore who fooled him at every turn.

Graves isn’t responsible for the stories his Roman sources told. But he was responsible for which sources he chose to trust. In particular, his use of Juvenal is pretty shameless. Even in the 1930s, scholars didn’t take Juvenal’s poetry as fact, so his choice to repeat the whole sex contest story is a sign that he wasn’t being particularly discriminating about the anecdotes he incorporated into his novels. He’s also responsible for the way he chose to assemble his sources into a coherent narrative, and the theme that the Julio-Claudians were good men ruined by bad women was something he imposed on the material, since the Roman sources are quite critical of some of the men in the family.

For example, the actual Postumus was apparently a much darker figure than the Postumus of the series; Tacitus describes him as “young, physically tough, indeed brutish….devoid of every good quality” (Tacitus, Annals, 1.3), while Suetonius and Cassius Dio are much harsher. But Graves and Pulman make him a thorough decent and likeable young man, a friend of Claudius, who is falsely accused of rape by Livilla because Livia views him as a threat to Tiberius’ succession. So Graves chose to ignore his historical personality in order to make him a better person. Similarly, while the historical Drusus Julius Caesar was apparently a rather violent man (which might explain his wife’s decision to have an affair with Sejanus); in the series Castor is something of a partier who grows up as he realizes the corruption of his father’s rule. So Graves and Pulman have a tendency to make the male Julio-Claudians better than they were, while accepting at face value the highly-negative picture of the women. In other words, the misogyny of the series might have its roots in the sources, but Graves wasn’t just passively repeating his sources. It’s an unfortunate element of an otherwise stellar series.

This post, and the others on I, Claudius was made possible by a very generous donation from a regular reader. Thanks, Lyn! If there’s a movie or TV show you want me to review, please make a donation to my Paypal account and let me know what you’d like me to review. I have another request coming up after I finish I, Claudius, so please be patient.

 

Want to Know More?

I, Claudius is available on Amazon, as is the combined I, Claudius pair of novels by Graves. They’re both highly recommended.

If you’d like to know more about Livia, try Anthony Barrett’s biography, Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome. 

Advertisement

I, Claudius: Livia!

Tags

Agrippa Postumus, BBC, I, Claudius, Interesting Women, Livia, Roman Empire, Sian Phillips

The most memorable performance in I, Claudius is Sian Phillips’ Livia. Her personality drives the action in the first half of the series, and Phillips gives a truly unforgettable, incandescent performance as the ruthless schemer who systematically manipulates everyone around her except Claudius (Derek Jacobi), whom she wrongly considers too stupid to pay attention to until late in her life. The performance netted her a much-deserved BAFTA award. So let’s take a look at her and see how fact meets fiction.

Livia in the Series

When we first meet Livia, it’s at a banquet celebrating the seventh anniversary of Augustus’ triumph over Antony and Cleopatra. She’s watching everyone in the room, catching every detail of what the people do, and she demonstrates her ability to manipulate Augustus (Brian Blessed). She’s iron-willed, arrogant and condescending, clever, and in many ways the power behind Augustus’ throne. And she is absolutely determined that her older son Tiberius (George Baker) is going to succeed Augustus as ruler of Rome. For the first four episodes, nearly everything she does is about eliminating all the possible alternative candidates, of whom there are several. Her problem is that Augustus dislikes the prickly Tiberius and would much rather have anyone else as his successor. So she has her work cut out for her. Over the course of the first seven episodes, Livia

• Poisons Marcellus, Augustus’ young nephew and initial favorite so that Agrippa will return to Rome, since she’s convinced that Augustus needs Agrippa
• Poisons Agrippa between episodes 1 and 2 because Agrippa required a marriage to Julia, Augustus’ daughter, as the price of returning to Rome, and Livia wants Tiberius to marry Julia
• Ignores Augustus’ explicit wishes and arranges for his deification on the eastern side of the Empire
• Apparently poisons her own son Drusus (Ian Ogilvy) because it looks like he might try to rebel against Augustus to restore the Republic
• Poisons Julia’s son Gaius off-screen because he’s Augustus’ obvious successor now
• Persuades Plautius (Darien Angadi) to spy on Julia and compile a list of Julia’s lovers
• Persuades Lucius to reveal his mother’s adulteries to Augustus so that he won’t appear complicit in the affairs, thus getting Julia exiled in hopes that Augustus will change his mind and recall Tiberius from exile
• Arranges for Plautius to kill Lucius in a boating ‘accident’ because he’s now Augustus’ successor
• Persuades her grand-daughter Livilla (Patricia Quinn) to falsely accuse Augustus’ last surviving grandson Postumus (John Castle) of attempted rape so that Augustus will have to recall Tiberius and make him his successor
• Tricks the chief Vestal Virgin into breaking her oath and allowing Livia to look at Augustus’ will and then substituting a fake will when she discovers that the will names Postumus as Augustus’ successor
• Poisons Augustus by painting poison on the figs he’s growing because he won’t eat anything anyone else has touched
• Sends Sejanus (Patrick Stewart) to murder Postumus so he can’t succeed Augustus
• Sends assassins to murder Fabius Maximus because he knows about Augustus’ intentions for Postumus succeeding him
• Sends her agents to spirit away Martina, the woman who poisoned Germanicus (David Robb), so that Piso (Stratford Johns) can’t use her testimony against Tiberius during his murder trial, compares notes about poisoning with Martina, and suggests that she could easily have poisoned Martina if she wanted to
• Intervenes in Piso’s trial to protect his wife Plancina (Irene Hamilton), which Tiberius refuses to do
• Persuades Plancina to persuade Piso to commit suicide so that Livia can destroy the letter than implicates her in Germanicus’ poisoning
• Persuades Claudius to promise to deify her by telling him whom she murdered, and admits to Claudius that she didn’t orchestrate the deaths of Drusus and Germanicus only because they died without her intervention
• And finally dies an old woman, with Claudius the only person who knows about her long list of crimes

Whew! That’s a rap sheet that even Shakespeare’s worst villains can’t match. So is any of it true?

Philiips as Livia

 

The Real Livia

Probably not.

As Augustus’ wife, Livia played an important role in his rule. Publicly, she was offered as the embodiment of traditional Roman feminine virtue, a great beauty, and a matron devoted to her family. She made many of her family’s clothes herself, a traditional marker of moral virtue for Roman women. To some extent, this traditionalist depiction was a strategy of Augustus to provide cover for the radical political changes he was introducing at Rome, but Augustus may also have been a man of conservative social tastes. His choice to exile Julia for the rest of her life (and deny her the right to drink wine) after her adultery was revealed was reportedly gut-wrenching to him because he loved her dearly, so he was clearly horrified at Julia’s immoral behavior. According to Cassius Dio, Livia attributed her influence over Augustus to her unswerving faithfulness to him and overlooking his various flings.

As she aged, she became a model for the depiction of the goddesses Piety and Concord and as such helped shape the Roman view of its future empresses, who were expected to faithful and devoted wives and mothers. At public events, she was allowed to sit with the Vestal Virgins, the most honored women in Rome. And of course after her death, Claudius had her deified, the first Roman woman to achieve that honor.

Livia

She was clearly interested in promoting her two sons politically. Both Tiberius and Drusus became important and trusted generals. Drusus married Augustus’ niece Antonia Minor and Augustus forced Tiberius to divorce his beloved wife Vipsania in order to marry Julia. This was clearly an unpleasant experience for both the unfortunate Tiberius and Julia; they got along poorly, which probably contributed to Julia’s decision to start sleeping with other men, and the loss of Vipsania seems to have permanently scarred Tiberius emotionally. But whether Livia played any role in orchestrating these two marriages is unknown.

The ancient sources all agree that Livia had a good deal of influence with Augustus. She is known to have helped him with the administration of the Empire, often replying to correspondence in his name. This gave her the opportunity to make important decisions on matters of second-tier importance. It’s unlikely that she presumed to handle the most important matters. Given that Augustus trusted her to handle a lot of routine and less important matters, it’s likely that the two discussed issues of governance and she probably acted as an important advisor to him.

Tacitus claims that “she had the aged Augustus firmly under control” and asserts that she was the driving force behind his decision to exile Postumus. The reason Augustus did this is unknown; the story of Livilla accusing him of rape at Livia’s behest is made up. But note that Tacitus says this was when Augustus was quite old; if the charge is true, it was a consequence of decades of ruling and not a basic characteristic of their marriage or Livia’s personality. Suetonius, in a striking turn of phrase, claims that Gaius Caligula described Livia as “Ulysses in petticoats” (Ulixem stolatum). Since in Greek mythology Ulysses (or rather Odysseus, the Greek form of his name) is marked out by his cunning more than his martial skills, the quip is a charge of being manipulative. But elsewhere he says that Augustus refused her request to grant citizenship to a Gaul.

Livia as Ops, Goddess of Wealth

The sources definitely accuse her of some of the murders she commits in I, Claudius. Tacitus claims that she murdered both Gaius and Lucius. He claims, quoting an unnamed source, that Marcia, the wife of Fabius Maximus, revealed to Livia that Maximus had accompanied Augustus to his reconciliation meeting with Postumus, and then subsequently said at his funeral that she had been the cause of Maximus’ death. But he admits this is a rumor. He says that Tiberius claimed that Augustus had left instructions for Postumus’ death, and then based on no evidence whatsoever asserts that it is more probable that Tiberius and Livia arranged it out of fear of Postumus, a rather odd claim given that Tiberius was emperor and Postumus was a disgraced prisoner. He notes that “some suspected” that Livia might have caused Augustus’ final illness out of fear that he would restore Postumus. Tacitus clearly dislikes Livia, describing her as a curse to the empire and curse to her family.

Tacitus also accuses Tiberius and Livia of conniving with Gnaeus Piso and his wife Plancina to arrange the death of Germanicus. The reported motive is that Germanicus was a threat to the possible succession of Tiberius’ son Drusus (called Castor in the series) and that Livia hated his wife Agrippina and wanted to ruin her because she had more children and was more famous that Livia. When Piso and Plancina returned to Rome, the Senate demanded a trial for the death of Germanicus. Tacitus claims that Plancina was saved, despite her guilt, because Livia begged Tiberius to rescue her friend. The claim that Livia orchestrated Plancina getting clemency has been confirmed by the discovery about 20 years ago of a senatorial decree that explicitly says as much.

Suetonius repeats the claim that Livia might have ordered the death of Postumus, saying that the tribune who did the deed had received a letter from Augustus ordering it, but that Livia could have written it. He says that as emperor Tiberius became vexed that Livia was claiming to rule jointly with him and went out of his way to avoid meeting privately with her. Their final breach happened when, during an argument, she produced some letters that Augustus had written to her complaining about Tiberius; since Suetonius had access to the imperial archives he might have seen such letters, although he doesn’t quote them as he does with other correspondence between the couple. But that’s the only crime he accuses her of, and given that Suetonius was normally eager to repeat dirt on the Julio-Claudians, it’s striking that he does not say anything about Tacitus’ other accusations.

Agrippa Postumus

The idea that Livia was systematically murdering her way through Augustus’ possible successors rests primarily on Cassius Dio. He says that she was accused of poisoning Marcellus, but then says that a lot of other people died of disease the same year, so that people were uncertain whether the charge was true. He says that Gaius died of an infected wound and Lucius of illness and people suspected Livia because this happened about the time that Augustus recalled Tiberius from exile. He claims that she manipulated Augustus into being merciful toward an attempted assassination plot as part of a Machiavellian scheme of her own. (Indeed, the conversation he invents about this is possibly the longest speeches an ancient author attributed to any woman. It runs for seven paragraphs.) He expands on Tacitus’ claim that she poisoned Augustus by inventing the absurd story that she smeared poison on some figs in Augustus’ garden and then offered them to him, eating clean ones to prove that they were safe. He repeats the claim that she might have arranged Postumus’ death. He says that people gossiped that Livia had secured Tiberius’ succession, much to Tiberius’ consternation, and that she claimed this as well, and that eventually she wished to take precedence over Tiberius. Tiberius grew tired of this, forced her to step out of public life, and then grew so tired of her trying to manage his household that he retreated to Capri to get away from her.

So between the three of them we find the following accusations (in chronological order):

• The poisoning of Marcellus
• The poisonings of Lucius and Gaius
• The poisoning of Augustus
• The murder of Postumus
• Perhaps the murder of Fabius Maximus
• The poisoning of Germanicus

That means that the other crimes, including the murder of Agrippa, the exposing of Julia’s adultery, the framing of Postumus, the theft of Augustus’ will, the suicide of Piso, and the kidnapping/rescue of Martina are entirely invented.

With the exception of the killings of Postumus and Fabius Maximus, Livia is accused of poisoning her victims (the sources disagree about how Lucius died). The problem with this is two-fold. First, the ancient world had only a hazy notion of medical issues. People easily died unexpectedly of undiagnosed maladies such as heart disease and sudden crises such as stroke, of fevers and other illnesses that simply couldn’t be treated, and from food poisoning, given the poor state of preservative techniques. Any of these could produce a sudden unexplained death. Injuries could easily turn infected and gangrene could set it. Because the ancient world could not easily explain such things medically, it was incredibly common for people to suspect poisoning and curses, because that made an unexpected event easily understandable in human terms. A second problem here is that the ancient world widely viewed poison as a woman’s weapon. Because women were physically too weak to use weapons successful (or so ancient culture assumed), they preferred to resort to poison to eliminate their enemies.

As a result, I am always very skeptical of historic accusations that a woman has poisoned men, because they can easily be expressions of misogyny and a lack of medical knowledge. Gaius’ death from a wound that became infected is so easily understood that attributing it to Livia is perverse. Similarly, Augustus was in his late 70s when he died; the idea that Livia would have gone to ridiculous lengths to poison the man who was the source of her political clout is absurd. Marcellus died in a year when many others died of disease as well. Germanicus and Lucius both died a long way from Rome, and murdering them would have required Livia to pull a lot of strings and risk her position if exposed. In all cases, Ockham’s Razor means that we ought to consider these deaths as result of natural causes rather than Machiavellian plotting.

A cameo of Livia

Our sources also acknowledge this. They repeatedly comment that these charges are rumors, that some people thought she might have poisoned Marcellus, Gaius and Lucius, that Livia could have forged a letter from Augustus ordering the death of Postumus. They offer no firm evidence for any of these claims. The only hard evidence we have for any of this is that Livia intervened to rescue Plancina from a poisoning conviction. That doesn’t prove that Livia had conspired with Plancina to poison Germanicus or even that Plancina had actually poisoned him, merely that she helped Plancina get off. An equally probable reading of the evidence is that Livia sincerely believed Plancina was wrongfully-accused and acted to help an innocent friend.

Notice also that the motives attributed to her are the typically misogynistic ones of advancing a son’s interest and, in the case of Germanicus, feminine resentment that another woman was more successful than she (a pretty absurd charge for a woman of Livia’s towering stature). The idea that a woman would kill another woman’s husband simply because they had more children than she did is the sort of misogynistic nonsense that ancient authors were prone to.

Livia makes a marvelous villain, perhaps one of the greatest evil women in all of 20^th century film and television, thanks to Sian Phillips remarkable performance. I’ve always suspected that Tony Soprano’s viciously manipulative mother was named Livia as a nod to Phillip’s performance. But while she’s a remarkable character, the historical Livia was probably quite different.

 

Want to Know More?

I, Claudius is available on Amazon, as is the combined I, Claudius pair of novels by Graves. They’re both highly recommended.

If you’d like to know more about Livia, try Anthony Barrett’s biography, Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome. 

I, Claudius: Republic vs Monarchy

Tags

Ancient Rome, BBC, Brian Blessed, Derek Jacobi, I, Claudius, Livia, Octavian/Augustus, Sian Phillips, The Principate

One of the major themes in I, Claudius is the tension between the concept of the Roman Republic and the reality of the new Roman monarchy. It comes up in every episode in some form or another. But there are major problems with the way the series handles the issue.

The End of the Republic

Before we can see what’s wrong with the series’ approach to the issue, we need to look at what was actually happening in Roman history. The last century of the Roman Republic witnessed the state in the process of slow collapse. The causes of the collapse of the Republic are extremely complex. Starting in 133 BC, there were repeated violations of the Republic’s constitution; a man was only supposed to hold office for one year and was not allowed to stand for office while holding one, but increasingly men were illegally re-elected to offices they currently held. Soldiers gave their loyalty to their generals rather than to the Roman state, and that enabled ambitious generals to wage civil war in pursuit of political aims; civil wars happened nearly every decade, and sometimes more than once in a decade. Political factions tore Rome apart in pursuit of mutually opposing goals. Perhaps the ultimate cause was that the Republic was really only meant to govern one city, but had been increasingly stretched to govern the whole Mediterranean basin, and eventually the system simply couldn’t endure the political pressures on it; imagine the mayor and city council of Chicago serving as the government for the entire United States.

Julius Caesar

In 44 BC, Julius Caesar appeared to emerged as victor in the brutal Hunger Games of the Late Republic. But Caesar was a man of such blatant ambition that once he was truly ascendant, he was unable to conceal what looked to contemporaries a desire to become a king. The Republic was established to prevent the emergence of a new king, and while the Republic as a system was so moribund as to be non-functional, there was still a deep antipathy of the concept of a king; eastern peoples had kings, but Rome had elected consuls. Eventually Caesar’s close friends came to the conclusion that his ambition was a threat to theirs; the result was his infamous murder at the hands of several close friends.

His heir was his adoptive great-nephew Octavian, who fought several more civil wars before his final triumph over Marc Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 BC. That victory left Octavian the unchallenged ruler of the Roman state. There was simply no one who could practically challenge him. But that had been Caesar’s situation as well, and when Caesar accordingly acted like a king, it got him murdered. So Octavian was left with a conundrum. He was unquestionably the sole ruler of the Roman Empire, but he could not admit to being the sole ruler without running the very real risk that he would be assassinated. So he had to find another way to rule.

Octavian (or as the Senate renamed him, Augustus) adopted the approach of claiming that he had ‘restored the Republic.’ Instead of inventing new titles and offices like Caesar’s perpetual dictatorship, he preferred to employ traditional Republican ones. He was named princeps (loosely, translated as ‘first citizen’, a traditional honor given to the longest-serving senator) and imperator (roughly, ‘one with the power to command’), another traditional title; from these two words we get the terms ‘prince’ and ‘emperor’, but crucially these words did not carry any suggestion of royalty, the way they do for us today. Rather than disrespecting the Senate, as Caesar had done, Augustus consisted treated the Senate with a great deal of respect, frequently asking for their advice. After several years of monopolizing the consulship, he realized that this was thwarting the ambitions of prominent men, so he stopped having himself elected consul so that others could enjoy the honor. Although he had been granted wide legal powers, he generally preferred to operate through traditional Republican officials, to maintain the illusion that the Republic was running as it always had.

Augustus

In reality, however, Augustus ran the Roman state as he willed. The senators understood that they were no longer truly in charge and evidently appreciated being allowed to remain as prominent figures without much true power. After decades of civil war, they must have been desperate for a man who could truly guarantee peace and stability. Augustus eviscerated the inner workings of the Republic but kept its exterior for show; having gutted the Republic, he was walking around wearing its skin and claiming that the Republic had been restored to health with his help. He created a system modern historians call the Principate, a system in which the man in charge pretended he was nothing more than the ‘first citizen’ of Rome.

Such, at least, is the traditional picture of Augustus. That’s the version I learned as an undergraduate and it’s the version I teach to my students. But in the past generation, some historians have argued that perhaps the truth is more complicated. They point to the fact that much of our information about Augustus and his immediate successors is drawn from 2^nd century AD historians such as Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, all of whom were writing with the knowledge of what the Principate looked like a century after its establishment. These historians argue that perhaps Augustus was serious about reviving the Republic but that the system was too moribund to be salvageable as anything more than a fiction. They note the very considerable continuities between the Republic and the Principate, such as its legal system and the major officials.

I’m not enough of a Classicist to go into much detail about this revisionist approach to the early Principate, so I’ll just leave it as a note that there is some debate among modern historians about exactly what Augustus thought he was doing. Whether Augustus was serious about reviving the Republic or if he was just cynically disguising his intentions, one thing is clear, he was not ruling openly as a monarch. He consistently avoided most of the trapping of monarchy in his day, such as a crown or a throne. Unlike kings, he did not dress in purple clothing; he preferred to dress simply, And he consistently refused to let the Romans worship him as a living god, because that was an honor demanded by Hellenistic kings in the eastern Mediterranean. He adopted a variety of dodges, such as allowing the dedication of temples to ‘Rome and Augustus’, but open worship as a living god was too strongly associated with kings for Augustus to be comfortable with it, even though he allowed the Senate to deify his dead adoptive father.

The Principate in I, Claudius

In I, Claudius, however, Augustus (Brian Blessed) and the members of his household talk plainly about the Republic being dead and discuss the Principate as a monarchy. In the first episode, Tiberius (George Baker) directly asks Drusus “do you think the monarchy will survive Augustus?” His brother Drusus (Ian Ogilvy) replies that Rome will be a Republic again. There is a great deal of discussion about the line of succession, with everyone assuming that it will follow biological order, the way it might in a monarchy. Drusus and Livia explicitly discuss Augustus as a monarch.

Blessed as Augustus

In the same episode, Julia wonders why her father puts up with the Senate at all, and Livia (Sian Phillips) replies that Augustus ‘observes the forms’ and that the Romans like to think they govern themselves. She’s exactly right about this, but it’s virtually the only hint the series gives about the historical Augustus’ strategy for governing. Julia’s response is that the younger generation don’t care about such things.

After Marcellus dies, a mob forms outside Augustus’ house. Livia confronts it, shouting “What do you want? The Republic? The Republic is all humbug!…You’re all crying for the moon!” Such a blatant statement that the Republic was dead was exactly the sort of thing that Augustus would not have permitted, and the historical Livia certainly understood that.

The Senate is treated as being a bunch of largely useless fools and in one scene Augustus’ wife Livia summons a senior senator and simply gives him orders. Since Livia had no official role in Roman government, the idea that she would boldly gives orders to key senators is rather improbable. Livia certainly was a powerful woman, and she took some of the work of governing off Augustus’ shoulders, but not in such a blunt and obvious way. That sort of disrespectful treatment of senators was exactly the sort of thing that Augustus knew he needed to avoid.

Phillips as Livia

Repeatedly, the good characters in I, Claudius talk about bringing back the Republic. Drusus is openly in favor of a Republic and encourages Augustus to retire. Postumus (John Castle) and Germanicus (David Robb) are both portrayed as favoring a return to the Republic, and Claudius (Derek Jacobi) consistently expresses Republican sentiments, including grooming his son Britannicus to lead an overthrown of Nero and restore the Republic. There’s absolutely no evidence that any of these men felt this way; it’s entirely the invention of Graves and the show’s screenwriters.

Much of the plot of the first third of the show revolves around the question of Augustus’ successor, and, as I noted, the series approaches this question as if it’s obvious that Augustus’ office will pass by simple hereditary succession following something like primogeniture. In the first episode, the order of succession is Marcellus (Augustus’ nephew and adopted son), followed by his sons Gaius and Lucius, and then Tiberius, the son of his wife. But actual Roman law was rather more complicated than that. Roman law made a man’s heirs his sons and daughters in equal shares, as well as his son’s children, but not his daughter’s children. But the law made no distinction between biological sons and adopted ones. So in fact, Tiberius was not in the line of inheritance at all, because he was not adopted by Augustus until 4 AD, after Marcellus, Gaius, and Lucius were all dead, whereas Julia would have been in the line of succession, had there been such a thing.

Jacobi as Young Claudius

I say ‘had there been such a thing’ because all of this assumes that the Principate was a form of property that would pass to Augustus’ heirs the way kingship would pass to a son. However, Augustus’ approach to governing involved denying that he held any special office. His governing powers were not rooted in a specific office but were rather cobbled together in an ad hoc fashion to meet his needs. There was no way to pass these powers on to an heir. This was, in fact, the biggest flaw in Augustus’ system. How could he pass on an office he couldn’t admit to holding? Over the course of his reign, Augustus’ solution to this was to build up a chosen man in prominence through office-holding and military service; then he adopted the man so that the man would inherit his wealth and his family name. So his strategy was to promote the man without explicitly designating him as a political successor. The problem that he encountered is that his chosen successors kept dying: Marcellus, Agrippa, Lucius, and Gaius. As we’ll discuss in a later post, Graves’ approach to this is that Livia was systematically murdering all of Augustus’ possible heirs until he finally settled on Tiberius, and then murdering anyone who might be an obstacle to that succession.

So the series’ approach to Augustus’ rule is mostly wrong. Perhaps his family might have privately spoken about Augustus as if he were a king, but they would certainly have known that he wasn’t a king and that his rule was based on a constitutional fiction that would collapse if it was openly discussed. Augustus’ system is hard to explain, and it’s understandable that the series decided to simplify it for the viewers, but they simplified it in a way that misrepresents how the system worked.

Want to Know More? 

I, Claudius is available on Amazon, as is the combined I, Claudius pair of novels by Graves.

There are many excellent biographies of Augustus. One good one is Adrian Goldsworthy’s Augustus.

Buying items through these links is one way to support this blog, since I get a small percentage of the sale. Another option to support me is to donate through Paypal. This series of posts was commissioned by someone who made a generous donation and asked me to review I, Claudius. So if there’s a film or tv show you’d liked to get my thoughts on, please donate and let me know what you’d like me to review.