While looking for something to watch on Netflix, we (Kai-Ling Su and Kate Scully) encountered a documentary series called Roman Empire. Each season follows a different famous Roman figure: the first tracks Commodus, the second, Julius Caesar, and the last, Caligula. As Julius Caesar has been featured in our recent class readings and in our Catiline Crisis game, we chose to watch the first episode of his season, which chronicles his time as a youth in the army and the beginning of his alliance with Pompey and Crassus.

We were interested in which aspects of his early life were included and which were left out. For example, his time as a curule aedile is completely omitted, as is his capture by pirates. While these episodes of his life are not crucial to understanding how he came to power, his execution of the pirates demonstrates his meticulousness and ruthlessness, and his fame as an aedile helps explain his popularity with Rome’s people. Leaving these out helps the documentary-makers tell a more streamlined story, but also omits events that would have helped reveal more about Caesar’s character and Roman society.

Similarly, we were intrigued by the differing degrees of sympathy the various figures were presented with. Caesar is very much the protagonist of the documentary, and is presented as  sympathetic in a number of ways. Chief among these is a focus on his care for his first wife Cornelia and his daughter Julia, as well as the inclusion of a scene in which he questions Crassus’ decision to crucify all of Spartacus’ followers (even if only because he believes it to be an economic waste). Pompey, on the other hand, is portrayed quite negatively, both in the way his actions are framed and in his mannerisms. This distinction occurs also on a visual level- while Caesar’s armor is close to the traditionally depicted red/silver, Pompey’s armor is all black. We found these characterizations especially interesting in light of the game. There’s an interesting contrast between the feeling of being a character, and having in-the-moment opinions about the rightness or wrongness of other characters actions, and this retroactive presentation of heroes and villains. Our own feelings about the characters of the game are shaped partially by our character’s relationship to them, and partially from our own understanding of who that person was, influenced in part by media such as Roman Empire.

We were thinking about the game particularly because one of us (Kate) plays Julius Caesar. In playing the game, we have reflected on how taking on the persona of a specific Roman has helped us more deeply understand and sympathize with that person, to the point where it can bias us in their favor. In portraying Caesar as the just and righteous protagonist, this documentary series does the same. We believe that it is crucial to engage with representations of the past critically: rather than take for granted that Caesar was in the right just because a documentary portrays him that way, we should think carefully about his actions, and come to our own conclusions about whether they were moral or just.

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#Rome On the Screen

We (Kai-Ling and Kate) were both intrigued by the clips of HBO’s Rome that we have been watching in class and as homework. To learn more about the show and the events it depicts, we watched the first episode. This episode introduces some of the key players of the show, both noble (Julius Caesar, Pompey, Octavian), and plebeian (the two centurions, Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus). We appreciated the inclusion of viewpoints from commonfolk, as historical media often focuses only on “great men.” While the show is clearly focused on a handful of male political figures, plebeian and womens’ voices are represented as well. 

We found the depiction of Atia, Octavia and Octavian’s mother, to be particularly interesting, as the kind of power she wields over her children in the show seems to almost approach patria potestas, by definition a level of power available only to men. Atia was able to manage and dictate every detail of her childrens’ lives: she decides that Octavia will divorce and remarry for greater political gain, and sends Octavian on a dangerous mission to curry favor with Julius Caesar. Octavia, while a more passive character in the first episode, is also able to use her sexuality and role as a woman to attempt to cement an alliance with Pompey. It is unclear to what extent Atia’s and Octavia’s actions are historically accurate (and many events in the show are fully fictionalized), but it was fascinating to see the ways in which women worked within a patriarchal system to gain power and agency for themselves and their families.

In terms of other themes from class, something that we took note of throughout the episode was the way the characters spoke about friends and friendship. Most notably, Pompey constantly referred to Caesar as his friend when speaking about him to other senators. The sense we got in these scenes was that only the more modern meaning of friendship as companionship was being invoked. At the end of the episode it is revealed that Pompey has been working against Caesar in several small ways, having orchestrated both the theft of Caesar’s standard and the waylaying of Octavian. This brought to mind for us the way Caesar himself would invoke the concepts of friendship at the start of the civil war, by claiming that his intentions in marching his army towards Rome were at least in part to reconcile with his friend Pompey. Overall, it was interesting to see how friendship was deployed as a political concept as well as a social and economic idea in the show.

Another, smaller, instance of a theme from class was an example of the discussion of citizenship from the beginning of the semester; when Octavian is rescued by Pullo and Vorenus, he invokes not only his relation to Caesar but also his citizenship, literally saying “I am a Roman citizen,” that is, civis romanus sum. While a small detail in the show, the use of the exact phrase, especially in a piece of media that takes many historical liberties, re-emphasised for us how much resonance the concept of citizenship represented by the phrase continues to have.

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#RomeOnTheScreen

A few weeks ago we (Anna, Kai-Ling, Kate, and a friend from outside this class) went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), and viewed several pieces depicting Roman events. While much of the art at the museum is from later periods of history, there were some wonderful tapestries showing various scenes in the life of Constantine. These tapestries were both instructive in Roman history and acted as examples of the beauty and intricacy of tapestry as an art form. We also saw one of the museum’s most striking pieces, a golden statue of the Roman goddess Diana prominently displayed at the top of a central staircase. 

We found the central placement of these artworks to be interesting: while many of the museum’s collections are concerned with later periods of history, the first pieces visitors will see are Roman in content. The placement of these artworks thus demonstrates Rome’s continued relevance in our institutions of art and culture. While this statue was created for a multi-story building in the 1930’s, we found it remarkable that a Roman deity maintains the literally high cultural placement she might have enjoyed in Ancient Rome so many years and miles away. The statue, having been removed from its placement in the Philadelphia skyline,now resides at the top of the Museums’ central hall and staircase, positioning her again as the deity in a sort of temple and certainly the focal point of the Museum’s most notable indoor space. Even the museum itself resembles a classical temple, though not specifically Roman, its architecture reinforces the primacy of the classical world in modern cultural thought. Likewise, the creation of the pieces itself brought to mind the fact that Rome was similarly seen as relevant in the time of the pieces’ creation, and that Rome has resonated throughout the past as well as in our present.

The friend who accompanied us had studied abroad in Rome, and was also able to remark on his experiences in modern-day Rome in contrast to our learning about ancient Rome. While he was able to see evidence of the continued presence of ancient Roman events and culture in both modern-day Rome and the PMA, he also commented on differences, and we were confronted by how much has been changed and lost across the centuries.

We were also inspired by the tapestries to think on textile work as an art form. Most textile work has traditionally been done by women: even in Roman theology it is Minerva, a goddess, who originated and oversaw tapestry work. Art forms typically undertaken by women have often been denigrated, but it is clear from the scale and detail in the PMA tapestries that such work required great skill and thousands of hours of painstaking work. Interestingly, while likely made exclusively by women, the tapestries depicted almost exclusively men (Constantine and his allies and enemies). Thus the tapestries acted almost as an allegory for broader conceptions of gender roles: the actions of “great men” made visible only through the painstaking labor of women who are themselves invisible and uncredited. Notably, many of these tapestries depicted the Roman armies in moments of great distress, highlighting their fallibility and suffering, rather than just the dramatic triumph or superhuman strength depictions of “great men” more often mythologize. 

Overall, we were struck by art’s ability to connect us to the past, even the very distant past. Given the primary cultural importance of ancient Greece and Rome, we were surprised at the PMA’s lack of actual classical artifacts or even collections but rather the presence of artworks and artifacts that reflect Rome’s ongoing legacy.  Viewing these tapestries and paintings prompted us to critically reflect on the ways in which these pieces were created, and how they have traveled through time and space to eventually be present in the museum with us.

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