Gender, Friendship, and Citizenship in HBO’s Rome
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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