November 10, 2024

When the Roman Empire is your Roman Empire

Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where Talia and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.
— David Swanson

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In the Spring of 2000, six months before a presidential election that would rattle America’s foundations and alter its trajectory, Ridley Scott unleashed “Gladiator.” Starring Russell Crowe as general-turned-brawler Maximus, the film was lauded by critics and the public alike, cleaning up at the Oscars and kicking off a wave of Rome-mania. Over the last year or so, as we’ve been living through another nightmare election season, Roman fever has returned, and it’s about to crest with the release of “Gladiator II.”

Last fall, in the wake of a viral TikTok video, a New York Times headline posed the question: “Are Men Obsessed With the Roman Empire?” The answer turned out to “yes.” The reasons proffered included basic nerdiness, an increased preoccupation with masculinity, and the precarious state of the American empire. While I plead guilty to the first and third reasons, in my case there’s another: it’s a comfort and distraction in a time when I’m desperate for both.

“Gladiator II” is set right around the time that most historians date the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire, a topic I’ve been thinking and reading about a lot in the last few weeks, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with Scott’s new movie. My fascination with the subject began in college when I discovered The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius—a battered paperback edition translated by Robert Graves—and has ebbed and flowed over the decades, through histories, movies, novels, articles, and travel.

At the moment I’m working my way through English writer Tom Holland’s trilogy of books about the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire. I’m also in the midst of a rewatch of “Rome,” HBO’s bravura period epic from the early 2000s, and have recently returned to some of the classic sword-and-sandals extravaganzas from Hollywood’s GoldenCAge: “Spartacus,” “Ben Hur,” “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” “Quo Vadis.” As entertainment, they haven't aged particularly well, but this week they’ve provided some intangible relief.

What really interests me is the history, so ahead of “Gladiator II,” I thought I’d put together a short pop culture syllabus of ancient Rome. By pop culture I mean that these picks are ostensibly fictional portraits of an empire that spanned continents and centuries. 

If you want non-fiction, go back to the sources: The Twelve Caesars, which recounts the reigns of every ruler from Julius Caesar through Domitian in such salacious detail you may need a shower after reading it; Plutarch’s life of Julius Caesar; Caesar’s own accounts of his campaigns in Gaul; and the Annals and Histories by Tacitus. As for the end of things, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the standard. (If you’re anything like me, however, you’ll content yourself with an abridged edition—the original runs to seven volumes.)

If these older histories feel too stodgy and it’s contemporary non-fiction you’re looking for, I’m finding Holland’s trilogy both informative and wildly entertaining. Much like fellow popular historians Mary Beard and Adrian Goldsworth, Holland deftly renders complex political intrigue, and depicts the broader Roman world in all its seedy, earthy glory. I’d recommend the work of all three. 

But we’re here to discuss fiction. The below recommendations include what I think are the best works of popular culture about ancient Rome from across the media spectrum: literature, film, theater, television. History moves linearly, so I’ve organized these selections in roughly chronological order, split into four different eras, and ending with “Gladiator II”. (Like a lot people—Shakespeare included—I’m most interested in the first era, when the Republic fell and the Empire rose.) 

At worst the works below should offer the entertainment and distraction you need. And at best, they’ll spark an interest that sends you to Holland and Beard, and then pulls you back further to Suetonius and Plutarch. The Roman Empire was so sprawling as to encompass innumerable historical precedents and parallels for the present, and to warrant countless perspectives on its story. That’s why its attraction has never really waned, and why over two millennia after Octavian became Augustus, we’re still thinking about the Roman Empire.

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The Decline of the Roman Republic
The Roman Republic’s foundation is usually dated to 509 and the overthrow of Tarquinus Superbus, the final king in a monarchy stretching back to Romulus. Between then and the fall of the Republic almost half a century later, the small city on the seven hills grew to become a global power. While contemporary accounts of the first 400 years of that stretch have been scanty, the final century is among the most well documented periods in ancient history.

Masters of Rome 
Set: 110-27 BC
After conquering best-seller lists with The Thorn Birds, Australian author Colleen McCullough turned her gaze back in time with this seven-volume series, which opens with the rise of Gaius Marius in 110 B.C. Post-Suetonius, this was my introduction to the warlike Romans whose compulsion towards power paved the way for Julius Caesar—Marius, Sulla, and Pompey—as well as other figures whose import has been obscured in the glare of Caesar’s glory, like Clodius, Catiline, Crassus, and Cato. Meticulously researched and propulsively readable, McCullough’s books highlight the crucial role the women of Rome played in the political skullduggery that rocked the city for a century. 

“Spartacus” 
Set: c. 73 BC
Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic paved the way for “Gladiator,” and unlike other classic sword-and-sandal epics like “Ben Hur” and “Quo Vadis”—fictional tales in historic settings—”Spartacus” is based on an actual events, Tony Curtis’s Brooklyn accent notwithstanding. It’s a story of gladiatorial revolution that has inspired numerous works, including a fun Showtime series that nevertheless failed to reach the heights of HBO’s “Rome,” which arrived on screens several years earlier.

Cicero Trilogy
Set: 79-43 BC
A decade before he wrote the Vatican potboiler Conclave—coming to movie theaters this fall in a big-screen adaptation—Robert Harris told the story of Rome’s greatest orator through the voice of his personal secretary. As Tom Holland wrote in a Times review, Harris’s books tap into “what is perhaps the supreme fascination of ancient Rome: the degree to which it is at once ­eerily like our own world and yet profoundly alien.” 

“Rome”
Set: 49-31 BC
Emboldened by the success of shows such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City, HBO swung for the fences with this blockbuster epic featuring all our favorites: Caesar, Brutus, Calpurnia, Marc Antony, Cleopatra, Cicero, Octavian. The primary protagonists are Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, a pair of Roman centurions who Caesar mentioned briefly in his personal writings. Here they’ve been given the Rosencantz and Gildenstern treatment and taken center stage, bringing viewers into the bowels of plebeian Rome, which we seldom see in more elevated tellings. Sadly, the series only lasted two season, but you can see the bones of HBO’s Game of Thrones in its scope and ambition.

“Julius Caesar”
Set: 46-44 BC
Based on the work of Plutarch, Shakespeare’s historical tragedy has become so embedded in popular culture that it’s difficult to tease out the fact from the fiction. So brilliant and sturdy are the bards’s words that “Julius Caesar” still resonates today: a 2017 production in Central Park depicting a contemporary, Trumpian Caesar was met with outrage. We’ll see if there are any upcoming revivals in the future, but for now it’s worth revisiting the 1953 version starring Marlon Brando as Marc Antony. 

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The Julio-Claudian Dynasty
In my opinion, no contemporary depiction of the Roman Empire’s first century compares to the classical works by Suetonius and Tacitus. Frankly, the heights of depravity achieved by Caligula, Nero, and the rest is so outrageous as to beggar believe—which is probably why no one has really taken a shot at it since 1977’s porny “Caligula,” starring Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren. The works of historical fiction included here, in contrast, take readers into the minds of two of the emperors rather than the bedrooms.

Augustus 
Set: 50 BC
This epistolary novel by John Williams, which won the 1973 National Book Award, charts the life and career of arguably the most consequential figure in Rome’s history. “The portrait Augustus creates, refracted through not only (invented) letters but also journal entries, senatorial decrees, military orders, private notes, and unfinished histories,” Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in The New York Review of Books, “is at once satisfyingly complex and appropriately impressionistic, subjective.” 

I, Claudius 
Set: 41-54 AD
The BBC miniseries, starring a murderers row of Shakespearian actors, may have been a sensation when it aired in 1976, but it’s aged in a way that the 1932 novel by Robert Graves on which it’s based has not. According to “Sopranos” creator David Chase, who called it one of his favorite books, “when you're reading it, you want to go there every day. You want to follow events there, instead of the ones in your own life.”

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Pax Romana
As the Gladiator-mad Romans knew all too well, when it comes to popular entertainment, blood and discord are a lot more popular than peace and tranquility. Maybe that’s why there have been so few enduring depictions of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty, whose so-called “Five Good Emperors” gave the empire a century of order and prosperity. Still, there have been a few: after the success of “Gladiator,” which starts at the end of this Golden Age, Hollywood released two forgotten features—”Centurion,” starring Michael Fassbender, and “The Eagle,” starring Channing Tatum—as well as the the Netflix Series “Those About to Die,” which debuted last summer and stars Anthony Hopkins as emperor Vespasian.

Memoirs of Hadrian
Set: 70 AD
Written in the form of letters from emperor Hadrian to his adopted son Marcus Aurelius, Marguerite Yourcenar’s revered epistolary novel is “a kind of trans-historical miracle,” wrote Joan Acocella in the New Yorker. “If you want to know what ‘ancient Roman’ really means, in terms of war and religion and love and parties, read Memoirs of Hadrian.”

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The Decline and Fall
Things fall apart, even things as seemingly durable as the Roman Empire. Though its ultimate demise has been pegged to a number of dates—the Western Empire collapsed in 476, but the Byzantine empire lasted for another millennia—the transition from the enlightened rule of Marcus Aurelius to the despotic one of his psychopathic son Commodus is usually deemed the beginning of the end. It’s where Gibbon begins his story, but if that’s too heavy a tome to tackle, these movies at least give viewers a taste of things.

The Fall of the Roman Empire 
Set: 180-190 AD
This 1964 costume extravaganza, starring Alex Guiness as Marcus Aurelius, Christopher Plummer as Commodus, and Sofia Lauren as Lucilla, might as well have been called “The Fall of the Hollywood Epic,” so emphatically did it bomb with audiences (it actually bankrupted the producer.) I still have some affection for it, especially Plummer’s chewy performance. The plot is so close to that of “Gladiator” that it must have been an inspiration. 

”Gladiator”
Set: 180 AD
While it is set in the same milieu at “The Fall…,” Ridley Scott’s telling veers even further from the historical record. This is a Hollywood blockbuster, not a history lesson: the New York Times review said it “suggests what would happen if someone made a movie of the imminent extreme-football league and shot it as if it were a Chanel commercial.” Like lots of successful movies, it inspired a wave of inferior imitators, but that’s just a testament to its thrills.

Gladiator II 
Set: 212 AD
Out November 22, this sequel to “Gladiator” is set two decades later, with Paul Mescal starring as Lucius, the Coliseum-bound son of Maximus. Connie Nielson returns as Lucilla, the real-life daughter of Marcus Aurelius, and the on-screen mother of the fictional Lucious. I haven’t seen it yet, but based on the trailer, Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger as co-emperors Geta and Caracalla deliver performances every bit as deranged as Joaquin Phoenix’s psycho turn as Commodus in the original.