Skip to main content

I Claudius



If you have never seen it, you should really try to watch an old TV series from the 1970’s called I Claudius. I Claudius was a BBC miniseries that I believe first made its appearance on American television on Masterpiece Theater. The series is based on the books I Claudius, and Claudius the God by Robert Graves and gives us a look inside the Roman Empire from the middle of the reign of Augustus through the reign of Claudius. The emperor Claudius was called Claudius the Stammerer, or Claudius the Idiot. A stammerer he was, but if we are to believe Graves, Claudius was no idiot.
We follow the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula (yes, that Caligula) and Claudius. Most histories about the early Roman Empire use Tacitus as their source. Tacitus was a man of facts, names and dates (though he was not above throwing in a cutting remark now and then. When Graves wrote I Claudius he based his novelization of this period on the writings of Suetonius. In contrast to Tacitus, Suetonius wrote about rumors, scandals and juicy gossip. It made his work very popular. So with I Claudius, we get all the dirt. We get the things they don’t tell you about in history books: affairs, secret assassinations, incest, poisonings, subterfuge, and various debaucheries. Sometimes the series is funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always fascinating.

One of the spectacular things about this series is the cast. It was the first time I had seen most of these actors, Derek Jacoby, Sian Phillips, Brian Blessed, Patrick Stewart, John Hurt, John Rhys-Davies, George Baker, to name a few. Because Claudius stammers when he speaks and walks with a limp, no one takes him seriously at court. And it is a dangerous court. Several of Claudius’s friends tell him to keep playing the fool because it is safer that way. Anyone related to the emperor (like Claudius) might find themselves mysteriously dead. Actually, it is not a mystery for the audience, as we know who is behind the deaths. It is Livia, the wife of Augustus, who was clearing the path for her son to become the next emperor. It would be a little bit like if Prince Phillip suddenly got the odd notion that he wanted Prince Andrew to be the next king of England, he would have to make sure that Charles, William and Harry and all their offspring died before the Queen did.

Livia is very good at getting what she wants. She is played with delicious evilness by Sian Phillips. One wonders if Geroge R.R. Martin used Livia as his model for Queen Cersei in the Game of Thrones books, Except that Livia is way smarter that Cersei, and more fun to watch.  I would say that it is worthwhile seeing the whole series just to watch Sian Phillips' performance, except that you could say the same thing about Brian Blessed who plays Augustus. Augustus is a dominant force for good while Livia is a dominant force for evil, but as in life, things are never black and white.

If you think political machinations in our own time are bad, we have nothing on the ancient Romans.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an e-book through Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Second Wind

  You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running.   In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...
1 comment
Read more

Roy Batty Figures it out

  This is written with the assumption that the reader has seen the film Blade Runner . If you haven’t, you may not get much out of it. In one of the last scenes in Blade Runner , the killer android Roy Batty, who holds Deckard’s life in his hands, has a remarkable speech: “I've seen things... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die.” I am told that the speech that was written was not working very well, and Rutger Hauer was told to just improvise something. Wow. He nailed it. At this point in the film Roy Batty has been the villain throughout. We have been rooting for Deckard (Harrison Ford) to take him out, but it is not going well, and it seems like Batty is about to kill him. At the last second, Roy Batty pulls Deckard up, to keep him from falling to his death. Then he delivers this...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...
1 comment
Read more