What is "I, Claudius"? It has been called the greatest series ever ("Brideshead Revisited," step aside) - BBC series, that is. Derek Jacobi as Claudius, John Hurt as Caligula and the electrifying Brian Blessed as Augustus, it is the story of a few Caesars after Julius and the Triumvirate, that classic era familiar to all who have taken a semester of Latin . Told in 13 parts in 1976, I'm on part 8.
We are set down in the relatively calm, noble era of Augustus in the first Episodes. Roman politics are expeditious, but relatively sane and wholesome compared to what would come. The nemesis is Livia, Augustus' wife, who is so bent on promoting her own children to the throne (she is Augustus' second wife and has a brood from the first marriage) that she kills off much of her family and much of Augustus', mostly by poison. Our humble narrator, Claudius, slowly rises in importance as the moral tenor of the emporership degrades during the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula.
So it made me think, god how fucked up can people be? And how much more civilized are we now? What does it take to get us to start offing our family and loved ones, throwing over girlfriends, children, mothers for the sake of personal glory? How can I relate this to my personal life? I doubt I will ever kill anyone in my family, nor know anyone who will. Such are rare enough crimes that they are usually headline news. What to ascribe such things to? Well, I may be getting ahead of myself, this is fiction after all and Suetonius and the other historians of this era are presumably not above spicing up their tales to move scrolls off the shelves.
I respond to the issues of accumulated bitterness throughout life, betrayals that reverberate, though the consequences of my own are on a far smaller scale, to be sure. I suppose once you decide to start murdering those, in an atmosphere where you can get away with it, that stand in the way of your vanities, it becomes a small thing. Yet so much of our self-identity is based on morality: I am worthy because I respect, because I do good, because I do unto other, that's why they will do unto me and make my life worthwhile, etc.
I am given new respect for the BBC: in 1976, few punches were pulled in terms of revealing rather sordid and objectionable aspects of family politics here.
Many of the characters age decades in this series and the makeup is utterly convincing. This was a real wow. To see a virile 40-year old Tiberius become a splotchy, degraded septuagenarian on death's door was just par for the course: Augustus, Livia and Claudius aged with miraculous verisimulitude as well.
This was shot on video, 1976-era video: strong light sources left trails behind them on pans, color palette was quite limited, etc. And the shooting was exclusively indoors on sets that were cheap by today's standards. All this mattered not a whit after the first few minutes of adjustment: the drama is so strong it leaps through the gauzy scrim of 3/4" tape that has probably not aged too well.
The overriding theme is ambition. To taste the power of emperorship. One that I cannot strongly identify with, to be absolutely honest. Once I owned my own home, my material covetousness plummeted alarmingly. I have 1000 sunfilled square feet - any more wouldn't make me any happier, that seems certain. So perhaps it is about attention, affirmation. These were certainly generations whose parents were too busy politicking to raise them properly, leaving them in the hands of nannies and placing cruel limitations on their identities: marriages and careers were arranged for children for political reasons, not personal. Can you imagine? If it's true as our era believes that parental neglect leaves a major mark on our future development, then I have no hope of identifying: I've been spoiled and coddled by comparison. We all have. But maybe that was part of the whole mechanism: leave them wanting as children, so that when they grow up they still have an empty mot-love piggybank to fill up with driving will-to-power, which will make the family safer, bring them up higher.
In a poor society, which every one was back then, the stakes were higher: to fall from grace could so easily mean to fall all the way: to starvation. So discipline was intensely enforced, finer emotions an obstacle to staying in favor with those in power. So was the society back then truly less advanced than ours? Are today's routine genuflections and politeness of a superior grade - more conducive to peacefull living in a community of hundreds of millions? Or is the lesson more narrowly about the mores of the few who seek the ultimate pinnacle - that they self-select for characters that value power over scruples? I'm sure if I studied more philosophy in college I would have more fluent answers to these questions...
Posted by marstall at May 31, 2004 03:58 AM