selenak

jI finished listening to the audio series Caesar!, written by Mike Walker, produced by the BBC, which has it's own wiki entry, starring a great bunch of actors including Anton Lesser as Cicero, David Tennant as Caliigula, Frances Barber as Agrippina the Younger, Andrew Garfield as Hadrian's lover Antinous and Tom Hiddleston as Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Western Emperors.

Some general observations:

- Walker thankfully does not exclude the women and sometimes gives them central focus - most of all in the episode "Empress of the West", which is about Victoria, played by Barbara Flynn, but, say, the Constantine episode ("Maker of All Things") has as much Fausta (his wife) and Helena (his mother) as it has Constantine and Crispus (his son).

- the first few episodes are based on Suetonius' "Life of the Caesars", but not uncritically so, as is most noticeable in the Caligula episode, Peeling Figs for Julius, about which more in a moment; Suetonius' himself shows up in the Hadrian episode, which is decidedly not based on his writings, and the later episodes for the post-Julian/Claudian Emperors seem take their cues mostly from the Historia Augusta

- Walker has a talent for using unexpected and interesting characters from the respective eras - I'm not bad in Roman history, but I had to look up several to check whether they really existed, which yes, turns out they did, like Julia Balbilla, female poet and companion to Hadrian's wife Sabina, or whether they really had a connection to the Emperor(s) in question (yes, Galen of medical history fame worked as a doctor for Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus)

- the fiirst few episodes have the obviious elephant in the room of how to not to be I, Claudius, given that Graves also used Suetonius as a main source, which is presumably why Claudius himself never shows up, but using George Baker as Tiberius for a scene in the Caligula episode was a nice casting gag anyway

- Walker gets around the fact that a lot of the rl people, especially the women, have identiical or similar names and complicated family connections by radically cutting down the cast; for example, the Caligula episode does not mention Caligula had any other siblings than Drusilla; neither his two older brothers nor the other three sisters make the cut, and in the next epsiode, which is about Nero, where Caligula's sister Agrippina is the other main character, the fact that she was his sister and the off stage's Claudius' niece is utterly unmentioned

- unexpected Latin is unexpected: it's really startling when Constantine for the first and last time in this series switches from English to Latin at the end of his episode, and very effective for what he says (more about this in a moment)

- while the actors in general are all very good, I make an exception for Jim Sturgess as Commodus in that his three scenes are all played on the same hysteric note; I mean, the script is enough to indicate just how unstable Commodus is anyway, Sturgess, less is more, and I'm glad the episode in question actually belongs to power couple Septimius Severus (Ray Fearon) and Julia Domma (Helen McCrory).

- other than in the very first episode where the Republic still exists, not a single character, be they good, neutral or terrible, later on wants to restore the Republic, thank the Olympic Gods (it works in I, Claudius, but it does not work in all the subsequent films, books, movies, and by the time Gladiator had Marcus Aurelius of all the people express a desire of Republic restoration I was ready to scream, so THANK YOU, Walker, for not using that ploy to make the characters sympathetic to a modern audience

- all the more so because the episodes still show that the Principate might have been historically inevitable but was still way too much power for any person, including the "good" Emperors, to have.

Incidentally, in terms of the three (among those the series focuses on) with the worst historic reputation - Caligula, Nero and Commodus - Walker only goes with Commodus as actually bonkers. His Caligula episodes focuses on young Gaius, who as opposed to Graves' version but in tune with Camus' drama doesn't start out as a young monster already, and basically is presented as made into one by the combination of traumatic childhood and adolescence, way too much power therafter and death of his single greatest emotional support (i.e. sister Drusilla); the episode stops shortly after Drusilla's death (in this version, definitely not Caligula's fault), when he gives his first evil orders, actually going through with things he was only joking about before, and it's presented as nihilism rather than psychosis. For Nero, Walker goes with "more sinned against than sinning", i.e. the clever but power-hungry and sexually abusive mother is the main culprit for character problems. Nero - who narrates the episode from a point shortly before his death - isn't the one responsible for the famous fire (which btw is something the current day historians I've read seem to agree on), and the episode only mentions but doesn't show the deaths of Octavia and Poppea, dito for the scapegoating of the Christians because "it just happened" is not a good explanation when people want someone to blame. The various failed attempts to kill his mother, otoh, are played out for all the black comedy the source material provides, before it finally happens, and the next episode (Hadrian) opens with Suetonius (who is a main character in that episode) being told he was being unfair with his "Nero was the worst" portrayal, so I think it's safe to say that Mike Walker agrees with Nero that if they'd only let him be an actor as he wanted, both he and the world would have been far better off.

The other episode which features an Emperor kililng his nearest and dearest is the last but one, with Constantine doing it in a variation of the Phaedra and Hippolytos story: his wife Fausta keeps flirting with stepson Crispus, Crispus eventually turns her down, Fausta retaliates by claiming he raped her, Constantine has first Crispus and then after learning the truth Fausta killed. That's another thing I had to look up, but sure enough, even Fausta's method of execution (hot bath, boiled alive) is in the source material. Here, the emotional tone is very different: it's presented as a tragedy, and as the true reason for Constantine (whose mother is Christian, but who is still wavering himself) to decide to really become a Christian because he needs someone to forgive him the unforgivable.

Speaking of the unforgivable: the Hadrian episode picks the mystery of Antinous' death. The source material offers mainly two different versions, which only share the element of him drowning in the Nile when travelling in Egypt with the Emperor. Some ancient writers say Antinous offered his death so Hadrian, who was sick, could live longer; the centuries later written Historia Augusta, presenting the relationship far darker, says Antinous committed suicide because Hadrian kept making sexual demands on him he wanted to leave behind. Walker goes for a combination; Antinous sees himself as too old for the erastes/eromenos relationship he has with Hadrian and feels that Hadrian won't let him be a man instead of a boy, and coming to the conclusion this will never change while also feeling incapable of just leaving commits suicide, but it turns out in a devastating twist he's actually been tricked into it because Egyptian priest X told Hadrian he could live longer if Antinous out of his own free will dies because of him. This is also presented as the reason why Suetonius - who is the main pov character of the episode - in the end burns his biography of Hadrian, considering it a lie, and not wanting to give him the kind of immortality writers provide as well.

Manipulation in general is presented as a neutral virtue; Victoria in her episode basically creates the breakaway Gallic Empire with it, by turning what Emperor Galienus means as a humiliating exile for her into an advantage, and effectively through her verbal and emotional skills making three Emperors in a row (Postumus, Marius and her son Victorinus). Note she doesn't have sex with any of them. Otoh, being a good talker has its limits, as Orestes finds out in the last episode; he's doing well as Attila's secretary, smoothtalks his way into a some major positions from there, but making his kid son the next (and last) Western Emperor proves to be the one thing too many, since he has neither enough cash nor military power to make it work against the oncoming forces of history. That young Romulus survives, unlike so many other deposed Emperors, is also a sign that the (Western part of the) Empire does not, and that was more than due.

Walker's picks of Emperors don't leave with with a sense of linear decline - for example, the Empire already hits rock bottom in the scene near the end of "Citizens of a Great City" where the Praetorians literally hold an auction in the Senate to sell the position of Emperor after Commodus has been killed - it's this more than anything else that makes Septimius Severus decide to do what hasn't happened since the late Republic and lead his army against Rome. And the next episode, "Empress of the West", deals with the formation of the breakaway "Gallic Empire". But then we get Constantine, who rules over a once more united Empire, with the position of Emperor having regained its power; at the same time, enough people mention in dialogue that there are just too many different people under Roman rule at this point, and the army is mostly made up of them now, so that the end of the Western Roman Emperors and the success of the former "Barbarians" in conquering Italy in the last episode is not surprising at all even if you don't know your history. Since Romulus Augustulus is basically a nice kid (sixteen at the end) who miraculously survives and for whom not being Emperor anymore is actually a salvation from the warping that happened to all the other men and women of the series who made it to the top, I thought Hiddleston was a bit wasted in the role, and wondered whether it wouldn't have been better to switch him and Sturgess (i.e. let Hiddleston play Commodus and Sturgess Romulus, but overall, this is really just a minor complaint. It's a great production to listen to.

Favourite trivia worked in: it's a tie between people calilng young Caligula "Bootsie" (which is what the "Caligula" nickname means, and why it was given to him when he was a child with his father's army in Germania) and everyone teasing Suetonius about his books "Lives of the Famous Whores" (subsequently lost) being the one he'll always be most known for.