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selenakAs cahn, who asked me this, guessed, said show would definitely be inspired/partially based on Lion Feuchtwanger's trilogy of novels about the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus/Joseph ben Matthias. But not exclusively, not least because there are aspects of the Flavian era which don't show up (Pompeii, for starters), got downplayed (Vespasian's life partner, the freedwoman Caenis, who used to be the slave of Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and mother of (I ,) Claudius, does show up in the first novel, but you could do far more with her than Feuchtwanger does), or are hardly mentioned (for example, an adolescent trauma each for Titus and Domitian respectively; Titus was childhood or teenage friends with Claudius' son Britannicus and was in fact present and supposedly co-poisoned at the dinner where Nero poisoned Britannicus and made everyone continue eating, and Domitian was present and in Rome in the year of the four Emperors, as opposed to his father and brother who were in Judaea and Egypt, and barely escaped with his life when Vitellius was Emperor, as opposed to his uncle, Vespasian's brother Titus Sabienus, who led the "Vespasian for Emperor" campaign in Rome).
Still, Joseph(us) is an ideal main character for a show covering the time between the last Nero years, when the Julio-Claudian dynasty ends and after that violent interludium of year the Flavian one starts, and the death of Domitian. He's an interesting person in his own right, he's a historian and thus with a good excuse to either be present or research about most of the key events in these years, though the opposite of an easy hero (extremely simplified, because of the "from resistance fighter to collaborator" development), and because his pov is that of basically three different worlds - the Jewish one, the Hellenistic one and the Roman one - often in great opposition to each other which he tries to bridge and yet is also at odds with - , you get a very different kind of story as if you either just go for the ruling family soap opera, or do what Lindsey Davies did with her highly entertaining Falco series, i.e. fictional mysteries set during Vespasian's reign with a deliberate parody of the noir template, in which our detective hero and his beloved are on the trail of villainy first in Rome and Britain and then all over the Roman Empire. (While fictional Falco hails from a plebeian family, he's still a Roman from Rome - just at a time where "born in Rome" slowly but surely stops being a criteria for "being a Roman", no less.) (BTW: I would love a film series based on the Falco novels as well, of course.) Joseph is both an outsider who experiences the human cost of Empire first hand, and an insider has a close up and personal view on the Flavians, and through him, you can connect storylines of a great variety of people who otherwise are hardly going to encounter each other.
Other tv series friendly elements offered by the Flavians:
- Game of Thrones happens literally in the first seaon as the Flavians come to power in the year of the Four Emperors, and since Vespasian was the Dark Horse candidate (Joseph(us) made a gamble there when declaring himther Messiah the next Emperor after being captured), you can milk a lot of suspense out of that (especially if teen Domitian in Rome gets his own subplot)
- These are the guys who build the Colloseum (i.e the "Flavian Theatre"), to give it its official name) and inaugurate it in a 200 something days of games marathon, so Gladiator obsessives will get their part of choreographed violence
- Vespasian dies a natural death in old age, Titus dies of a sickness, but not least due to a lot of ancient writers hating his little brother's guts, you have enough of them side-eying Domitian to justify a murder mystery plot if you want to do one; Domitian definitely was assassinated, so you can go all Ides of March and do a tense conspiracy story there
- interesting women! Caenis I already mentioned, Berenice the Jewish princess whose affair with Titus is so open to a gazillion interpretations (politics? actual love? mutual benefits? all of the above?) and who is someone I've yet to encounter a fictional counterpart off that really satisfies me (the first of Feuchtwanger's Josephus novels comes closest, but then alas there's the second one where he doesn't handle her as well), Domitia Longina (who in Feuchtwanger's novels is called Lucia), the wife of Domitian and supposedly the only person never afraid of him, despite a temporary exile after an affair she had with an actor (Domtiian couldn't live without her and called her back)
- incest! Domitian supposedly had an affair with Titus' daughter Julia after refusing to marry her while Titus according to master of sensationalistic gossip Suetonius could have had a fling with Domitian's wife near the end of his (i.e. Titus') life
- competence! Here you have that oddity, a whole dynasty (since Domitian was the last Flavian on the throne) where not a single member was actually born into the purple amd were actually working Emperors; Vespasian had to clean up the whole mess left behind by Nero and the three short lived Emperors in between and stablize the Roman Empire again, Titus was essentially co-Emperor already during Vespasian's time and in his own short rule had to cope with three natural disasters in a row, including Pompeii, and Domitian may have been a creepy tyrant, but he was a competent creepy tyrant who pushed through the biggest building programm since decades (not just in Rome itself, either) and managed a balanced economy for most of his reign
- doomed rebellions and heartbreaking sieges (in Judea, of course) (I mean, Masada got its own extra tv series already) (with a final successful conspiracy when Domitian gets killed)
- some of the best known ancient writers in addition to Josephus are around (Suetoniius, Martial, Tacitus, Pliny the older and Pliny the younger), and "how to be a writer in a dictatorship" is an eternally challenging question
All of which offers enough material for five seasons at least, especially in this day and age when seasons are no longer 22 episodes long but only eight or six per season. I think old age make up should be up to aging everyone through the years (especially Josephus, who will be around the entire time), though if we do flashbacks to teenage Titus during the murder of equally teenage Britannicus, there needs to be an actual young actor, and Domitian in s1 should look young enough that it's clear he is still in his teens then, so possibly also another young actor than main Domitian who needs to be around till the end as well. Caenis can be a great role for a middle-aged or older actress, and very refreshingly, Berenice is canonically older than Titus when they meet, so no actress in her early 20s/ actor in his 40s or older pairing here. Depending on how much the series draws on Feuchtwanger, controvery is guaranteed, because a great deal of the Josephus trilogy ponders what it means to be Jewish and whether that meaning can change (or not) in the diaspora, and whether or not revolting against a greater military power whom you know will respond with devastating force can be justified. But that's what makes the books so captivating and if the writing of the show is up for it, it might be the same.
Expensive: very, given that not only do you need to show ancient Rome but also ancient Judea and ancient Alexandria in Egypt, and depending on how much you want to include events there, ancient Britain and ancient Germania. Otoh, I, Claudius solved the problem of a small budget by having everyone in costume but no sweeping landscape shots whatsoever (or battles, or gladiator fight scenes - we see what's going on from the reactions of the main characters who are among the audience whenever something takes place during the games), and GCI can do so much these days; it should be workeable.
Fan favourites: party, this depends on the actors. You need a really good one for Joseph(us), and if he's also handsome, I think early fandom will pair him with Titus (and again, depending on how much Feuchtwanger the show includes, definitely with his frenemy and rival Justus of Tiberia), but I'm pretty sure he'll never be the favourite, and will frequently be the cause of long rants early on, though later will secure a kind of "no one's first but many people's second or third favourite" fondness. Teen and young Domitian might get a lot of woobie sympathy if people consider him ill done by because Dad and Big Bro don't take him that seriously and are such a working team that they exclude him, but I don't think that will survive once he actually gets into power, because even if the show goes all revisionist on Domitian he's still going to do a lot of less than palpable things in a slow, methodical way instead of flamboyant craziness. At the latest when he's ordering the first Vestal in over a century to be killed for having had sex in the traditional gruesome way, he'll be out of favour. I'm betting on his wife as an overall favourite, because fearless ladies who have a sex life they themselves choose and don't end up dead or (permanently) exiled, have the All Powerful guy of the show be often putty in their hands and who are alive and well at the end of the story deserve to be.
The other days
cahn, who asked me this, guessed, said show would definitely be inspired/partially based on Lion Feuchtwanger's trilogy of novels about the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus/Joseph ben Matthias. But not exclusively, not least because there are aspects of the Flavian era which don't show up (Pompeii, for starters), got downplayed (Vespasian's life partner, the freedwoman Caenis, who used to be the slave of Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and mother of (I ,) Claudius, does show up in the first novel, but you could do far more with her than Feuchtwanger does), or are hardly mentioned (for example, an adolescent trauma each for Titus and Domitian respectively; Titus was childhood or teenage friends with Claudius' son Britannicus and was in fact present and supposedly co-poisoned at the dinner where Nero poisoned Britannicus and made everyone continue eating, and Domitian was present and in Rome in the year of the four Emperors, as opposed to his father and brother who were in Judaea and Egypt, and barely escaped with his life when Vitellius was Emperor, as opposed to his uncle, Vespasian's brother Titus Sabienus, who led the "Vespasian for Emperor" campaign in Rome). Still, Joseph(us) is an ideal main character for a show covering the time between the last Nero years, when the Julio-Claudian dynasty ends and after that violent interludium of year the Flavian one starts, and the death of Domitian. He's an interesting person in his own right, he's a historian and thus with a good excuse to either be present or research about most of the key events in these years, though the opposite of an easy hero (extremely simplified, because of the "from resistance fighter to collaborator" development), and because his pov is that of basically three different worlds - the Jewish one, the Hellenistic one and the Roman one - often in great opposition to each other which he tries to bridge and yet is also at odds with - , you get a very different kind of story as if you either just go for the ruling family soap opera, or do what Lindsey Davies did with her highly entertaining Falco series, i.e. fictional mysteries set during Vespasian's reign with a deliberate parody of the noir template, in which our detective hero and his beloved are on the trail of villainy first in Rome and Britain and then all over the Roman Empire. (While fictional Falco hails from a plebeian family, he's still a Roman from Rome - just at a time where "born in Rome" slowly but surely stops being a criteria for "being a Roman", no less.) (BTW: I would love a film series based on the Falco novels as well, of course.) Joseph is both an outsider who experiences the human cost of Empire first hand, and an insider has a close up and personal view on the Flavians, and through him, you can connect storylines of a great variety of people who otherwise are hardly going to encounter each other.
Other tv series friendly elements offered by the Flavians:
- Game of Thrones happens literally in the first seaon as the Flavians come to power in the year of the Four Emperors, and since Vespasian was the Dark Horse candidate (Joseph(us) made a gamble there when declaring him
- These are the guys who build the Colloseum (i.e the "Flavian Theatre"), to give it its official name) and inaugurate it in a 200 something days of games marathon, so Gladiator obsessives will get their part of choreographed violence
- Vespasian dies a natural death in old age, Titus dies of a sickness, but not least due to a lot of ancient writers hating his little brother's guts, you have enough of them side-eying Domitian to justify a murder mystery plot if you want to do one; Domitian definitely was assassinated, so you can go all Ides of March and do a tense conspiracy story there
- interesting women! Caenis I already mentioned, Berenice the Jewish princess whose affair with Titus is so open to a gazillion interpretations (politics? actual love? mutual benefits? all of the above?) and who is someone I've yet to encounter a fictional counterpart off that really satisfies me (the first of Feuchtwanger's Josephus novels comes closest, but then alas there's the second one where he doesn't handle her as well), Domitia Longina (who in Feuchtwanger's novels is called Lucia), the wife of Domitian and supposedly the only person never afraid of him, despite a temporary exile after an affair she had with an actor (Domtiian couldn't live without her and called her back)
- incest! Domitian supposedly had an affair with Titus' daughter Julia after refusing to marry her while Titus according to master of sensationalistic gossip Suetonius could have had a fling with Domitian's wife near the end of his (i.e. Titus') life
- competence! Here you have that oddity, a whole dynasty (since Domitian was the last Flavian on the throne) where not a single member was actually born into the purple amd were actually working Emperors; Vespasian had to clean up the whole mess left behind by Nero and the three short lived Emperors in between and stablize the Roman Empire again, Titus was essentially co-Emperor already during Vespasian's time and in his own short rule had to cope with three natural disasters in a row, including Pompeii, and Domitian may have been a creepy tyrant, but he was a competent creepy tyrant who pushed through the biggest building programm since decades (not just in Rome itself, either) and managed a balanced economy for most of his reign
- doomed rebellions and heartbreaking sieges (in Judea, of course) (I mean, Masada got its own extra tv series already) (with a final successful conspiracy when Domitian gets killed)
- some of the best known ancient writers in addition to Josephus are around (Suetoniius, Martial, Tacitus, Pliny the older and Pliny the younger), and "how to be a writer in a dictatorship" is an eternally challenging question
All of which offers enough material for five seasons at least, especially in this day and age when seasons are no longer 22 episodes long but only eight or six per season. I think old age make up should be up to aging everyone through the years (especially Josephus, who will be around the entire time), though if we do flashbacks to teenage Titus during the murder of equally teenage Britannicus, there needs to be an actual young actor, and Domitian in s1 should look young enough that it's clear he is still in his teens then, so possibly also another young actor than main Domitian who needs to be around till the end as well. Caenis can be a great role for a middle-aged or older actress, and very refreshingly, Berenice is canonically older than Titus when they meet, so no actress in her early 20s/ actor in his 40s or older pairing here. Depending on how much the series draws on Feuchtwanger, controvery is guaranteed, because a great deal of the Josephus trilogy ponders what it means to be Jewish and whether that meaning can change (or not) in the diaspora, and whether or not revolting against a greater military power whom you know will respond with devastating force can be justified. But that's what makes the books so captivating and if the writing of the show is up for it, it might be the same.
Expensive: very, given that not only do you need to show ancient Rome but also ancient Judea and ancient Alexandria in Egypt, and depending on how much you want to include events there, ancient Britain and ancient Germania. Otoh, I, Claudius solved the problem of a small budget by having everyone in costume but no sweeping landscape shots whatsoever (or battles, or gladiator fight scenes - we see what's going on from the reactions of the main characters who are among the audience whenever something takes place during the games), and GCI can do so much these days; it should be workeable.
Fan favourites: party, this depends on the actors. You need a really good one for Joseph(us), and if he's also handsome, I think early fandom will pair him with Titus (and again, depending on how much Feuchtwanger the show includes, definitely with his frenemy and rival Justus of Tiberia), but I'm pretty sure he'll never be the favourite, and will frequently be the cause of long rants early on, though later will secure a kind of "no one's first but many people's second or third favourite" fondness. Teen and young Domitian might get a lot of woobie sympathy if people consider him ill done by because Dad and Big Bro don't take him that seriously and are such a working team that they exclude him, but I don't think that will survive once he actually gets into power, because even if the show goes all revisionist on Domitian he's still going to do a lot of less than palpable things in a slow, methodical way instead of flamboyant craziness. At the latest when he's ordering the first Vestal in over a century to be killed for having had sex in the traditional gruesome way, he'll be out of favour. I'm betting on his wife as an overall favourite, because fearless ladies who have a sex life they themselves choose and don't end up dead or (permanently) exiled, have the All Powerful guy of the show be often putty in their hands and who are alive and well at the end of the story deserve to be.
The other days
no subject
Date: 2025-01-21 10:12 pm (UTC)I have no relevant icon. Will have to go for Cicero, as I'm still holding out for a TV drama on Cicero.
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Date: 2025-01-22 10:38 am (UTC)(BTW, I haven't read said trilogy, though I've read other novels, so I couldn't tell you how good or bad it is, but it's definitely popular.)
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Date: 2025-01-22 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-22 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-22 05:09 am (UTC)Wait, Pompeii was during this time?! Yup, would not have figured that from Feuchtwanger :P Also, YES to MORE CAENIS :D
Domitian definitely was assassinated, so you can go all Ides of March and do a tense conspiracy story there
Yes please! :D (I loved the Feuchtwanger take...)
incest! Domitian supposedly had an affair with Titus' daughter Julia after refusing to marry her while Titus according to master of sensationalistic gossip Suetonius could have had a fling with Domitian's wife near the end of his (i.e. Titus') life
...wait really? I forgot this or never knew it
Domitian may have been a creepy tyrant, but he was a competent creepy tyrant
hee!
Depending on how much the series draws on Feuchtwanger, controvery is guaranteed, because a great deal of the Josephus trilogy ponders what it means to be Jewish and whether that meaning can change (or not) in the diaspora, and whether or not revolting against a greater military power whom you know will respond with devastating force can be justified.
It did occur to me that the whole Messiah plotline would be... extremely controversial even by itself. When you add in eerything else about the revolt... I think it would be very hard to get this made!
Oh, I like and find very plausible that Joseph/Titus would be a major fan pairing. (And maybe also Joseph/Vespasian as the "edgy" pairing...?) I think Titus will be another fan favorite -- he just has a lot of qualities that make him rather woobie-like, culminating in his tragic death, of course! And his partisans would explain away all the parts that didn't fit their woobie image. (But my favorite is always Lucia, as you know!)
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Date: 2025-01-22 10:48 am (UTC)Indeed it was. Titus got to show he'd gotten really good at organizing disaster relief. It's one of the reasons why he, who during his Dad's reign was seen as playing often bad cop to Vespasian's good cop in public perception (among other things, Vespasian let him head the Praetorian Guards, which given the Praetorian Guards had become notoriously crucial in new Emperors making it to the throne is a job you really give only to someone you trust, but it's also predestined to make the one having it look like the tough, grim enforcer type), quickly became very popular in his own short reign.
I think Titus will be another fan favorite -- he just has a lot of qualities that make him rather woobie-like, culminating in his tragic death, of course! And his partisans would explain away all the parts that didn't fit their woobie image.
I can see that, always depending on the actor of course, and the chemistry he has with other characters. Otoh, he does have the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple against him going in already (I mean, if there is one thing Titus is known for outside of people watching Mozart's lesser known operas...), but as you say, depending on his popularity, there will be entire blogs filled with arguments sit was really the fault of Captain what was his name again.
BTW: Fritz was a Titus/Berenice shipper. He wrote in his old age a letter to either Voltaire or Heinrich, I forget which one, in which he mentions having just reread Racine's play about them and crying, and that he never used to cry over love stories in his youth, but now he finds himself doing so and is not ashamed.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-22 07:53 am (UTC)incest! Domitian supposedly had an affair with Titus' daughter Julia after refusing to marry her while Titus according to master of sensationalistic gossip Suetonius could have had a fling with Domitian's wife near the end of his (i.e. Titus') life
I feel like this show could play really interestingly with perception, and alt POVs, leaving you unsure of what's going on-- ie, are Domitian and Julia having an affair, or are they just the two closest in age to each other, and were both stuck in Rome during an intensely traumatic time, and it has left them with a Bond (TM). So from Titus's POV, Domitian is rudely refusing to marry Julia, and then if it is played later from Julia's, it's clear that she really doesn't want to marry Domitian, but her 'no' just isn't loud enough, because Roman patriarchy, and from Domitian's, he wants to marry Longina far more than Julia, but also sees Julia as 'his'. Likewise, does Titus see Berenice as True Love, while Berenice is being more political about it, and making reference to Cleopatra (whose descendants are around Rome at this time) You could even take it right back to Titus's flashbacks, with the lines being the same each time, but the play being different-- is Britannicus poisoned? Does he just have a seizure? Does Nero insist people keep eating confidently and cruelly, or is it less clear? The Roman mind goes instantly to poison, but, as Emma Southon points out when discussing Livia, sometimes people just die.
I would probably fan Domitian the competent creepy tyrant. Competence is so rare...
(Having been watching the recent BBC documentary about new discoveries in Pompeii, you could have plotlines about the need to resettle refugees from the city, and possibly heartwarming and less heartwarming attempts to find each other)
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Date: 2025-01-22 10:36 am (UTC)The Roman mind goes instantly to poison, but, as Emma Southon points out when discussing Livia, sometimes people just die.
Oh absolutely. But let's face it, Britannicus and Nero were in an unprecedented situation as it was - Britannicus was in fact the first biological son of a sitting Emperor who was still alive when said Emperor died. (Augustus and Caligula did not have biological sons, while Tiberius did have two but outlived both. And his grandson, Gemellus, who was supposed to be co-Emperor with Caligula didn't live long to be so once Caligula was Emperor.) Meaning that as long as Britannicus was still a kid, that might not have mattered so much because young Nero was actually very very popular (not least thanks to his mother), but by the time Britannicus died, he'd donned the toga virilis, so could quite possibly have now been seen as competition in a way he wasn't before. In the case of Livia's supposed killings, there is some divergence in the sources insinuating it or point blank accusing her. In the case of Britannicus, there's unanimous consent Nero did the deed. (Which in itself is interesting, in that you'd expect for Tacitus at least to blame Agrippina for it - he does like blaming her for a lot - but no.) Does all of this mean it couldn't have been a stroke? No. These things happen, and given all the sources are writing when Nero is already dead, there's hindsight coloring the reporting. Nero could have been as innocent as snow of Britannicus' death and they'd still have been convinced he did it because of later events.
Now, given Titus did erect a golden statue in Britannicus' memory and issued coins showing him, at a point when I doubt many surviving Romans cared one way or another what had become of Britannicus, it's probably safe to say this early death did impact him, whether or not he believed that he himself could have died on that occasion, but if you want to do, say, an episode where Titus has to question a lot of certainties he previously believed in, you absolutely could have him wonder whether this death was really what he assumed it to be, that's agood idea.
Having been watching the recent BBC documentary about new discoveries in Pompeii, you could have plotlines about the need to resettle refugees from the city, and possibly heartwarming and less heartwarming attempts to find each other
Yes, that's what I think really would belong into a series about this era - and it would keep it humane as well as human.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-22 10:20 pm (UTC)f you want to do, say, an episode where Titus has to question a lot of certainties he previously believed in, you absolutely could have him wonder whether this death was really what he assumed it to be, that's agood idea.
If nothing else, there's the difference between the perceptions of 16 year old Titus and 41 year old Titus, especially if you go with the Nero-Domitian parallels which appear in Suetonius (I once read someone saying that Suetonius, survivor of Domitian, is really writing about Domitian when he writes about Domitian's predecessors Nero and Tiberius and their purges)-- and of course, both of them were anti-Senate, in a way that could initially appear sympathetic. Titus the scared adolescent and Titus the grown adult might look at the same events completely differently, especially after a life in the palace.