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Mike Walker: Caesar! (Audio Series)
Jun. 17th, 2021 06:01 pmjI 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.
( More detailed observations with spoilers for this series' particular interpretations of historic characters and situations below the cut. )
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.
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.
( More detailed observations with spoilers for this series' particular interpretations of historic characters and situations below the cut. )
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.
