The wapthcallion hath thpiwit.
I watched the six-part BBC series Ancient Rome in one sitting (It was the day I did not get a single text message). Unlike the HBO/BBC series Rome, this one was based on actual accounts by Roman writers (which assumes that writers don’t embellish or exaggerate, haha), and does not contain graphic sex and nudity (Blast). Like the fictional series it contains plenty of violence, cause that’s how the Romans achieved world domination.
Stuff I learned from Ancient Rome, the series:
1. According to the series advisers, Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned, he tried to save it. When Rome stopped burning he was advised to move the capital, but he insisted on rebuilding Rome. He envisioned it as a center of art. Unfortunately he was bonkers, and thought of himself as a great artist. He insisted on performing in public. In contemporary terms, that’s like “Queen Elizabeth as a pole dancer”. Try reviewing your emperor’s performance poetry. His reconstruction plans bankrupted Rome.
2. Tiberius Gracchus was the first populist tribune. He pushed for land reform, which angered the aristocrats. The Romans were deeply suspicious of anyone who might aspire to be king (as Julius Caesar would find out). He was clubbed to death with the leg of a stool.
3. Ed Stoppard (Cute!) who played Flavius Josephus, the Jewish revolutionary turned Roman historian, is the son of Tom Stoppard the playwright who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the literary model for Rome with its fictional heroes Vorenus and Titus Pullo.
4. The Goths who sacked Rome were not really barbarians or savages. Their leader Alaric did not want to sack Rome, but after the Goths had served the empire in various campaigns, they were screwed over. Alaric’s brother-in-law Athawulf ended up marrying the emperor’s sister.
5. There were many squabbling Jewish factions during the rebellion against Rome, not unlike the Judaean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judaea.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
May 26th, 2008 at 08:53
I enjoyed watching HBO’s Rome, well of course, initially, due to sexually explicit sequences, I can’t help it! Never knew ancient Romans are a liberally sleazy bunch :p
But I really got hooked to the story, all the characters rivetingly are interesting, specifically Titus Pullo, Atia, and Servilla (sadly she committed roman version of seppuku from previous season while cursing archenemy Atia).
Segue:
Jessica, I know you collect browline, vintage glasses. I was at Bleecker street in Greenwich Village in NY a couple of weeks ago, a few blocks from the Magnolia Bakery is a small shop selling a variety of these vintage frames. I also saw one along Prince St in SoHo. Anyways, I thought you’d like to know.
May 26th, 2008 at 18:38
I loved HBO’s Rome as well. Very intriguing, especially Vorenus story arch for Season 1 and Pullo’s for Season 2.
May 27th, 2008 at 02:25
I read somewhere that Rome became extinct because it had a senate,LOL. As a hub of the ancient world, Rome was very much like Manila (or Calcutta for that matter) today: it was ruled by mostly corrupt and corrupting emperors (our own president);it had the patrician class (now the elites and the wannabe elites); it had the preatorians and legionnaires (our own AFP and Magdalos)it had the plebeians (that’s you and me, assuming you are not an heir of Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala)It had consuls (our garden variety consehales and wannabe governadores) it had glamor in its coliseum and other buildings (um, Araneta coliseum, Rockwell, MOA, etc) it had lots of sex, sodomy,booze, gambling,homicides,crime, scandals, sandals, vandals, rebellion, coups, chismis, unemployment,filth, squalor, overcrowding,and stinking poverty in its urine-soaked streets (almost same here!) Boy, it makes me wonder, are we going the way of Rome? I want to be Spartacus, or Maximus.
May 28th, 2008 at 05:19
I wanna do a clever Roma Eunt Domus comment, but I get a feeling it’d just end up sounding too silly.
May 28th, 2008 at 14:23
There were many squabbling Jewish factions during the rebellion against Rome, not unlike the Judaean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judaea.
And the Phawisees, I mean Pharisees was one of them, although they were a faction that sided with Rome, the Makapili of the time. They werent very popular, as one might suspect. All those senakulo scenes of the huge crowd in Pilate’s backyard yelling ‘crucify him’ was probably just spurious propaganda. More likely there were less than a hundred people there. And the scenes where the entire Jerusalem were mocking Jesus? Bollocks. More likely they were quietly stewing in the sidelines at the Romans, as they watched another one of their own tortured by the occupiers. Remember in the Bible that less than a week before, Jerusalem was cheering him on as their new messiah? And yet they would have us believe that these same people would come out in droves and throw rocks at him? Naka!
May 29th, 2008 at 02:58
Jeg, that’s a good point. It has always puzzled me too, this whole “messiah ” concept of the Judeo-Christian religion. Why this whole concept was (and is) being force-fed to the rest of the world is most unjust. Why did the God of the Jews allow evil to flourish in the first place? Di ba if there’s no evil or sin, there would be no need to send a messiah or redeemer? Hmmmm. something tells me the writers of the New testament are striving for the human drama…Just imagine, all they have is the desert,the Romans, the stifling poverty, more desert, and ancient brutal laws and traditions to live with. Boring! By the way, Moses is believed by the Jews to be the writer of the first 5 books of the old testament. However, if we accept this, it would appear that he wrote about his own life and death, in the THIRD person point of view AFTER he has died. (“And Moses died and was buried by the Lord in the mountain etc, etc.”) Ibang klase. Patay na, naisulat pa yung buhay at kamatayan nya. Poging-pogi ang dating nya sa sarili nyang “biography-autobiography”. Puzzling no?