The dark and messy goings on in Imperial Rome ....... back on my telly after 46 years

Now I am the first to admit that television dramas are not the most reliable way to learn history, for all the obvious reasons and recently said so.*

But done well they can offer up something, and with the passage of time become historical pieces, showing us how thought about a period in the past.

So last night I started on the box set of I Claudius which our Polly got me for Christmas.  The television series was first broadcast by the BBC in 1976.**

It tells the story of the first five Roman Emperors from Augustus through to Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

And wanders across a murky period of political murders, family warfare, heaps of casual sexual peccadillos, as well as incest.

At its heart is the study of one family's manipulation of people and politics to establish an Imperial dynasty.

It was based on two novels by Robert Graves, the first of which carried the same title as the TV series and the second which was called Claudius the God. 

I Claudius was published in 1934, and its sequel the following year and both were a success.  The story lines are fictional but are based on events and description which are drawn from historical accounts by the Roman historians, Suetonius and Tacitus.

I must have been just 16 when I came across Tacitus whose surviving accounts included a biography of Agricola his father in law who was the Roman general, as well accounts of campaigns in Britain and Germany and the politic of Rome.

Suetonius I came  to later, and his book The Twelve Caesars is as my Wikipedia tells me,  “is a set of twelve biographies of Julius Caesar and the first 11 emperors of the Roman Empire.

The work, written in AD 121 during the reign of the emperor Hadrian, was the most popular work of Suetonius, at that time Hadrian's personal secretary, and is the largest among his surviving writings. It was dedicated to a friend, the Praetorian prefect Gaius Septicius Clarus.

The Twelve Caesars was considered very significant in antiquity and remains a primary source on Roman history.

The book discusses the significant and critical period of the Principate from the end of the Republic to the reign of Domitian; comparisons are often made with Tacitus, whose surviving works document a similar period”.***

I will have read it around 1976 and the fun was to match this source with the two books and of course the telly series.

And now 46 years on I have to say that the television series has stood the test of time.  

True, some of the sets look a bit clunky but like many a Shakespeare play the magic is in the words, stories, and of course the acting.

There was a first-rate cast, some of whom were distinguished actors, while others were just setting out.and with a script written by an accomplished writer, it all came together.

And that is that.

Location Rome, and the Empire

Pictures; replica of a statue of the Emperor Augustus, Rome, and bits of ancient Rome much knocked about, 2009, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* La sposa, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2022/01/travelling-italian-history-with-la-sposa.html

**I Claudius - Complete BBC Series (5 Disc Box Set) [1976] [DVD]

***The Twelve Caesars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Caesars