When in Rome, build as the Romans do. That’s what the BBC and the American cable channel HBO have done. Six miles from the city’s real Roman Forum, in Rome’s famous Cinecitta studios, they have rebuilt Rome all over again.
This version, though, is made from fibreglass. Comprising the Forum, the opulent villas of the rich and the cramped, squalid flats of the poor, it includes a communal public lavatory, where a shared sponge on a stick was the ancient equivalent of Andrex. Here it was that social climbers, their modesty covered by tunics, angled for an invitation to dinner. A few liberties have been taken with the landmarks. The Temple of Jupiter has been moved from its real home on Capitoline Hill and relocated to the Forum, but from here, the face of the god — angry and redder than a middle-aged boozer — stares out. For the past 18 months, it has been looking out on the unfolding of Rome, an 11-part, $100m television epic being made by the BBC and the award-winning HBO. If Jupiter, the god of Rome, looks liverish, he has cause. From almost the first frame, this production does not shirk from the sex and violence ancient Rome was renowned for. In episode one, there is full-frontal nudity, explicit sex and, from Caesar’s niece Atia (Polly Walker), language racy enough to make a centurion blush. Now, 2,000 years after she lived, Atia’s licentiousness still arouses controversy, causing as much shock as the ancient Greeks felt when they discovered the Romans included women at dinner parties.
Beginning in 52BC, this ambitious series covers the eight years that lead up to the assassination of Julius Caesar — the transition between the Roman republic and the empire. “I don’t know if there was ever a more turbulent time in the history of Rome,” says Jonathan Stamp, the historical adviser on the series. “The very soul of Rome was being fought over. It’s like the eleventh hour, the countdown to the moment where all power is appropriated into the hands of one man.” Ancient Rome was a very different universe from ours. Morally, Frankie Howerd’s Up Pompeii had it about right, says Stamp. Rome’s patricians would have sex with slaves, in front of slaves, for advancement and, when it was for sale, for about the cost of a pizza. This production is upfront about it all. Caesar himself was bisexual, freely gossiped about as being “a man to every woman and a woman to every man”.
These cultural differences make the drama compelling for a modern audience. “One of the joys of the Roman value system for us now is that it is modern man unmasked,” says Bruno Heller, the 45-year-old British writer of the series. “Everything we secretly wish for — to humiliate our enemies, to be adored by the masses, to have sex with whomever we want, to take what we like — all the sadomasochistic elements of human nature were right out in the open in the Roman world. Cruelty was a virtue. Mercy was a flaw.”
Brutal, licentious, violent and debauched as it was, however, ancient Rome is relevant still. “I think a little Roman history handed around in America today would be a very good thing,” says Stamp. “As America starts to flex its muscles and believe its own hype about being a great imperial power, I think that would be valuable. Rome also matters on the grounds that it is the culture that, probably more than any other, provided the shape of the modern world.”
The fast-talking Stamp, who has directed more than 20 historical documentaries for the BBC and won three Emmys, could make you interested in the driest dust of ancient Rome. To the classical world, he says, the sprawling, chaotic Eternal City was a magnet, exercising an extraordinary power. “One of the ways it exerted its force was through the Roman dream. Just like the American dream, it was the idea that you, too, a dweller in the shanty slum outside the gate, could get rich, could rise to one of the great offices of state, could make it, and with all the concomitant feelings that if you didn’t, you probably deserved to fail.”
At the period of this drama, it was also a city where everyone was out for what they could get. “One of the inscriptions found in Pompeii read Salve lucrum, ‘Welcome profit’. That pretty much summed up the prevailing ethos at the end of the republic and into the first century AD,” says Stamp. “Everyone was hustling. At one point, Caesar despaired of it and said, why don’t we ship them all off to Corinth, where they have always been like that? It probably expressed the frustration that what had once been a proud republic that prided itself on aestheticism and self-abnegation had gradually become a city of a million people on the make.”
Although rooted in fact, the series has been bent to the demands of fiction, hammered into a sexy shape that fits the broad outline of history while taking dramatic liberties at will. “It’s the distinction between being historically accurate and being historically authentic,” says Stamp. Enormous pains have been taken over the details — the first episode opens with a bone-crunching battle in authentic 36lb chain mail, followed by a couple of crucifixions. “The Roman army was a mobile tank,” says the military adviser, Billy Budd. “Before the invention of gunpowder, it was said to be the most formidable army the world had ever seen.”
Too tough for some of the extras. “I started with 65 guys at boot camp. I finished with 44,” says Budd. “Some chose to leave, some were asked to leave.” Some, you feel, might otherwise have been strung up by this former marine, who didn’t let them wash for the best part of a week. Confiscating all hair gel, deodorant, Armani jeans and mobile phones, he made them sleep 10 to a tent. “When I gave the winning teams their phones back, they all called their mothers.”
Many a Hollywood road has led to Rome. The lowest point was probably Gore Vidal’s Caligula, a preposterously debauched account with literary ambitions. The highest was BBC’s 1976 series I, Claudius. Adapted from the book by Robert Graves, it is still the standard against which all others are measured. “HBO had been thinking of doing a modern I, Claudius, and wanted to do something about the childhood of Octavian, who became the first emperor, Augustus,” says Heller. “It developed from there.”
With Rome, HBO has itself an ancient equivalent of one of its most successful series, The Sopranos, and the body count is predictably high. The BBC adds a lifetime’s experience of making historical drama. It is hard to think of better allies to go into a ratings battle; or, with its whiff of the mafia, a story on which they would be better suited to collaborate.
“You can think of the mafia as being not so much as about Bada Bing and shooting people as a way of life, but one in which respect is owed to a great man,” says Stamp. “In Rome, there was a hierarchy in which all great men had hangers-on, the clients, who conferred prestige or honour by their presence. The great man was known as the patronus, or padrino in Italian, conventionally translated as ‘godfather’.”
In Italy, some traditions survive intact. When the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi visited the Cinecitta set, he brought a retinue of 100. “I said to one of the crew, film him, because this is the nearest thing we will ever see to a real emperor’s progress through the Forum,” says Stamp. “He had his bodyguard, who were all tall, very good-looking, sunbed-tanned Italian men in perfectly cut suits, and behind them a great troop of hangers-on, all on their cellphones. You could transpose that image back 2,000 years.”
The series has the A list of the ancient world: Julius Caesar (Ciaran Hinds), Mark Antony (James Purefoy) and Octavian (Max Pirkis), who becomes the first emperor, Augustus. Lindsay Duncan plays Caesar’s mistress, Servilia (the mother of Brutus), and Kenneth Cranham is the old warhorse Pompey. But, distinctively, Rome is also about ordinary people. In his writings, Julius Caesar mentioned two soldiers, Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson). They have been seized on by the producers, given fictional lives and used to show what Rome was like for those at the bottom of the heap.
“I was in Europe right after 9/11, and it struck me how everyday life continued,” says the producer, Frank Doelger. “It made me think that in Rome, this is a similarly climactic moment in history, but ordinary people still get on with their everyday lives. I’ve never seen a historical drama of this period that does that.”
Rome the drama ran into nearly as many difficulties as Rome the republic. The scale of the project meant it wasn’t financially viable for it to be road-tested with a pilot. But once the first three episodes had been shot, there was a serious rethink. “The backers took a look at it, shut down and retooled,” says Doelger, who also produced the second world war television dramas Conspiracy and The Gathering Storm. “I was asked to come in at that point, and it struck me very much as a first draft. There were a lot of terrific ideas, but what hadn’t quite come together was a seamless vision for the whole.” Doelger lost sleep trying to find the right tone, but shedding the classical acting style helped. “We encouraged the actors to think of it as a contemporary drama that happened to have a period setting, and as soon as you gave them that freedom, they changed everything.”
Like Rome itself, the producers have spent a fortune rolling out what they hope is an all-conquering format that will run and run, and everything is poised for series two. The fibreglass Forum stands at Cinecitta still, waiting for the Roman dream to work its magic again.
Rome begins on BBC2 in the autumn
