I, Claudius - An Analysis of Nero

By the way Zaz, can you change the title to that as ab ovo usque ad mala "from egg to apple" is actually rather appropriate as it describes what we're doing. Looking at I, Claudius from start to finish.

Sstart watching it here

Characters

Agrippina, Antonia, Augustus, Claudius, Germanicus, Domitus, Herod Agrippa, Julia, Livia, Livilla, Lucius, Plautius, Postumus, Thrasyllus, Tiberius

Summary

The episode opens with a senile Claudius in his messy study looking for Livia?s letter to Tiberius. The letter begins ? My dear Tiberius the answer I?m afraid is no, Augustus won't even consider it-... despite the sudden and unexplained death of Gaius...?

Fade to Tiberius receiving this letter from his mother, Livia. He is on the island of Rhodes, where he has been exiled for several years. His personal astrologer, Thrasyllus, has brought the letter from Rome. The letter reports that Augustus will not give into Livia's appeals to have Tiberius released from exile and returned to Rome. Thrasyllus tries to cheer up Tiberius by saying that his chart indicates good news and by relating some of the juicy gossip from Rome: Gaius?s mysterious death in the East, Lucius' commission in Spain and Julia?s scandalous behavior.

The next scene finds Julia at her seaside villa at Antium. In the peristyle, Antonia, the model Roman matron, sits sewing. Julia, reclining as she stuffs her face, is just skanky. Germanicus and Agrippina run in arguing. After mediating their tiff, Antonia tells them not to leave Claudius out of the games. When the children leave, Antonia reveals her disgust for Claudius; not just because he is deformed but because he is stupid. She wonders what Drusus would have made of him. Julia comments that Drusus was quite the man and asks Antonia if she ever suspected that Livia had a hand in his death. Antonia is horrified. Julia says that people say Tiberius didn?t mind being exiled because he couldn?t stand Julia, but the truth is that he wanted to get away from his mother: she invited him to dinner too often. Lucius and Plautius now come in to say their good-byes. Plautius gets a special present from Julia. Postumus enters having quarelled with Livilla and asks to accompany his brother to Spain. Julia brushes off his childish request. At this point young Claudius becomes the center of attention. While he and other family members are in the garden, an eagle drops a wolf-pup into Claudius' arms. It just so happens that an haruspex, one Gnaeus Demetrius, was on his way to Formiae and felt that he must call upon Julia. He had been the one who read the auspices for Gaius before he left. He can?t figure out why Gaius died, since the signs were so favorable. He witnesses the event and interprets it in front of all the kids: the wolf cub is Rome torn about the neck and shivering with fear; Rome will be wretched some day, and Claudius will protect it. Livilla laughs at the thought of Claudius as protector of Rome and hopes she will be dead before that. Her mother yells at her to shut up and go to her room with nothing to eat for the rest of the day.

Meanwhile back in Rome, Livia, who has been tirelessly looking for a way to get Tiberius recalled, finally sees her chance. She corners Plautius, whom she accuses of having Julia, and makes him confess. She plays on his ambitious nature and threatens his friendship with Lucius. She feigns mercy, but only for her own ends. She "promises" not to tell anyone about his involvement with Julia, provided that he make a catalog of all of the men Julia sleeps with at her orgies: names, dates, places, evidence that can be verified.

In the next scene Augustus appears with an imago of Gaius. He then proceeds to give, in his own courtyard, a stern speech to men of the Noble Order of Knights, commanding them to get married and make babies. He uses the twitching Claudius as the example of the product of a proper Roman union. After the Knights have left, Livia, hearing that Augustus has just used Claudius as

 

From the book: "[Julia] was, I believe, naturally a decent, good-hearted woman, though fond of pleasures and excitements, and the only one of my female relations who had a kindly word for me. I also believe that there were no grounds for the charges made against her many years later, of infidelity to Agrippa while she was married to him. Certainly all her boys resembled him closely."

But there's no doubt that the scene of Augustus with Julia's various lovers (some of whom, the book makes clear, were framed) is a memorable one. He asks some of them whether they slept with his daughter; when one nimrod tries to be over-exact: "Not slept, Caesar," he explodes.

The other good scene is the wolf-cub, though it doesn't quite have the horrible resonance that the scene in the book has, especially when you reread it.

Here we see Livia striking at Julia to try and recall Tiberius from Rhodes. It doesn't work immediately, even though she is careful not to make the accusations herself. But she is whittling down Augustus' descendants at an alarming rate.

Re: the diminutives: Atia, for instance, was one of three sisters. Her elder one was Atia Balba Prima and the younger one was Atia Balba Tertia. A serious lack of imagination there, don't you think. Also very confusing.

I agree that patrician women in Rome were pieces of meat to their male relations. Another example is Julia, the daughter of Julius Caesar. He married her to Pompey, his political ally, and when she died in childbirth, offered Pompey his great-niece Octavia instead, even though she was married to Marcellus' father at the time. Pompey declined, but Octavia was married by her brother to Marc Antony when Marcellus died. And when Agrippa married Julia, he divorced Marcellus' sister Marcella. And so forth.

 

Somehow I prefer the ye olde Roman tradition of taking wives by force, ala Romulus and the Sabines. No, not really, but's it's a comparison.

As for the names Zaz, that's how they actually named people in Rome, you inherited you names from your father and sometimes had others tacked on due to nicknames or something you did. I'd like to go into it but I'm not completely sure how the whole system works, and I know if I get it wrong Jello will probably smack me in a similar manner to Lupercal.

BTW, I wasn't being completely serious about Julia, as the poor woman was left alone. I seem to remember Lucretia was the woman so chaste she was found to be spinning in her room in the middle of the night. The virtues of women in Rome for some reason make me look back to Thucydides writing of Pericles, where he said a virtuous woman was never mentioned by men.

But not all Augustus's descendants are out of the way, there's still Agrippina and her children.

 

Not for long, however...but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

 

We can't help is Zaz, we're always been jumping back and forward really.

The wolf cub scene is my favourite of the series, and it's one of the few times we see Antonia giivng any affection towards Claudius. I'd like to know what happened

The scene with Augustus and the equestrians (whom Graves and Pullman call knights) was a little bit more extended in the novel and was much later. Augustus actually grouped the men into the married and unmarried, telling off the unmarried men and praising the married men. Claudius was actually among the married men and he felt like laughing as he had been married to Urgulanilla and had had no choice about it.

And we hear another great Augustus-ism "A radish may not know Greek, but I do!"

Later in that scene Augustus and Livia discuss the marriages of the children, Augustus suggests Livilla and Postumus. Livia disagrees as she has some sort of personal prejudice against him. Posthumus' passion for Livilla though will be his downfall.

 

In the book, they note that the members of the Imperial family are married off very young...Germanicus and Agrippina at 15, and they had 9 children. Claudius gets this treatment, too, though Pulman deletes Camilla.

 

As well as Aemllia and Julilla, a lot of characters are left otu but it's such a huge cast.

 

They don't delete anybody important, though. Liked seeing Herod Agrippa as a child.

 

I need this series on DVD. I have some of it on video, but it's quite old now, and, I think, edited.

Herod was a great character - charismatic and intelligent, yet destined for such infamy.

 

The DVD version is on the youtube links I keep posting.

And yes, Herod Agrippa is in it but his role is much reduced.

 

Livia points out to Claudius that she never poisoned any of her female rivals...basically true, if you don't count the aphrodisiac she gives Julia.

 

Waiting in the Wings

I rewatched this one over the weekend.

This is where I think the show is really hitting its stride. I love the opening scene of Claudius searching through his study looking through tons of papers. But it does leave me curious (maybe Jello can answer this when he returns): that letter was just simple communication between Livia and the exiled Tiberius. Does that mean that Tiberius would have kept/archived the letter in his official "Caesarean" papers, or maybe that letter was stuffed into a trunk or box and forgotten for decades until Claudius starts digging through the family storage while doing his research? Finding such correspondence helps explain why Claudius was able to get into his relatives' heads in later years to write his book, but I find it curious that they would have held onto such mundane conversations and exchanges. (Livia gains possession of the Sibylline verses at some point, and apparently stashes them somewhere secret until she can reveal them. Makes me think that everybody in the household would have acted similarly when handling sensitive/confidential papers. The only way I can get over this curiosity is to settle for the explanation of Claudius randomly stumbling upon various documents the way he does with Augustus' actual will in Ep 5.)

I don't know why, but for some reason Julia's face looks to me like a circus clown resemblance. Antonia still bugs. I figure that she consciously hates on Claudius because she realizes that she can--Germanicus is the oldest male and the obvious heir to her immediate family line. Nice to see Herod Agrippa being introduced at the proper chronological time, as opposed to the novels' mention of Herod. The gravity of the wolf cub scene is interesting--the augur is totally stunned by what he's scene. But in hindsight, it doesn't seem like it was necessary for him to swear the others to secrecy about his vision. Nobody there (except for maybe Germanicus & Postumus) would have seriously believed Claudius would someday be in the position to "save" Rome. Hell, Livilla inadvertently chooses her own fate. I also love the subtle mention of how she teases Postumus yet makes like she hates him. Boy, being a bitch was a lifetime occupation for her...

It's not addressed within the episode, but you gotta wonder what Julia was thinking. Did she really think that her father wouldn't find about about her escapades? I can think of two possibilities: either Julia was convinced she had daddy wrapped around her finger and could sweet-talk her way out of it, or perhaps Livia herself took efforts to shield Augustus from the truth, until the circumstances were right for her to spring her plans against Gaius & Lucius (I'm leaning toward the second possibility). Augustus confronting the leading Senators is just awesomesauce. It also shows just how good these actors were: it's a very long continuous shot of Augustus walking his way around the line of Senators, with the camera then quickly pulling back around the line, back to the first man. There were hardly any cuts or edits in that sequence, so you just know these folks were skilled enough to sink into each scene without a lot of flubbed lines and goofs. I suppose that's one of the benefits of having a cast of stage/theater veterans. That, or maybe the BBC just didn't have the budget for extra videotape for re-takes.

Hmm, while I'm not disagreeing with the difference from historical accuracy, perhaps it was just an economical issue. Maybe Pulman didn't have the time to write in a dramatic-license fix, like, say, Tiberius & Gaius being "joint heirs" the way Tiberius later did with Caligula and Gemellus. It could have worked in the larger way that Augustus tended to

 

About the senators scene, apparently they did do a few takes of it as Brian Blessed says that the extras started to giggle as he went down the line of people.

And about Julia, Claudius said she wore a wig as there was baldness in the Julian family. This probably explains Caligula's baldness as males get it from their mothers.

Next episode is also Varus, not just Claudius getting married.

 

Iello, could explain the conventions about names? Zaz was asking about it before.

 

Grave's novel also talks about the archives quite a few times, which is why Claudius could get his hands on a number of documents.

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[i][b]What Shall We Do About Claudius?[/b][/i]

[b]Summary[/b]

The episode starts off with Claudius remembering a family dinner that took place while he was still a young boy. While Horace recites from his latest opus, Livia watches Livilla hungrily eye Postumus from across the room. Claudius is seated at the "kiddieclinium". He is clumsy and an embarrassment to everyone present. After the "children" leave, Augustus and Livia briefly discuss whether Claudius will sit in the imperial box at the upcoming Drusus Memorial Games. As Augustus says his good-night, he is interrupted.

A soldier from the 19th legion enters bringing horrible news from Germany. His legion along with two others has been massacred by the Germans. Augustus is furious about what has happened. He brings Tiberius and the soldier into his study to discuss the situation and sends for Germanicus and Postumus. In the dining room, a bewildered page asks Livia about Postumus' whereabouts. Postumus, it seems, cannot be found in his own chambers. He was last seen headed toward Livilla's apartments. Livia files this under "A".

In the stacks of the library, Pollio and Livy frantically search for a commentary on Polybius' Military Tactics. After a librarian takes over their search, they come upon Claudius reading. Recognizing young Claudius, Livy comments on his studiousness and asks what he is reading. After Pollio quips that it must be some romantic rubbish which young people these days read, we find that Claudius' reading material is in fact Pollio's History of the Civil War. "It's rubbish alright,"Livy jokes. When Claudius tells Pollio that he is one of Rome's two greatest historians and names Livy as the other, Pollio presses Claudius to choose one as "two greatest is just shilly shally apart from being an abuse of the Roman tongue." Ever the diplomat, Claudius responds by saying that it depends on what he is reading for. He would read Livy for beauty of language and he would read Pollio for interpretation of fact. Livy, upset at this appraisal, starts to leave as the librarian returns. Unable to find the requested scroll, the librarian suggests that Livy might be confused about which library owns the work. Livy, insulted by the questioning of his scholarly acumen, reaches the breaking point when Claudius, correcting him on the scroll's title and author tells Livy on which shelf he might find it. As Livy leaves in a huff, Pollio continues his conversation with Claudius. He is surprised to find that he is talking to 'that Claudius' whom he had heard was a half-wit. When Claudius tells him that he is doing research for a history of his family, particularly his father and grandfather who were republicans, Pollio says "yes, that's why they were poisoned". Claudius is stupified. Although Pollio is reluctant to identify the culprit, he does give Claudius some good advice. If Claudius wants to live a long and useful life, then he must exaggerate his limp and his stammer, let his wits wander and play the fool as much as he likes.

In the peristyle as Augustus picks a fresh fig for Postumus, a disembodied voice mysteriously echoes "Poison". Augustus lectures Postumus on his rakish behavior. As Augustus' only surviving grandson and intended successor, Postumus needs to be cognisant of his responsibilities. When Postumus asks about Tiberius, Augustus says he adopted Tiberius out of respect for his mother (an amazing woman), but in his estimation Tiberius lacks the right stuff to rule. Livia overhears this conversation and undetected withdraws with a stony gaze. She then summons her granddaughter Livilla to her chambers. In a masterful piece of manipulation, Livia coldly accuses Livilla of adultery with Postumus and threatens her with a fate like Julia's. Livilla hysterically confesses, promising never to see him again. Now with Livilla in her clutches, Livia comforts her with grandmotherly affection and e

 

None of the young men actors are bad, but none of them make much of an impression...I mean those who play Drusus, Germanicus, Castor, Postumus, Gaius, Lucius, etc. The exception is Herod, who does get a good portrayal (it is a good role). I wouldn't classify Jacobi, Baker, Stewart or Hurt in this group as they are not very young.

The Pollio/Livy scene gets its due; it's a good one in the novel, too.

Postumus has, like his mum, gotten a bad rap in history; since he was among the losers in the Emperor-stakes, not surprising.

Livilla is very cast and just as nasty and spiteful as in the book. We get to see Livia in action.

 

Herod is one of my favourite characters in the series and it's to my regret we don't get to see the whole rollicking story that Graves has him in, including the Samaritan Silas. Why Herod has a Samaritan servant is beyond me, but Roman wasn't very Jewish according to Graves as he liked suckling pig.

And I wish we could read Pollio's history, but it has been lost to time which is why Graves can do as he likes with it. Maybe one day it will be found along with a lot of other Greek and Roman texts that I'd like to read. Appius and Plutarch use him as a source though.

 

Claudius's histories are lost as well, right?

 

What Shall We Do About Claudius?

Derek Jacobi brings his gift for the role in this one. Seeing the contrast between himself as an old man versus himself as a young man is great. I didn't know much about the seating protocol of where people sat when they dined, but it's obvious to the viewer that his being segregated on his own recliner isn't accidental. His clumsiness is hilarious to watch, but at first I do feel kind of guilty: this particular brand of clumsiness is genuine. It's easier to laugh later, because you realize that he's already starting to exaggerate his slapsticky ways to throw people off.

Just a minor question to anybody who knows: given the prevailing family embarassment/shame of his existence, why didn't they just exile him somewhere on an island the way Tiberius was? He would have been out of the city, and the general public didn't know what he looked like anyway, since Antonia & Livia went to great lengths to keep him out of the the public eye. He could have lived out his life in seclusion and wouldn't have humiliated anybody. So why did they keep him in Rome? Was it to use him as leverage for a politically-minded marriage with a powerful family? Tradition alone just seems too pat an answer, but I admit I don't know the history as well as you other folks.

Livia finally maneuvers Postumus out of the way. And just like with Julia & Lucius, she does it indirectly by pressuring somebody else into doing the dirty work using threats and/or extortion. She might have been the first mafia chieftain.

*waits for Jello to come in and make the correction*

What I really love is when Augustus faces Postumus in his offices, with Livia off in the corner. The way she looks in this scene, I can't help but think Pulman, et al. were deliberately making Sian Philips up to look like the Virgin Mary, giving the audience a sense of twisted visual irony. But I know that could be purely coincidental--it's probably just my Catholic school background that makes me see it that way. And she shows remarkable cool even when Postumus screams that he knows exactly what's going on.

Favorite line: "That grandson of yours could wreck the empire... just by strolling through it."

Claudius's wedding scene is short, but so ****ing hilarious that it's the perfect scene to close out the episode. I mean, most hetero women I talk to wouldn't want to be with a man who's shorter than they are, but for those times it must have been just unthinkable unless the wedding was purely for political purposes only. And even then, only the girl's parents would have been pleased to have her marry somebody like Claudius. Or would they? (Augustus: "Well, does she know what she's getting?" Livia: "Do any of us??")

Up next: Livia uber alles. Do NOT **** with this woman.

 

Claudius and his first wife have a child, so they must have done some cohabitation...

Livia is getting very close to achieving her dream...Tiberius as Emperor.

 

That's the extent of the cohabitation they did, theyt lived completely seperate lives as Urgulanilla was enraptured by her brother Plautius's first wife Numantinia. There is one other mentioning of them in bed together by Graves, when apparently Urgulanilla kills her brother's second wife Apronia.

And Drusillus, Claudius's eldest son, was killed on Livia's orders when Sejanus was trying to arrange a marriage between him and his daughter. She had him strangled and a pear stuffed down his throat. It was assumed that he had been throwing pears into his mouth and he had choked to death, so the pear tree was charged with murder, sentenced to be uprooted and burned. I am not making this up.

Livia also had a network of spies and she was helped out by Urgulania, Urgulanilla's grandmother, who was some sort of mother confessor for the Vestal Virgins. This was why Claudius married Urgulanilla, an alliance between the familes and she was rather hefty so not really appealing. Claudius reflects in the novels that she could quite easily kill him.

He was actually going to be betroved to Medullina Camilla, but she was killed on the way to the betroval ceremony. Graves has Camilla as Claudius' first love, and it's so sad as it would have been a happy marriage.

And yes Zaz, Claudius' writings have been lost to us. He had the History of Carthage, History of the Etrucans, the histories of his father and grandfather, a history of his own life and a writing of the religious reforms of Augustus which Graves has Livia tell Claudius to write, despite her telling him off for it in the TV series. The only writings we have of his is fragments of a speech in the senate and a letter from him to the Alexandrians, both of these of course may have been written by someone else as Claudius was emperor when these texts were produced. Suetonius talks about Claudius' histories in The Twelve Caesars.

And about Claudius on an island, you have to remember Tiberius was never really exiled, he left Rome according to Graves to get away from Julia, and Livia let him because she knew with Tiberius away she'd have enough rope to hang herself. I don't think he goes about in society as much, at least according to the novel, and he's kept on the fringes but is still a member of the Imperial family. I think they had him about sometimes to save face or people would wonder why they kept him shut up for just being what he was. In the reign of Tiberius he is very little in Rome and Livia does make him leave during Germanicus's triumph and to prevent him from telling Germanicus the truth about what happened to Postumus.

 

I'd love to read one of those histories...especially Carthage.

 

There is a huge stack of lost texts that I would like to read Zaz, top of them is the lost plays of Sophocles, one of my favourite authors. I'd be interested to know what a certain mod has to say about this.