‘I, Claudius’ thoughts, Episode 4: ‘What Shall We Do About Claudius?’
To accurately describe the world is to sound insane. That’s the dilemma facing observers of America’s collapsing empire today. The corruption is so naked, the incompetence so comical, the sheer evil so gleeful and unrepentant, that describing the situation to others makes you come across as badly undermedicated. There’s an old saw that goes around lefty political spaces saying that when you explain Republican policies in black and white for people, they simply won’t believe you. Surely, no one could be that psychopathically cruel for so long and just get away with it.
Postumus Agrippa (John Castle) lives in a world that’s similarly askew. The dark secret at its center is right there in his own name: He’s the son who was born to the legendary war hero Marcus Agrippa posthumously. Why did Marcus Agrippa die, and his rival Marcellus before him? What of Postumus’ late brothers, Gaius and Lucius? Did the solitary exile of his mother Julia have a reason behind it beyond her infidelities? And what of Drusus, ally to the Republic, son of Empress Livia, and father of Postumus’ best friend, the twitching, limping, stuttering Claudius?
The answer has been obvious to us in the audience all along: Livia Drusilla is behind it all. She’s behind the deaths of Marcus, Marcellus, Gaius, Lucius, and Drusus, plus the exile of Livia, and as of now the exile of Postumus for attempting to rape Claudius’ married sister, the gorgeous Livilla (Patricia Quinn, aka Magenta from The Rocky Horror Picture Show). In this very episode we see Livia confront Livilla about the affair, then half-cajole, half-blackmail the younger woman into keeping it up long enough to frame Postumus. She’ll do anything, stop at nothing, to ensure her son Tiberius is next on the throne.
Photo: Acorn
But try telling this to Augustus, the greatest man in the history of the known world. He’s not such a bad guy, as far as it goes, but he’s not a person accustomed to being told he’s wrong. (By anyone but Livia, that is.) Now he’s been told that his beloved wife is responsible for the death or disappearance of half a dozen people he adored, including no fewer than five planned successors to the throne, plus the mother of three of them.
“For years, everyone around you has either died or disappeared. Do you think it was all an accident?” Well, you’d want to, wouldn’t you? Would you choose to accept the horrible truth? Or would you go on clinging to the world as you knew it, believing in your heart that it could never really change? We know how our own elites have reacted; Augustus reacts little differently.
It’s a brilliant narrative maneuver by screenwriter Jack Pulman, working off the novels by Robert Graves. Here we have the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Finally, someone exposes Livia as the serial killer she is to the only man who can do anything about it. But even as it’s happening, we know nothing will come of it, because unless you’ve been watching through the BBC’s cameras, there’s no way you’d accept Postumus’ word for it, not when he’s trying to save his own skin in the process.
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