As for Jack Pulman and Herbert Wise’s 1976 TV series? To call it a masterpiece is to understate the case. With a cast that turns over completely mid-series, it keeps churning out compelling new characters, brought to life with performances that feel rivetingly true to life yet grandiose enough to burn Rome down around them. Brian Blessed, Siân Phillips, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, Patricia Quinn, John Hurt, Sheila White, and Derek Jacobi alone sear themselves in your memory with their terrible energy; they are the glistening tip of a spear made of ace supporting players seemingly without end.
With a budget and design aesthetic more attuned to live theater than broadcast television, it uses deft camerawork and industry-best blocking of its actors to draw the audience into a conspiracy of make-believe. Long takes that allow you to sink into the acting and thus inhabit a world you know is not real; you may not be there, but you are there. Since so much of the work is done in-camera, when the series does resort to visual effects or striking editing choices, they hit like a freight train. Try shaking the feeling of all those characters talking directly to you in this episode, I dare you.
What emerges paramount from it all, from those spectral faces looming in the lens on down, is the feeling of ancient history speaking to the present. It is madness, madness, to trade away hard-learned, hard-fought moral and political principles for the expediency of autocracy. The lives of first Augustus and then Claudius himself prove there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship; surrender your rights and you have no right to complain when you are forced to surrender far more.
It should be noted here that Sheila White, the beautiful actor playing Messalina, is frequently shown nude throughout this episode, as are her male lovers. Her fuckathon battle with Scylla is described with shocking frankness, and when you see the aftermath – Scylla, her hair mussed, her chest slicked with sweat or saliva or, well, you know – there’s no question what has taken place. I kept reacting like Tim Robinson in that one I Think You Should Leave sketch: “I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that.”
In retrospect, there was one clear warning sign. Yes, Messalina, the sweet, beautiful, precociously competent and intelligent teenage girl to whom Claudius was forcibly wed by his demented uncle Caligula, makes the newly crowned emperor happy. Yes, she helps him immeasurably in his work. Yes, she’s the mother of first one, then two children by him. Yes, it seems like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
Until she says this: “My darling, I want to be Livia to your Augustus!”
It is, of course, the last hurrah of the spectacular John Hurt as Caligula, which means it’s the last time we’re going to hear one of the most distinctive, melodic, terrifyingly powerful voices in the history of cinema. The way Hurt lets his raspy delivery sink into a purr, flitter into flights of laughter, or rise in volume and intensity until it sounds like he really is an angry god, is all-timer work on a show full of all-timer work.
Will I miss him? Oh, absolutely. But I also missed Augustus, Julia, Livia, Livilla, Sejanus, and Tiberius, and we’re getting along fine without all of them, aren’t we? I’ve never seen a show that goes through its core cast at this rapid a clip — Claudius is the only character in this episode who appeared in any of the first five — and never suffer a drop in quality, or the sense that the writing is flailing around looking for the next thing to do. I don’t see any reason why Caligula’s death should deal more of a blow to the show than any of the others, Livia’s in particular.
Fans of Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin’s source novels A Song of Ice and Fire, no doubt, see plenty they recognize about Westeros and its inhabitants in Caligula and his macabre misadventures. Caligula has the pale blond hair of House Targaryen, a dynasty that, as Herod says of the Claudians, produces either great men or madmen. He’s in an incestuous, blasphemous relationship with his sister Drusilla (actually the other sisters too), another hallmark of the Targaryens and their native Valyrian culture. A blonde queen fucking her brother immediately puts one in mind of Cersei and Jaime Lannister, too. Caligula himself, of course, is the archetypal Mad King.
Anyone, however, can recognize the prodigious gifts of John Hurt, whose Caligula is one of TV’s greatest villains, on a show that’s given us one already in Livia. Indeed, it’s worth reflecting that with the deaths of Tiberius and Antonia, Herod and Claudius are the only characters left alive from fully the first five episodes. In many ways we’re watching a brand new show, and for now at least, it’s a one-man show at that.
There’s something quite humbling about having your nation’s number well and truly gotten by a television show aired in Britain in 1976, based on novels published in 1934 and 1935. But humbling isn’t the right word at all. Humiliating is closer to the mark. Two thousand years after the events of I, Claudius, the United States of America — the richest and most powerful empire in the history of the world — is crumbling before our eyes due to the every combination of greed, ambition, sadism, and degeneracy that brought mighty Rome low centuries ago. We, as a species, have learned nothing.
But that’s not quite fair, is it? You’ve learned something. I’ve learned something. People who have kept their minds and souls intact amidst the fascist onslaught, people who have remained human as the entire warship of the state and technology and capital aims its cannons at anything remotely human and fires — people like that, people like us, we’ve learned our lesson. We know that gerontocratic perverts like Emperor Tiberius, gibbering young psychopaths like Caligula, and scumbag secret police chiefs like Sejanus have been put in charge of our country, our future, our world — our children’s country, our children’s future, our children’s world. I think what we’d like to happen to these people in return is clear enough.
I, Claudius isn’t about everyday people like us, though.True, everyday people come into the story every now and then — in this very episode there’s a lengthy, hilarious aside in which a scribe passive-aggressively instructs his employees to erase the beautiful elephants they’ve drawn on Claudius’ manuscript about Carthage, seething about his rich client’s bad taste all the while. Even Sejanus is, in his way, closer to the masses than the Julio-Claudians, into whose ranks he’s been scheming to climb for years. But like George R.R. Martin (more on him in a moment) writing A Song of Ice and Fire, author Robert Graves and adapter Jack Pulman made a conscious choice to center royalty and aristocracy in their narrative.
But it’s the powerful who move the plot here. And look where they’ve moved it to. Justly titled “Reign of Terror,” this episode of I, Claudius is a cavalcade of cruelty — and I defy you to find a single reason why it couldn’t happen here tomorrow.
It goes ill for the Empire. Its ruler is a bitter old man who spends his time nursing ancient grudges and indulging in rape and pedophilia as pastimes. The whisperings of the ambitious head of his secret police drive him to ever greater acts of paranoia and violence. His inner circle includes even bigger, more sadistic perverts and murderers. The Senate goes along with it as innocent people are arrested without charge. The only ones who can put a stop to it all are either too old and enfeebled to act, or too complacent, or too cowardly.
Anyway, did you guys watch this episode of I, Claudius? Because things are pretty bad there, too.
Beautifully blocked even by I, Claudius standards, this episode makes the most of the Senate’s comparatively cavernous size, framing Piso pontificating in the foreground while Tiberius glowers beneath his imperial laurels in the back. Sejanus is constantly standing in the Emperor’s personal space, indicating who really wears the pants in the relationship. Caligula is a sinister presence throughout, a Lynchian entity in child form, lurking in the crowd or in the rear of the frame.
And that final scene with Piso and Plancina, ugh, my god! Stratford and Hamilton’s clinch, their desperate pressing of their heads and faces together as they resolve to die as one, is incandescently hot, the way doomed passion so often is. It makes Piso’s decision to back down feel like even more of a slap in the face. Did you not watch the scene you are currently in, dog? You’re caught in a bad romance, roll with it!
Photo: Acorn
But Piso’s uncertainty and terror are understandable. He now lives in a system where everything comes down to the decisions of a single man, a sovereign, a one-man maker of reality. Your safety as a Roman citizen, even a Roman Senator, ultimately depends not on laws or principles, but on remaining in the Emperor’s good graces.Humanity struggled for centuries to crawl out of this kind of moral morass, in which liberty and freedom enter freefall as the whims of dictators reward friends and punish enemies with impunity. It’s been recognized almost universally as evil for generation upon generation. I, Claudius was made for societies where, it was presumed, people agreed on this. But it’s just as good, if not better, in a society where they don’t.
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.
Since the sets and set-ups are so limited on this show, it falls to blocking and camera placement and movement to create a sense of space, pacing, and momentum. Good Lord, does it ever do so in this episode. From the long take that sees Augustus stalk up and down a line of Julia’s accused lovers like a wolf selecting his prey, to the way the camera wheels around from a triumphant Livia to an enraged Augustus when the power shifts between them following Julia’s exile, these shots and staging decisions use physical space to convey the political and psychological hierarchy of the royal family — who’s on top and who’s beneath them, who’s the public face and who’s the force in the background. As a visual text, I, Claudius one of the most watchable shows I’ve ever seen, no frills required.
Drusus himself now occupies the command of the German legions Tiberius once oversaw. He’s a fine and honorable soldier as best we can tell, and a friend to Augustus as well. But while he serves the Empire, he’s no fan of it, nor of the all-powerful position it’s built around. In a letter to his brother after he returns to the front, Drusus writes of his worries:
A period of enforced rest due to a slight head wound has given me much time to ponder and reflect on the state of our beloved Rome. Such was the extent of the corruption and petty place-seeking that I found in Rome, that I have come to the conclusion that it is the inevitable consequence of the continued exercise of supreme power by Augustus.
The problem with building an enormous, largely unaccountable apparatus of power around one person, however good a guy he is, that power will eventually be inherited by someone who’s not such a good guy. Okay, so today we’re legalizing same sex marriage and talking about how the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. That’s nice. We’ll get Shep Fairey to make a poster.
But what happens tomorrow? Perhaps the council of black-robed wizards who decide whether laws are legal or not will one day be dominated by right-wing lunatics. Perhaps the person placed at the apex of the richest and mightiest nation in human history will one day be a senile Nazi with an axe to grind against anyone who’s ever wronged him. Every opportunity we had to undermine the power of these institutions and didn’t take it was a waste of good fortune and a crime against the future.
Drusus already senses these problems arising, even with Augustus still on the throne. In argument with his mother, who resents both Drusus and her first husband for harboring hopes for the return of the Republic, Drusus asks her if she wants Rome to be reduced to the open corruption of “the Eastern potentates,” upon which their civilization had always looked down. He sees how quickly these things fall apart, even with someone decent at the top.
I, Claudius feels weighty. A cast consisting almost solely of British acting royalty. A story about the mighty Roman Empire and the legendary (or infamous) men and women whose strength and cunning held it together (or tore it apart). Dialogue with a knack for sounding both casually naturalistic and as precisely calibrated as the finest poetry. A profound influence on such New Golden Age/Peak TV giants as David Chase and George R.R. Martin. Its legacy as a staple of the highfalutin line-up of PBS, back when our own empire believed in improving its subjects’ lives somewhat. How do you wrap your mind around a show with a reputation this sterling and imposing? How do you wrestle this masterpiece to the ground?
You do it in a pit of mud, that’s how. Sexy, sudsy, sinister, spearheaded by a cast that makes an absolute feast out of every betrayal and bon mot, I, Claudius is aimed at the gut and the groin as much as it’s aimed at the noggin.
