So how about Rome, then?

[strange_complex]

Initial reaction - I liked it a lot. Good characterisations, plenty of interesting details to look out for in the sets, and accessible without being too patronising. Sure, there are some historical liberties being taken. If little Octavius ever got captured by Pompey's agents in Gaul, the event was so successfully hushed up that there's absolutely no trace of it left anywhere, in any of the historical records. But it developed his character, and also helped to clarify the enmity between Pompey and Caesar.

I'm pleased, in fact, to see Octavius taking such a central role. In fact, I'd go as far right now as to say that it looks to my eye very much as though the whole production has really been conceived from the start as his story. Not Julius Caesar's, not Mark Antony's. It starts at the very point when the young Octavius is just beginning to become actively involved in the affairs of his family and the politics of Rome. Of course, his story involves some major secondary players, and I'm sure they will have their moments. But in terms of the grand arc of the production, it looks to me as though it is his life story that will form the central peg on which all others hang. And so it should, because he is amazing.

It's a pity, that being the case, that they've got his name wrong. He didn't officially become Octavian(us) until adopted by Julius Caesar, and he didn't use the name himself even then. And a pity that we didn't get to see his first real major public appearance in Rome - the delivery of the funeral oration for his dead grandmother, Julia. But I suppose that that would only have worked for an audience familiar with the device of the Roman funeral oration, and who wants to hear a long boring speech anyway, when they can see him nearly getting killed in Gaul?

On the plus side, his costume was excellent (a bulla! and a toga praetexta!), his physical appearance convincingly like his later portrait images (as indeed was the case for most of the major characters) and his characterisation just perfect. The nerdy kid with a vicious streak, already unnervingly au fait with Roman politics and keen to manipulate and control. Oh yes, all just ready to flower into a most excellent Augustus.

I look forward to seeing more: of him, of the sets, and of the fine details of HBO's Roman world.

Edited 03/11/05 to correct mistake about Julia.

Comments

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

No, my point was not that you've got the family relationship wrong, but that you've got two separate individuals confused. The Julia whose death is an important plot point in the first episode, Pompey's wife, was Caesar's daughter (d. 54 BC). The Julia for whom Octavius read the funeral oration was a different Julia, Caesar's sister (d. 51 BC). (And I wonder if when talking about the 'oration for his dead great aunt' you aren't actually thinking of yet another Julia, the aunt of Caesar himself and mother of Marius, for whom Caesar performed the funeral oration.)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Oh, gosh - yes, I do see what you mean now. No, I'm not getting confused with Caesar's oration in 69, but I did think there for a minute that Pompey had been married to Caesar's sister. Of course he wasn't, you're right, and indeed she was referred to early on in the programme itself as Caesar's daughter, now I come to think of it. Although, in my defence, last night's episode had conflated the events of the last few years of the Gallic Wars so seriously that 54 and 51 rather merged with one another, and it becomes almost a pardonable mistake in that context!