This chapter focuses upon the representations of Cleopatra and the city and court of Alexandria in Season Two of the HBO–BBC series Rome. This exploration considers some of the significant production decisions, which appear to have been made in an effort to increase the sense of “otherness” in the depictions of the Alexandrian court, in both set and costume design as well as in casting and performance. My discussion highlights many of the actual two- and three-dimensional artefacts from which Carlo Serafin, the supervising art director, and April Ferry, the costume designer, along with their teams, evidently drew inspiration, while drawing certain parallels with the depictions of the Ptolemies and their city in earlier film, television, and stage productions.

EGYPT AS “OTHER”

From the outset, the producers of Rome were presented with something of a problem: their depiction of the city of Rome and its inhabitants was already a considerably grimier and more alien representation than the cinema-literate audience might expect from its more sanitized depictions in Hollywood epics such as Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) or, even more recently, Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000). How, then, should the even more exotic and decadent city of Alexandria and its Egyptian queen be depicted?

First and most importantly, the designers took a clear tonal decision to represent the palace and its inhabitants as an almost entirely Egyptian society, eschewing the more obviously Hellenistic modes of dress, architecture, and internal décor which would have existed throughout the historical Alexandria of this period. No doubt this is a common problem for those attempting to visualize the Ptolemies and their world. Cleopatra VII Philopater, to give the queen her full name, was known as the first of her lineage to read and speak the Egyptian language, indicating that Greek was the more usual tongue and script used at the Alexandrian court. Sculptural representations show the ruling dynasty in both Egyptian and Hellenistic garb, depending upon the purpose for which the statuary was intended, although it is impossible to say which of the two modes may have been the more usual in daily life. It is normally suggested that Hellenistic dress would have been the general rule, while purely Egyptian dress was reserved for formal state occasions and more religious contexts.

Fans of Rome used the internet to respond to the series and share their views with other fans by reviewing episodes, responding to polls on favorite characters, and speculating on future plotlines via discussion forums. Fan sites such as the Rome Fan Club pages on Fanpop.com and the Rome Fan Wiki on Wetpaint.com make it easy for fans to interact with each other and engage with the text. Creative forms of fan engagement include devising role-playing games based on characters from the series and creating fan art including pictures, icons featuring characters from Rome that fans can use to represent themselves, and fan videos or vids, using excerpts from the series set to music.

This chapter explores a specific mode of creative fan production: Rome fanfiction. The focus of this study will be on fanfiction written in English and made available online via fanfiction archives on Fanfiction.net and Livejournal after January 2007, when the first episode of Season Two was first broadcast, and before December 2012. Rome fanfiction continued to be produced and posted after this date, but as Matt Hills states, “one can only extract artificially bounded sets of information” from the vast amount of fan-produced material available online. My survey includes all types of creative fiction based on Rome from novel-length works to short pieces of less than five hundred words, sometimes referred to by the authors as oneshots, or drabbles, which should be one hundred words exactly in length, but are often slightly longer. Poetry or stories written in languages other than English will not be a part of this study.2 As most fanfiction is written by female fans, and published under often gender-neutral pseudonyms, authors are referred to by their pseudonyms or preferred first names and the female pronoun will be used throughout.

FANFICTION AND SEX

Fanfiction for Rome, as for other films, television series, and novels, can be split into three genres: slash, het, and gen. Slash focuses on same-sex relationships, most frequently male, but femslash is also written by some fans; het focuses on heterosexual relationships; and gen is general, so any other fiction that is not based on romantic or sexual pairings.

In two of the more notorious scenes from the second season of Rome, Livia and Octavian are discussing and enjoying sadomasochistic sexual activities together, with Livia as the dominant and Octavian the submissive. Octavian may have been guilty of a number of things in and out of the bedroom, but he is not described in the ancient sources as possessing this particular kink. This discrepancy raises a few questions. Why did the creators of the series choose this sexual behavior in their portrayal of Livia and Octavian? Was this choice in any way informed by the historical or cinematic tradition regarding the pair? And finally, what messages are aimed at the audience through the use of sadomasochism, and are those messages different from the ancient reception of Livia and Octavian? In answer, this choice of S&M does indeed reflect historical tradition, particularly the anti-Augustan one as presented by Tacitus, and was also chosen as the most effective and efficient way of communicating the alleged dominance of Livia over Octavian to a modern audience more generally accepting of gender equality in public life.

THE FIRST COUPLE AND THE HISTORICAL TRADITIONS

We will begin with a brief background on Livia and Octavian as a couple. Rather than the match being arranged seemingly on a whim for pure political expediency, as suggested in the series, ancient accounts speak instead to the passion that preceded the marriage. The two had apparently met while she was married to Tiberius Nero, and she was pregnant with her second child, Drusus, when she went to Octavian. There were rumors that the two were involved in some way prior to her divorce from Nero, or that at the very least Octavian was smitten with her (Suetonius, Augustus 69.1; Tacitus, Annales 5.1).2 The haste with which he courted and married her was considered unseemly in some circles,3 and the two seemed to be aware of this, as they consulted the state priests to determine if the marriage would be legal and pleasing to the gods (Tacitus, Annales 1.10).

When Mark Antony left his wife, Octavian's sister Octavia, for Cleopatra, he provided Octavian with a propaganda gold mine. Octavia was painted as the chaste, proper Roman matron, abandoned by her irresponsible and increasingly emasculated husband for an exotic foreign temptress. Rome tells a similar story, but substitutes Octavian's mother for his sister in terms of narrative drive. This chapter will explore how and why Rome adapts a narrative over two thousand years old and why the emphasis is shifted from Octavian's sister to his mother.

ROME’ SAFFAIR : ATIA AND ANTONY

Rome established an ahistorical affair between Octavian's mother Atia and Antony as early as episode 2 (“How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic”). In the first season, this relationship was portrayed as largely motivated by political interest as well as a fairly casual affection on both sides. Atia shows a glimmer of vulnerability in episode 6 (“Egeria”), when she first brings up the subject of the two of them getting married. When Antony asks why, she first says because she loves him, which he assumes is a joke. She then outlines political reasons for them to get married, in a conversation that quickly turns into an argument. Polly Walker's performance as Atia, first quietly suggesting that she loves Antony, then shifting into a more confident tone as she comes up with a political plan so unexpected and cold-hearted that it leads Antony to call her a “wicked old harpy,” implies that it was the first reason she gave – love – that was the truth, and her political machinations were a cover-up to protect her hurt feelings. But the relationship is balanced out, to a degree, in episode 11 (“The Spoils”), when Antony enlists Octavia to help reunite them as a couple, placing himself, as Monica Cyrino has pointed out, in the position of the elegiac lover desperately pursuing his elusive mistress.

In Season Two, however, the dynamic in the relationship shifts. The unequal affection hinted at in episode 6 becomes increasingly prominent and it becomes clear that Atia is more in love with Antony than he is with her.

When they were concerned with women at all, Roman historians focused almost exclusively on imperial women or other elites, so that those outside the highest levels of the aristocracy remain virtually invisible to history. Cinematic depictions of the Roman world, in contrast, have shown an interest in the lower classes, both men and women, but they typically adhere to the common stereotype of a virtuous and industrious lower class set against a corrupt, vice-ridden elite. The Rome series largely avoids these pitfalls1 by not only acknowledging the diverse roles of non-elite women in antiquity, but also providing these female characters with individuality and complexity. Admittedly, the portrayal of women like Eirene, Gaia, and Vorena in Rome's second season does replicate some ancient prejudices about the female nature that have become familiar components of modern depictions: women are scheming, duplicitous, and dangerous, both sexually and otherwise. The men of Rome, in addition, seem to impose on these women the familiar “goddess/whore” dichotomy prevalent in ancient literary accounts of their upper-class sisters. But while the series repeats some of these biases, it also takes pains to trouble them, revealing such binary divisions to be a function of individual male subjectivity and exposing the “Catch-22” nature of the dilemma whereby women who would exert agency were limited to channels that required them to enact the very traits used to justify controls on their behavior. The series thus demonstrates that in a world where they are largely disenfranchised, women must draw on the tools at their disposal – such as their sexuality and reproductive functions – to negotiate power and position. The non-elite women of Rome in Season Two thus provide an instructive complement to the historically attested elite female characters, offering both a window into the lives of women in ancient Rome and a mirror in which we might catch reflections of ancient biases about the nature of women lingering in contemporary narratives.

THE WOMEN OF ROME

Through its lower-class female characters, Rome's second season suggests to its viewers many important social realities for women, such as their association with domestic duties and nurturing roles. In this series, lower-class women cook, clean, and care for the sick, and thus they hint at the ancient association of women with “inside” and men with “outside.”

Screening Antiquity is a new series of cutting-edge academic monographs and edited volumes that present exciting and original research on the reception of the ancient world in film and television. It provides an important synergy of the latest international scholarly ideas about the onscreen conception of antiquity in popular culture and is the only book series to focus exclusively on screened representations of the ancient world.

The interaction between cinema, television, and historical representation is a growing field of scholarship and student engagement; many Classics and Ancient History departments in universities worldwide teach cinematic representations of the past as part of their programmes in Reception Studies. Scholars are now questioning how historical films and television series reflect the societies in which they are made, and speculate on how attitudes towards the past have been moulded in the popular imagination by their depiction in the movies. Screening Antiquity explores how these constructions came about and offers scope to analyse how and why the ancient past is filtered through onscreen representations in specific ways. The series highlights exciting and original publications that explore the representation of antiquity onscreen, and that employ modern theoretical and cultural perspectives to examine screened antiquity, including stars and star text, directors and auteurs, cinematography, design and art direction, marketing, fans, and the online presence of the ancient world.

The series aims to present original research focused exclusively on the reception of the ancient world in film and television. In itself this is an exciting and original approach. There is no other book series that engages head-on with both big screen and small screen recreations of the past, yet their integral interactivity is clear to see: film popularity has a major impact on television productions and, for its part, television regularly influences cinema (including film spin-offs of popular television series). This is the first academic series to identify and encourage the holistic interactivity of these two major media institutions, and the first to promote interdisciplinary research in all the fields of Cinema Studies, Media Studies, Classics, and Ancient History.

Screening Antiquity explores the various facets of onscreen creations of the past, exploring the theme from multiple angles.

Almost at the end of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (ca. 1607), the tragic queen expresses her fears (5.2.214–21):

This metatheatrical prophecy is revisited in the second season of HBO–BBC's Rome as it begins and concludes with Antony's orgiastic excesses and a shrill Cleopatra's twin attempts to prostitute herself for survival. The Cleopatra scenes are indeed heavily indebted to Shakespeare's play but, as Jonathan Stamp and Bruno Heller note in the DVD commentary to the last episode, they do try to find “a new way into something familiar.” In doing so they have crafted a novel and modern reception of the Cleopatra story by invoking Shakespeare – and film – to underscore their departures, by emphasizing some frequently neglected parts of Plutarch, and most notably by attempting to tell the story of both Antony and Cleopatra while weaving their stories into the series’ story arcs of Octavian and Pullo. The result is a creative and successful addition to the Cleopatra reception.

CLEOPATRA AND ROME

Cleopatra's appearance in episode 8 (“Caesarion”) of Rome's first season is discussed in depth by me elsewhere.2 In this episode, the fic-tionalized core protagonists Pullo and Vorenus rescue the drug-addled princess from her brother's minions. On the way back to Alexandria, the slave Charmian detoxes Cleopatra and devises a plan to ensure her mistress’ pregnancy by enlisting first Vorenus, who declines, and then a more willing Pullo. After emerging disheveled from a proper Plutarchan sack in a pose mirroring Claudette Colbert's in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (1934), she is able to seduce Caesar, secure her throne, and give birth to Caesarion, as Pullo cheers lustily for his progeny. I have argued that this episode shows a keen awareness of Shakespeare, Plutarch, and several twentieth-century films. Her appearance, initial stupor, and serpent-like sensuality were quite a shock to many viewers. Cleopatra appears in the second season in episodes 14, 20, 21, and 22, which also bear witness to similar influences and offer their own novel depictions.