“Running this damn city isn't nearly as amusing as I thought it would be,” complains Antony as he reclines in a candlelit bath with his patrician lover Atia in episode 14 of Rome. His petulance is due to the fact that he is under mounting pressure from commercial and political leaders to deal with the chaos on the Aventine, Cleopatra is not the sexual pushover he had envisaged, and Cicero is uncomfortably cognizant of his own power relative to Antony's. Having seized control of Rome in the aftermath of Caesar's death, Antony expected that the strong-arm tactics that had served him so well as the dictator's quasi-political muscle would continue to reap the kind of financial – and authoritative – rewards to which he has been accustomed as the right-hand man to a political force majeur. That true power, power in its own right, has proven capricious is revealing of Antony's gender position within the text. This chapter will argue that the relationship of Rome's Mark Antony to the public sphere – how he uses it and performs within it – is key to situating him on a continuum of problematic masculine performance that has ghosted Antony's position in popular culture for as long as popular culture has revisited his mythology. I will also argue that his incarnation in Rome is unique in terms of the way it chooses to structure his relationship to the political, and attempt to place this in the context of a wider socio-cultural debate about masculinity.

ANTONY AND MASCULINITY

Rome's Antony is a strange beast, and he defies simplistic evaluation. On the one hand, he can be situated alongside his previous incarnations on screen – Henry Wilcoxson (1934), Raymond Burr (1953), Richard Burton (1963), and Billy Zane (1999) – in that he evidences an engagement with wider socio-cultural anxieties around masculinity and a hegemonic masculine ideal. On the other, he deviates significantly from his predecessors in a number of key areas that, while the overarching message remains the same, demand closer engagement with his means of performing sub-hegemonic masculinity.

Hegemony itself is capricious; gender hegemony particularly so. Its nature is to be invisible, coded into the structures of societal discourse in a manner that allows it to be reproduced as something “everyone knows.”

INTRODUCTION: REEL REVENGE

“I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.” This line is perhaps one of the most memorable in the film Gladiator (2000), as it comes at a pivotal moment and focuses on the main character's principal motivation: revenge. In this crucial scene, Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe), by this point a celebrated gladiator, stands opposite the Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) in the arena and removes his helmet to reveal his face, as music swells in the background. Commodus gasps at the shocking sight of him alive, and Maximus announces that he is “father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife” and he will have his revenge. While this line is now legendary among fans, the general theme of vengeance has long been a mainstay of the sword and sandal genre, often providing the driving motivation for the male hero, as well as overall narrative stimulation.

Hence it is not surprising that revenge is also a major force in the action of the second season of Rome, picking up on and augmenting a minor theme from the first season. While the instances of revenge in the series are clearly inspired by antiquity, the purpose of this chapter is not to trace their historical roots, but to consider them within a larger modern cultural and cinematic framework, in particular examining how the series has moved revenge out of the domain of men into that of women.

The involvement of women in intrigues is not a novel take on ancient Rome. One need only think about the scheming women of I, Claudius (1976), such as Livia (Siân Phillips) and Messalina (Sheila White), to see a pattern. But the sword and sandal genre typically has not depicted female revenge as the main focus of these schemes. Even a major theme of its second season. The cover art for the DVD box of the second season sets up the theme of female revenge, even before the viewer watches an episode. On the cover there is a woman in profile view with long hair, wearing a flowing white dress and gripping a dagger at her side: the dagger faces outwards toward the viewer. Blood covers the ground near her feet, while blood drips from the “e” in the series title.

The first season of the highly acclaimed television series Rome unfurled the feud between Atia and Servilia by emphasizing the transformation of Servilia's body into the body politic. Rome's first season depicted Servilia, the former lover and then staunch enemy of Julius Caesar, pushing her son, Brutus, against the dictator, under the pretext of liberating the Republic and thus honoring his family tradition of tyrannicide, a tradition that goes back to his namesake ancestor in the sixth century bc. This chapter explores the role of female sexuality in the second season of Rome and demonstrates that Atia's and Servilia's bodies are shown to be used and abused, as the viewer witnesses the desexualization of these main female protagonists.

Undoubtedly, both women experience tremendous personal bereavement in Season Two that reflects on their loss of both political power and momentum: Servilia's son, Brutus, dies in battle, and she commits suicide asking for revenge in front of Atia's house, while Atia herself loses Antony forever to Cleopatra. The matriarch of the house of Octavian is now spurned by her former lover in Egypt and returns to Rome desolate, soon to experience her own son's triumph; this triumph, however, only emphasizes how Atia has ultimately been “defeated” by her own son, who will now officially be called Augustus. Servilia's death figuratively underscores and prefigures Atia's own “demise” as well, as the latter's power will be displaced from now on by the ambitions of an emerging young wife, Livia.

At the same time, this transformation of the two main female characters of the series into powerless “effigies” in Season Two highlights Octavian's control over the female body. The grown-up Octavian transforms the female body into a locus of political manipulation: when he addresses a group of women in episode 20 (“A Necessary Fiction”), Octavian is offering a history lesson on Rome's men and on old-fashioned Roman mores, traditionally upheld by the virtuous women of Rome's past. Octavian thereby “fetishizes” the female body by turning it into a controllable medium, on to which the future of the Empire under the Principate will be mapped. The control and manipulation of female sexuality by the princeps announces a new type of regime, a rather more conservative and phallocentric one, in which the Eastern otherness of Mark Antony and Cleopatra are no longer viable.

The tension and interplay between social classes was a major appeal of the first season of the series Rome. By juxtaposing the stories of the fictional lower-class characters Pullo and Vorenus with that of historical aristocrats, such as Caesar, Octavian, and Antony, Rome's filmmakers show both the complexity of life in the ancient city and the difficulty of wielding power and getting and maintaining control. The comparison and contrast between the plebs and aristocrats continues in the second season of Rome, as does the desire for power and revenge in each segment of society. But another factor enters the picture that changes the relationships among the characters and classes: the extreme chaos of civil war. It is true that the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus disrupts the lives of all Romans in the first season. However, the strong hand of Caesar keeps the capital from disintegrating into complete lawlessness. At the beginning of the second season, however, neither the soldier Antony, nor the senatorial conspirators, nor the young Octavian has sufficient support, resources, or leadership to keep the Republic intact. The situation on the Aventine mirrors the problems among the upper-class people. Without a strong leader to keep order in the city's commercial districts, anarchy reigns among the lower classes; thugs and gangsters terrorize the neighborhoods, making normal, everyday life almost unbearable.

This chapter focuses on two relationships between a plebeian and an aristocrat that epitomize the importance of allegiances across class boundaries in Rome: the relationship between Titus Pullo and Octavian Caesar, and that between Lucius Vorenus and Mark Antony. At first glance this appears to be an odd pairing because Antony and Pullo seem more alike, as do Octavian and Vorenus. The first two are both soldiers given to excess with women, drinking, and gambling; while Octavian and Vorenus are both stoical by nature, dedicated to traditional republican values and prone to acting on their principles more than their emotions. The fact that Vorenus ends up serving Antony while Pullo remains Octavian's man is more a matter of circumstance than political or personal leaning. However, in the end it is the commonalities between Pullo and Octavian that enable them to survive, just as it is the commonalities between Vorenus and Antony that doom them to their tragic deaths.

Introduction

Dio Chrysostom delivered his first speech to the inhabitants of the city of Tarsus in Asia Minor sometime between 105 and 115 CE (Salmeri 2000 : 78 n. 126). The speech is a curious work, since the orator spends most of his time criticizing the people for habitually ‘snorting’, making an unpleasant sound with their noses that makes the visitor want to block his ears. In order to hammer home his objection to this noise, Dio compares what would happen if the men spoke with female voices:

Dio suggests that for men to speak like women would be considered an affliction worse than the plague, and one that would cause an immediate public call for divine intervention. His invocation of the calamity of men's loss of a distinctively male speech pattern underscores the importance of looking at the link between gender and language. Gender intersects with all the aspects of language discussed in this book so far: the language choices made by bilinguals, the utterance of non-standard linguistic variants, even the progression of language change. The study of gendered speech further cuts across divisions of time, place and social structures, and scholars have observed cross-cultural similarities in the ways in which male and female speakers choose to differentiate themselves through language.

Bible translators and cradle-snatchers

Sacred books and texts are central to many religious traditions. These may be based on a believed divine or mystical revelation to a single individual, as the Qur'an was transmitted to Muhammad or the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith. Alternatively, the central texts of a religion may be a compendium of a variety of separate texts, perhaps associated with named authors or perhaps anonymous, which have been grouped together sometimes centuries after they were first written. The Zoroastrian sacred texts, known as the Avesta, provide one example of such a compendium, including both hymns thought to be composed by Zoroaster at some time earlier than 600 BCE and later hymns and accounts of myths and rituals, which may be as much as a thousand years later than Zoroaster himself. The Jewish faith makes use of the Hebrew Scriptures or Tanakh, known in Christian contexts as the Old Testament of the Bible, which include material ranging from the Torah (or Pentateuch), five books combining narrative and religious prescriptions, to works of prophecy and poetic texts. The Christian Bible incorporates the Hebrew Scriptures with a collection of texts, originally written in Greek, known as the New Testament, which include four different versions of the life of Jesus (known as the gospels), a narrative of what happened after Jesus (called the Acts of the Apostles), and a number of letters, many of them written by, or ascribed to, the apostle Paul. Religion can be a key factor in language change and language spread, as the impact of Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, on North Africa and the Near East shows. In this chapter, I will focus mainly on the effects of one religion in particular, Christianity.

Christianity changed the linguistic map. Early translations of the Bible provide the first written evidence for a diverse array of languages, and missionaries devised new alphabets that have remained in use until the present day.

Introduction

Variation is an inherent property of human language. Biological and physical factors mean that it is very difficult for two people to reproduce exactly the same pronunciation of a particular word, or even for a single person to utter the same sounds when speaking at a different volume, or when sleepy, breathless, or intoxicated. Human language has inbuilt mechanisms to overcome this variation in the sound of utterances, but it has taken decades to develop sophisticated voice-recognition software, and automated speech-to-text devices are still unable to match humans in the ability to correlate spoken language with particular words, as is very clear to anyone who has ever struggled to make their words understood on an automated telephone line, or watched a television news broadcast with live captioning. Linguistic variation also encompasses choice of individual vocabulary items and word-endings, or selection of different syntactic rules. A vast amount of modern linguistic research in the last sixty years has greatly increased our understanding of variation in speech, and its relationship to social status and language change.

However, as the examples of voice-recognition software or live captioning show, in modern societies written language exhibits a far more restricted range of variation than speech. This is especially true for the phonology (the sounds of language), where the almost infinite variety of noises that a human can produce is mapped onto a much smaller number of distinct letter-forms or signs. But it is also the case for other areas of language; even though less formal written styles are nowadays found in text messages, tweets or emails, most educated people avoid writing down vocabulary items and sentence structures that they may utter in everyday conversation. In modern western cultures where nearly all of the population is literate, most written texts are not direct transcriptions of speech, but are framed within the norms and styles inculcated by education and the models provided by books, newspapers, articles, essays and blogs.