Spoilers for Rome follow.
The Roman Empire stood for a millennium. When it fell, it was in shambles, a husk of what it once was. HBO’s Rome ran only two seasons, having lost the network 30 million dollars. And it went out on top.
I’ve followed few shows as closely as I did Rome. It was personal to me – I saw every episode as it appeared.
Now that it’s over, and its characters have retreated from the screen to their dry histories, I have to say I’m satisfied. Deadwood got short shrift, and its “finale” barely qualified. I recall watching Bullock walk down the thoroughfare feeling like something had been stolen from me. I didn’t have the same feeling watching Titus disappear down a narrow Roman street. Certainly the show had to sprint through great stretches of time without so much as a word in order to reach its proper conclusion, it did reach it at last.
I was surprised, then, when it was Antony’s arc that I cared most about seeing concluded. The first season was all about Titus and Lucius. Caesar’s death and Brutus’ duty ran a close second, but the crux of that season was Vorrenus leaping into the gladiator pit to save Titus. I’ve said more than enough about how much I love that sequence, and I aped it in the first NaNo. Titus and Lucius weren’t great historical figures, and their fates were unknown from the start. Unlike watching the preordained doom of Caesar, my sense of dramatic irony fully engaged by my gut otherwise, I found myself investing more into these two Romans. With their final chapter yet to be penned, I did the uncritical thing and started hoping these guys would overcome their respective damages.
So the gladiator scene was a triumph in every way. Pullo, at the end of his tether, given up on life, is saved by the relentlessly upright Vorrenus, who finally admits his brotherhood to a man who seems in all respects his polar opposite.
This spoke to me. I was surprised when I Antony’s fall so entrained me. I’m a sucker for tragedy, and downfalls are of particular interest. And so Antony’s spiral served as the heart of the second season (or the end of it, anyways). As a character, Antony always struck me as a little empty. Sure, he got all the good lines (“Snows always melt”), but there was no depth to him. He liked fighting and fucking, and didn’t think too much about any of it. It was only in S2 that he considered either of them.
There’s a scene when Octavian and Antony unite to crush Brutus’s army. They watch from horseback high above the battlefield, and Octavian, unblooded, ask if Antony knows what’s happening. Antony, munching a loaf of bread beside him, says, “No idea.” He tosses the bread and draws his sword. “When in doubt… attack,” he tells Octavian.
There’s a sharp contrast then when Octavian defeats Antony at Actium. The scheming nephew of Caesar is no warrior like Antony – his only talent lies in realpolitik. So as Vorrenus and Antony row away from the battle, bedraggled and defeated, one has to think of Achilles slain by Paris. He says:
“All my life, I’ve been fearful of defeat. But now that it has come… it’s not near as terrible as I’d expected. Sun still shines. Water still tastes good. Glory is all well and good, but… life is enough, nay?”
Here’s a man draped in glory all his life, and now the sun on his face is enough to make him feel blessed. Where’d this transformation come from? Cleopatra is the cause of it.
Antony’s falling in love with Cleopatra (and Attia as well) is what sends him over the brink. Before this, we’re pretty sure Antony is incapable of love. He fucks anything that moves, and he strings Attia along. But Cleopatra can match him. So he follows her to Alexandria, with its dope and orgies and cruel decadence (Cleo uses a man dressed as a deer for target practice). He is immersed in this grotesque place, and soon his eyes are blacked with charcoal and a pink slip hangs from his shoulders. Of course it is Vorrenus, the most Roman of Romans, who tears down his gauze of drugs and decline. The moment Antony realizes what he’s become is perhaps the best bit of acting in a season filled of them.
His awareness of his downfall is what sold it for me. I’ll spare you the recounting of his suicide (best to just watch the episode, probably), but holy shit was it intense. When he’s decided to end it, Antony muses, “Anything to kill this fucking hangover.” This typical quip isn’t so empty as it once was. Where his witticisms used to only damage, here it masks an absolute weariness. He asks Vorrenus to help him with his leaving, and as they prepare, Vorrenus tells him it was an honor to serve him. “Was it?” he says, the relief in his voice making him sound like a child. Here is the character’s greatest moment: a vulgar, crude, sardonic, brutish, intimidating, and violent man, we see in his final seconds an entirely new aspect. After helping him end it, Vorrenus wipes the Egyptian makeup from his face and armors him in his soldier’s regalia.
Then great Antony looses his hold on the narrative, and it all comes back to Lucius. When it becomes apparent that Cleopatra tricked Antony into killing himself, Lucius is livid. As the bereaved queen makes her way up to her dead lover, Vorrenus is glaring at her as only he’s capable. “You would not want to be staring at me,” she warns him. Lucius says nothing, only leans forward and continues to stare her down.
I’ll write more on Vorrenus later, since this post is running long, but I always liked his character the best. A spiritual cousin to Bullock, he struggles more than any other character to come to grips with what he is. Octavian observes that he turns loyalty to a fault – Vorrenus’s word is adamantine. This unyielding observance of duty and slavish obsession with honor is his great failing. Where his friend Pullo knows when to relax his morals in order to come to grips with what he does, Vorrenus deeply feels each action. It was a relief for me when Vorrenus finally died, having reconciled with his daughter.
Guys like Vorrenus never see the end of the story – they are too brittle, too fixed to survive. He was first a soldier, and everything else he struggled at: husband and father never came easy to him.
Pullo didn’t struggle as much with these. Sure, his first impulse was to be a soldier, but his marriage to Eirene and quasi-marriage to Gaia showed he was capable (and desirous) of that life. So Pullo can walk into the sunset with his son, ready to face his future. Behind him the way is littered with the bodies of those who couldn’t or wouldn’t become other than what they were, those too great, too impetuous, too rigid, or too afraid.
I have no idea how to wrap this up, but it occurs to me that this isn’t a fucking english paper. So, we’ll do it abruptly.
