Living beyond the range of cable television and not willing to pay for a satellite dish, M. and I watch HBO series with a year’s delay.
Right now we’re working our way through the first season of Rome. And we like it, right from the starting sequence of the animated graffiti (based on originals in Pompeii, or so they say.
But despite the presence of historical advisors, anachronisms both religious and mundane creep in.
For instance, in Episode 8, Cleopatra is shown smoking opium, which is wrong on two counts. First, as far as I can tell–and I have researched this some–the technology of smoking with a pipe, as opposed to throwing herbs or resins onto glowing coals, was unknown in Eurasia until Columbus sailed to the Western Hemisphere.
Second, the pipe shown is not an opium pipe, but an East Asian tobacco pipe. The bowl is wrong.
Opium had been used in Europe since the Bronze Age, at least, but not in pipes.
Steven Saylor felt that Cleopatra’s character was wrong, as well, but that is another story.
The show’s makers fudged the stirrup question. The Romans did not have stirrups–no Europeans knew them until a few centuries later. Yet if you look, you can see that riders in long shots are riding with them. Close up, however, they have been removed for verisimitude’s sake.
I was skeptical about the brothel-keeper in Episode 7 counting with her abacus, but apparently the Romans indeed did have them. The one in the scene looked more Chinese, however.
And I wonder at seeing candles everywhere instead of cheap ceramic oil lamps. The latter are not hard to find–they are still made for the Middle Eastern souvenir trade.
On the religious side, in one of the early episodes, there is a brief depiction of the taurobolium, or purification in the blood of a sacrificed bull. That rite was not known in the last days of the Roman Republic, which is when the series begins.
The other rites, whether in temples or at home altars, have to be admitted as reconstructions. There is so much of basic religious practice that we do not know, really. Music, too, can only be guessed at.
Quibbles aside, it’s worth renting the series on DVD if you have not seen it.
Tag: Rome
Why do bureaucratic organizations like universities have “affirmative action directors” and “diversity committees” that skirt the edges of the Constitution when what humans really respond to is food?
And the vegetal star of last weekend, green chile peppers roasted in the mesh cylinders rotated over flames, here at Musso Farms’ booth.