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A Mighty Curse, Sealed in Blood
Inside the Episode
With Jonathan Stamp
'Now that', as Antony rightly and reverently remarks, 'is an exit'.
The Servilia-Atia show has run and run. It was always going to require a grand finale, and, boy, did Servilia, with a little help from writer Scott Buck, provide it.
Besieging Atia's villa day and night, rain and shine. Endlessly pronouncing the same litany - "Atia of the Julii, I call for justice" - the while. Smeared in mud, sprinkled in ashes. It looks as though Servilia - tortured, broken, bereaved Servilia - is out for the count.
But not so. Not so. Servilia may be literally on her knees, but she has a final card to play, and perhaps for the first - certainly for the last - time she truly trumps Atia with it.
How exactly? Well, you'd have to be a Roman to feel, as Atia does, the full force of the reversal that Servilia devises, but it basically comes down to two devastatingly effective tricks: squalor and curses. Let's talk about squalor first.
Rome has no police force and a very limited system of courts. It is accepted that the easiest and most commonly taken route to justice is popular justice. What we'd call taking the law into your own hands.
All very well if you're powerful, what if you're powerless? Well, you can seek the help of a powerful friend - or take the squalor route.
'Squalor' is a Latin word. It means, as you'd expect, dirtiness. In this case, very deliberate dirtiness. Letting your hair grow and tangle, ('summittere capillos' in Latin), putting on filthy clothes, ('vestem sordidam habere') and then displaying yourself in public were two ways of exciting pity and indignation in those around you. Pity for you, indignation against the person who had wronged you. They were ploys to arouse feelings of anger and hurt and revenge and then direct them against a specific target.
The mantra - "Atia of the Julii, I call for justice" - was the next stage of the process. It identified who the target of those feelings should be. The more often you pronounced the mantra, the more intensely those feelings were directed toward that target. Using a mantra against someone in this way was so common that there was a set Latin phrase for it: 'fidem implorare'.
The net result is that the target suffers what is for a Roman the most terrible of all fates: loss of face. The public mood turns against them. Paradoxically it is not the mud-smeared, unkempt Servilia who is humiliated by her vigil, but the coiffed, ever-immaculate Atia. It is Atia's dignity that has been lost.
And that's what ultimately brings her to the door, not the tedium of listening to Servilia's endless repetitions. Atia wants to face down her accuser, while she still has some face to save.
And so she appears and Servilia seizes the moment. All Romans, high-born and low, educated and illiterate, took curses with tremendous seriousness. (We know that both professional curse-pronouncers and curse-lifters made a very healthy living in Rome.)
Servilia's curse is delivered directly, eyeball to eyeball. It is terrible, withering, comprehensive, and sealed with her own blood. It doesn't come worse than that -- it shakes Atia to the core.
Does she have reason so to fear it?
Documentarian and historian Jonathan Stamp is a former Executive Producer in the BBC History Department and acted as Consultant and Co-Producer on Rome.
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Rome Logo Tee
An HBO SHOP(SM) exclusive features a soft cotton construction with the Rome logo across the front.
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Rome Fact
The population of Rome is estimated at its
height to have been over a million people, and that no other city was again as populous for another 1800 years.
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"Death Mask"
