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Ghosts at Cockrow
Inside the Episode
With Jonathan Stamp
So there it is. Octavian, it turns out, is Michael Corleone. He has, as promised, made something completely legitimate of
the family business and has outwitted, or eliminated, all those who stood in his way. He has paid Michael's price of friendlessness and solitude into the bargain. The analogy looks complete.
Well, yes and no. For me there's a crucial difference in the close-up that dominates the Triumph sequence with which 'Rome' reached its climax in the final episode. There's a satisfaction there on Octavian's face, a sense of self-justification, of pride in achievement, that is completely missing from that unforgettable shot at the end of Godfather II. Of Al Pacino alone in his chair, alone in his room, alone in his lakeside house. Pacino is brooding on what he's lost, not celebrating what he's gained. Pacino's story ends in pathos, Octavian's in what is, at least to us, perverse pride.
It's another character on the Triumph podium that carries the pathos. And that, of course, is Atia.
Now, I suspect that I'm like many other 'Rome' lovers in having a soft spot for Atia. Resilient, bitchy, witty, vulnerable Atia. But this was, of all her moments, my favorite.
As the effigies of Antony and Cleopatra bobbed past her in the Triumphal parade the camera crept in on Polly Walker's face. It's a truly great close-up, so much being said with so little. Ineffable sadness. She's the one who, at her moment of achievement, is mourning what she's lost.
'Rome' has had a burden to carry from the outset. How do you take a world that is so mythic, so smothered in so many layers of invention and re-invention, and make it live? How do you evade the clichés of HollyRome, all white pillars and white togas? How do you write dialogue for legends like Caesar and Antony, dialogue that isn't 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' or 'Et tu, Brute?'
All of us who worked on the show have wrestled with this. None of us would claim that we have always succeeded.
But that moment at the Triumph is one that works for me. The details are right, the feel unobtrusively authentic. Even the late afternoon light on the Cinecitta backlot is thoroughly and uniquely Roman. And at the heart of it is a reaction that is human, timeless, moving and real.
Above all, real. History, however it is told, is in the end the story of real people who have gone before us. And that, to me, is its enduring value.
Anyone who has followed my blogs will have seen me quote this passage already. But I cannot find better words with which to end. It's by a British historian called GM Trevelyan.
"The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today...The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once on this earth, once on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow".
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
Up to 70% of the population of Rome is estimated to have been comprised of either slave or freed slaves.
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"De Parte Vostro (About Your Father)"
