The Gender Gap: Religious Spaces in HBO's Rome

J. Mira Seo

University of Michigan

The creators of HBO’s Rome have discovered that historical authenticity is sometimes more exotic and titillating than fabrication.  The series depicts many different types of religious activity to reveal the complex interweaving of religion into every facet of life, both domestic and official.  Not surprisingly, the rituals the series features mostly involve blood, bloodshed, or at least murderous intentions; they seem chosen more for visual and emotional effect than to provide a careful survey of Roman religion.  Fair enough—the show’s creators earn their audience’s thrills with effective reproductions of certain Roman religious rituals, and if they emphasize the differences between ancient religious practices and contemporary concepts of religion, this is clearly more desirable than offering a false picture of similarity.  Nonetheless, though most religious rituals are treated fairly accurately, the instances in which women perform private devotionals seem more historically problematic.  This gendered inaccuracy in representing religious performance should be assessed against historical data about religious practices, and the narrative and cultural aims of the series. 

This paper analyzes the religious rituals associated with men and women in the series (e.g. Jupiter Optimus Maximus in Caesar’s triumph, Cybele with Octavia), and how their depiction creates an impression of gendered space.  Though the male and female characters often interact socially and within the family in environments relatively unmarked by gender (Atia’s grand parties, Pullo’s frequent presence in Vorenus’ home), this impression of open male-female relations is counterbalanced by the strongly segregated religious behaviors that men and women exhibit.  Space, therefore, is defined by religious activity perhaps more than by physical separation of the sexes.  In order to maximize the potential of female characters to participate in the events of the narrative, the show’s creators have minimized the historically accurate separation of men and women physically and socially—it would seem more alienating and create more narrative problems for the contemporary Western audience if Roman daily life appeared as patriarchal and segregated as it historically was—and yet, the show does carve out distinct spaces through gendered depictions of religious practice. 

Broadly speaking, the show associates women with personal, individualized devotional practice and men with public-official ritual.  Servilia’s curse tablets and Octavia’s retreat to Cybele’s cult mark their reactions to emotional events and aim to effect individual goals through an intimate association with divinity, whereas when Caesar purchases favorable auguries, he is revealed as manipulating state institutions while totally unencumbered by personal faith.  Though the latter case is less historically problematic, in the case of female devotionals, Rome veers perilously close to assimilating Roman religious practice to contemporary ideas of personal faith.  The show’s simplistic and anachronistic dichotomy between personal faith and public display seems to ignore contemporary scholarship on the nature of Roman religion as a system that organizes and is constituted of cultural meaning.  Nonetheless, the pressures of contemporary entertainment may explain this infelicity: we can see an interplay between the series’ need to integrate its female characters into the action while maintaining an impression of cultural and historical difference by segregating the women from the men through their religious practices.