Talk:Masters of Rome

message: As a big fan of the series, I'm glad it has its own page. Since it is so much praised for its "meticulous research", I would very much like to read what historians have to say about it. I just watched an 8-part documentary (Ancient Rome: Power & Glory, Discovery Channel) that would turn every McCullough-nursed Rome buff into a "lies!!!"-screaming lunatic. This article would also profit from a few links.
I was looking for something really damning (like the best comments on imdb are usually the 'hate it' ones), but so far all I managed to find was an essay by Margaret Malamud (Historian) in "Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture". I'll have to pay for that one. Here is an except from a review:
"Most interesting here is the observation that these novels are essentially conservative: bloodlines determine social class, and correctly so; women are weak and subordinate; homosexuality is an identity and an indication of moral degeneration; eastern characters are effeminate and luxurious; and so on. [...] McCullough infantilizes her characters, producing upper class Romans who are all Id. Finally, the essay critiques the marketing of the novels themselves, and the ways in which the novels re-make Roman history into a supermarket Romance."
Malamud has a point there. But that's all about characterization and not the intricate backdrop that makes the series such a good and convincing read. ALu06 23:09, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I do hate to be anal, but McCullough observed that she wrote the novels from the point of view of those who actually lived during that time, not from our own modern perspective. She strove to avoid anachronisms. So yes, bloodlines certainly determined social class, or else Marius and Cicero would not have had such a time to get their consulships. Women were supposed to be weak and subordinate, though that didn't stop Aurelia, Cornelia Mother of the Gracchi, Fulvia, Servilia, and other women a patriarchal society saw fit to record, and not just for womanly virtue. Ancient Romans (in Caesar's time, at least) certainly viewed homosexuality as damning to a political career, and viewed Easterners as effeminate and luxurious, though I'd be delighted to hear Malamud explain how Mithridates VI was characterized as an effeminate pansy.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Black Sword (talk • contribs) 17:55, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reviews by historians? 

message: The article as currently written makes Sulla appear to be a member of the populares. Both historically, and in the context of the novels, this is false; Sulla was very much an optimate. However, the novels have some sympathy for his politics, as opposed to most other optimates portrayed. Not quite sure how to fix this in the article, where populares/optimates are mixed up with good guys/bad guys. Murr (talk) 00:02, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sulla’s Politics 

message: The article oddly concludes that it was unlikely in the years after publishing her last entry in the Rome series that McCullough would return to it given the macular degeneration she suffered before her death. Antony and Cleopatra, the last installment in the series, was published in 2007. Entries in the murder mysteries she wrote in the last years of her life were published in 2006, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013. She also published Bittersweet, a novel set in the 1920s, in 2013. McCullough died in 2015. According to an obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, "Her publisher at HarperCollins Australia, Shona Martyn, said McCullough had been dictating a sequel [to the novel Bittersweet], set around World War II, into an old-fashioned dictaphone but had only completed a third of the novel when she died." I infer that eyesight trouble did not prevent Colleen McCullough from writing and that the main reason she stopped writing novels about Rome in the period 2008-2015 is that she wanted to write about other subjects.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:844:4100:392E:8AD:DA3A:2283:AF4D (talk) 04:32, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Macular degeneration as preventing further entries in Rome series