Human Stories in PBS’ ‘The Roman Empire’

If you like sex, violence and intrigue in your dynastic politics--and who doesn’t?--then PBS has a dandy four-part documentary for you: “The Roman Empire in the First Century.”

With narration by Sigourney Weaver, producers Margaret Koval and Lyn Goldfarb have whipped up a zesty, nicely paced, eye-catching rundown of the personalities, triumphs and agonies that gave the world its first superpower, whose dominion spread through Europe, North Africa, Britain, Greece and to the borders of Asia.

Various academics make brief appearances to explain the players and plays in down-to-earth terms.

Like Judith Hallett, professor of classics at the University of Maryland, explaining why the scheming of Antony and Cleopatra flopped: “Cleopatra did not enjoy a good press in Rome .... Cleopatra and Antony were cast as the leaders of the Evil Empire.”

Koval, whose documentary resume includes three episodes of the award-winning “The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century,” said the team’s goal was to provide a quality often lost in the retelling of the Roman Empire story: intimacy.

“Often filmmakers get distracted by the vast sweep of the Roman Empire and the relentless march of great names,” Koval said. “Our series tells the human stories associated with ancient Rome.”

One of those stories pits Caesar Augustus--who posed as a “family-values” politician while divorcing his wife and marrying his pregnant mistress--against the love poet Ovid, “Rome’s reigning poet of stolen kisses.”

To solidify his power, Augustus sought to convince influential Romans that he was restoring traditional mores. At first, Ovid was an annoyance but later a perceived threat.

As the documentary tells it, Ovid pushed too far with an explicit description of simultaneous pleasure: “When a man and woman collapse together, they both win. That’s the great prize.”

At a point in his reign when he saw plots and anarchy everywhere, the edgy Augustus found it expedient to exile the poet to a fly-besotted village on the Black Sea. The poet’s anguish is rendered through his writings in exile.

And if you thought the phenomenon of powerful people being irked at troublesome or embarrassing relatives started with Billy Carter, take a gander at Augustus’ daughter, Julia.

Clever, vivacious and an original feminist, Julia was so promiscuous that the people of Rome marveled that her five children actually resembled her husband. After one sex scandal too many, daddy gave her the boot.

If there is a downside to the series’ motif, it is that hearing snippets read from Ovid, Virgil, Seneca and others makes one crave more quotation and less narration. Sorry, Sigourney.

The series is helped by sumptuous photography and re-creations of historic events. The ambush and destruction of three Roman legions by German tribesmen in the Teutoberg Forest is particularly good.

Ever wonder what kind of fun and games went on at the Roman baths? It’s all here, in tantalizing detail.

While the series focuses on the military adventures, debauchery and power connivings of the ruling class, it does not forget the grim life of the un-noble Roman masses.

“Our notion of Rome bears [not] much relation to the Rome of everyday life,” said UCLA history professor Ronald Mellor, “because what is left today are the big public buildings and not the squalid hovels without plumbing, and without any kind of sanitary condition, that ordinary people lived in.”

The upper classes moved to the hills not for the view but to escape the noise and stink of that “incredible horde of people pressing together,” Mellor said.

There are characters here that even the boldest screenwriter couldn’t concoct: the crazy Caligula; the disfigured Claudius and his treacherous, adulterous, murderous wife; the fiddle-loving Nero; the British warrior queen Boudicca; and the carpenter’s son from occupied Judea who was executed by the Romans but started a charismatic movement that swept the world and the Roman Empire with it.

“Governing Rome,” Weaver tells us, “was like holding a wolf by the ears”--an understatement if ever there was one.

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“The Roman Empire in the First Century” premieres tonight at 8 on KCET with parts 1 and 2, with the remaining two hours to run next Wednesday. The station has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).