Here's a serious review by Dr Anna
Clark who teaches
Roman history at
Christ Church College,
Oxford:
(Having watched the entire series, I recommend the Bananae episode as most fun and more or less family friendly. Spoiler alert: it's all about your first taste of a banana.)
If you criticise this sitcom for its historical inaccuracies, you're missing the point. Plebs transfers 21st-century characters and preoccupations to ancient
Rome – and finds humour in that mismatch. It's explicitly not trying to be educational: the writers seem proud of their anachronisms.
I was surprised, then, to find some accuracies here and there. It's set in 27BC, when
Rome really did feel like the centre of the universe (to the
Romans at least). The main characters –
Marcus, Stylax and their slave Grumio – live cheek by jowl in rented rooms, overseen by a dodgy landlord. From what the ruins of Pompeii tell us, this seems to be how many people lived, though I suspect actual
Roman landlords were much less pleasant.
Each episode picks out a theme that plays to all the usual
Roman stereotypes, such as gladiators and orgies. I was glad to see that they didn't have the gladiators fighting in the Colosseum, as it wasn't built until decades later. As for the orgies, we don't know much about what actually took place, apart from the odd lurid account by an emperor. I've never heard of cage-fighting going on, but that might just be my ignorance.
The notion of the boys having a slave is not unreasonable; as to whether they would have been nice to him, we can't really say. Relationships did develop with trusted slaves:
Cicero freed
his, for example. With
his deadpan delivery, Grumio is a lot like Baldrick in Blackadder. In the first episode, a young British woman, Cynthia, and her slave move into the boys' rooming house. It's hard to believe that Britons really would have been hanging around in
Rome in 27BC –
Britain didn't become
part of the
Roman Empire until AD43 – but they're clearly riffing on the idea of backpacking Britons with guidebooks. It's possible that a woman of status could have lived alone in ancient
Rome, but she would have
had a much larger retinue.
I rather enjoyed seeing
graffiti on buildings. I'm researching
Roman graffiti at the moment. It was a much more widespread practice then, rather than a social nuisance. But the
graffiti that has been found on the walls of
Roman brothels, taverns and houses – "I screwed so and so", "This is how much you pay for a prostitute" – resonates with today. That's exactly the effect Plebs is going for: to make us feel that in the course of human
history, nothing much has changed.