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- Notable Sandwiches #117: Mettbrötchen

- How to Stay Alive and Horny Under Authoritarianism

- When the Roman Empire is your Roman Empire

NONE | NOV 15, 2024, 1:02 PM EST | SOURCE

Notable Sandwiches #117: Mettbrötchen

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, marching alongside my long-suffering and brilliant editor David Swanson, bring you the ups and downs of Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a German sammie: the Mettbrötchen.

We at the Sword and the Sandwich are taking a mental health break for two weeks after this column. And while I’m not saying this latest sandwich was the tipping point… I’m also not not saying that.

“Germany's Raw Pork Sandwich Isn't As Scary As You Think,” argued an article by Crawford Smith in Tasting Table, from last year. I beg to differ, CRAWFORD. Your two last names don’t intimidate me. On the other hand, this sandwich—raw, minced pork meat on a bread roll, often adorned with diced raw onion and spiced (German style!) with salt and pepper—scares the hell out of me.

Even worse, in the postwar heyday of Germany adopting the kitschy kitchen craftiness of its American and European peers, the preferred way of serving this confection was in the form of a “Mettigel”—“Mett” being the Germanic root of our word “meat” but now referring exclusively to raw, ground pork meat, and “igel” meaning “hedgehog.” In any fashionable West German cocktail party from the 1950s to the 1970s, you could expect to see one of these fuckin’ things:

Aaa! It’s a raw meat and onion monster.

Fresh from the land of Struwwelpeter and other horrors, the Mettigel is going to haunt me for some time to come.

The Germans, I’m sure, have evolved some terrifyingly efficient standards regarding raw pork consumption—for one thing, it’s illegal to sell Mett except on the day of its production. Around the world, trichinellosis, a pork-borne, parasitic worm that takes root in your body and then just hangs out until slowly killing you, has certainly dropped precipitously. That being said, there’s a whole gang of bacteria—from campylobacter to salmonella, shigella, clostridium perfringens, and the pig-friendly yersinia enterocolitis that makes the prospect of eating raw-pork on a bread roll seem decidedly not worth it. (Our brave counterparts at Sandwich Tribunal did take the plunge and seem to have survived it OK. Which I’m grateful for, because Jim Behymer is a treasure.)

There aren’t a ton of sources concerning the Mettbrötchen’s origins (read: lazy Google trawls produced little fruit and I still don’t read German), but the word itself is quite old; in Old Saxon, spoken circa the 8th to 12th centuries, meti just means “food.” And maybe this is apt! Not all food is appealing, or safe. Not all food is created equal.

My unremitting hostility to the Mettbrötchen may seem uncalled for. Ungenerous, even. What care I if Swabians and Bavarians feast on their raw-pork hedgehogs in between swigs of gluhwein and weissbier? For now I’m trapped in America, for several complicated reasons (mostly: as a disabled person, I need a support system, and no one wants disabled, unemployed immigrants), so why not just let people enjoy their adorable lean mince critters and stop being such a snoot about it?

Well, partially it’s because all those links to food-safety articles I posted above come from government sources. The FDA, foodsafety.gov, the CDC. And the guy who’s just been appointed by our incoming monster president to head these agencies is none other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose face, incidentally, resembles nothing so much as a slab of uncooked pork. And whose brain has famously harbored worms.

Mettbrö

I’m pissed off, and I’m scared. It’s good to know what’s in your food, from bacteria to additives. It’s good not to drink water that’s full of lead (and to know there’s some recourse if you do), or to drink milk with reasonable confidence that it’s been pasteurized, and therefore isn’t chock-full of tuberculosis (and chalk, formaldehyde, and plaster of paris, and pus). It’s good not to eat confectionaries tinged with arsenic. It’s good to eat meat with the modest assurance that it won’t contain human limbs, debilitating disease, or embalming chemicals (cf the “embalmed beef” scandal following the Spanish-American war). It’s been good, most of my life. And I never even realized it—because a basic sense of safety, of met needs, is the platform from which we can do things like write, and create art, and love, and live fully.

Last week, in anticipation of this precise moment, I read Deborah Blum’s electrifying The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, about the political and scientific crusade to pass the Pure Food Law of 1906, which eventually led to the creation of the FDA. It’s an excellent book, and part of its excellence—beyond exploring the life of pioneering and eccentric food chemist Harvey Washington Wiley—is its detailed chronicle of the ways untethered capitalism is fundamentally indifferent to human life. It puts paid to the idea that the “invisible hand of the market” will magically solve problems like poisoned milk so widespread it gave rise to the diagnosis of “cholera infantum,” a term which is now obsolete because people worked very hard to make lives matter more than profits. But for a very long time it was profitable to put formaldehyde in milk, and profitability mattered more than infant deaths. Left to their own devices, the creators of this sort of product would never have stopped for a second. Making pure and unpoisoned food a niche for the rich is an atrocity, from which unfettered capitalism is uniquely ill-equipped to save us.

Illustration from The Jungle

Or, as Upton Sinclair put it in The Jungle, a didactic socialist novel outlining the terrible fate of immigrant meat-packing workers almost solely referred to now for the absolute gross-out it delivered to American readers, and the aid it gave in the push for the Pure Food Act of 1906:

“There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”

And to this grim state of being we shall return, most likely, with corporations running even more rampant than they already are. Given Kennedy’s priorities, the new administration’s first act will most likely be an attack on vaccinations, another world-historically beneficial fin-de-siecle innovation victimized by its own success. Bring Back Cholera Infantum. Measles For All.

The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about deadly serious extremism and serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with

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Maybe I’m just jealous of the Germans, whose pork is safe enough to consume raw, free from borax or ratflesh. Maybe I’m just scared of any bacterium that starts with yersinia. Maybe I’m already overwhelmed by the absolute firehose of shitty information coming my way, with the precise intent to confuse and demoralize opponents, and the belly-up rollover presented by the current one. I should be used to this by now. I lived through it once already! But it’s really not any nicer the second time. In fact, all evidence points to the notion that it’s going to be significantly worse. I’m a listless blowfly in a dying beast, getting sick off the effluvia of its rotting flesh.

So forgive me if I find Mettbrötchen distasteful. I haven’t eaten raw pork (although I’ve sampled steak tartare in Paris, in sunnier times), and maybe it’s delicious. I wish the best to the Mett-eaters across the Atlantic, to the hygienic practices within the Schengen line, to the idea that somewhere there are still places where kids can drink milk and water and eat bread and meat with relative safety, and even insouciance. There should always be such places. I hope someday to return to living in one.

In conclusion, given that my state right now is like so,

I need to chill out until I’m at this level:

Now I’m going to retreat and play ungodly amounts of Stardew Valley while telling everyone I’m writing my novel. Sometimes you need to put yourself on hold to survive. But I’ll be back soon, and I’m with you for as long as I last on this long and shitty road. I love you all!

Until soon,

Talia

This article was downloaded from https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich/archive/notable-sandwiches-117-mettbrotchen/ at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:24 PM EST.

NONE | NOV 12, 2024, 1:02 PM EST | SOURCE

How to Stay Alive and Horny Under Authoritarianism

Sophia Parnok (1885-1933) was born in Taganrog, Russia—Anton Chekhov’s hometown, on the sea of Azov—two decades or so before her country exploded. Born into a hyper-educated, assimilated Jewish family, she grew up to be a hyper-educated, assimilated Russian Jew, and, by the age of twenty-one, had dedicated herself to the vocation she would spend her entire life following: writing extremely horny lesbian poetry.

Parnok was the gayest voice of Russia’s Silver Age. She had freaky, luminous, magnificent eyes, and often wore suits. She was married to a man so briefly that, after leaving him in 1908 to take up with one of her many female lovers, she told him, “I know that my leaving you won't bring me anything good in the sense of public opinion, but I also know very well that as soon as I have my first real success, everyone who has turned their backs to me will turn again and acknowledge me with polite smiles on their faces. Therefore, I really don't care whether I see their backs or their faces."

Thanks to an extraordinarily thorough account of her various liaisons—and how they corresponded to shifts in Parnok’s modes of expression—by the scholar and translator Diana Burgin, one thing is clear: Beginning in the decades leading up to the Russian Revolution, through World War I, the Civil War, the New Economic Plan, and the rise of Stalin, Sophia Parnok was unapologetically—and unceasingly, and reverentially—horny for women.

The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about deadly serious extremism and serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with

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She bedded Marina Tsvetaeva, a tragic poet whose flirtations with more existential and political topics led her to exile and suicide. She dallied with minor literati, with doctors, with composers, with older women in particular (her mother died when she was very young): actresses, widows, teachers of mathematics. These were not casual encounters. Her poems thrum with a love so deep it embodies agony, ecstasy, and earthy sensuality at once. As the Russian Civil War ignited she was writing an opera, and she kept writing it as fighting reached her town. She planted a kitchen garden during the war, in Crimea, and fought the dry earth for her sustenance. But her real sustenance was love. And her love, by virtue of being outlawed, was as revolutionary as even the most ardent revolutionaries.

I am thinking of her now because she succeeded, throughout one of the most strife-ridden periods of a strife-ridden country’s history, to retain her questing and loving soul. Her poems are not about revolution or hunger or exile or suffering. But they could hardly be any more dramatic, with their focus on love in a time of carnage. Parnok managed to keep her libido and capacity for love intact without the buffer of wealth or station or political affiliation to bulwark her safety. And she loved and lived with a passion so enormous it is worth resurrecting and recalling, even as she has faded into history.

Sophia Parnok and Olga Tsuberbiller, 1930s

I think of her now because we are once again living in an age where to be who you are, for many people, will become a crime. No one embodied being who you are more enthusiastically than Sophia Parnok, who was seducing women until the day she died, and mocked Stalin’s Five-Year Plans by saying she only approved of five-year plans for kissing. She kept writing, even when, after 1927, she knew she could only write for “the drawer”—the place for poems that threaten authoritarianism. But she kept on with her florid and defiant paeans to the broken heart and the inflamed heart alike.

I think of her and remember that sometimes just being—being, joyously, all that you are, despite injunctions against that being—is enough. But for a lagniappe, she happened to write about it, with transporting joy and eloquence (and horniness). So I’ve translated a few of her poems for you, to keep my hand in (it’s nice as a translator that Parnok doesn’t employ the elaborate internal rhymes that other Russian poets do). And to pay tribute to greatness in all its forms—little and large and loving.

“Margaret’s Garden” by Konstantin Korovin, 1910

Kitchen Garden

The insatiable salt-soil’s eaten everything.

I pulled out the gnarled roots

Of curling vines that grew here once—

This humped, dry, scabbed earth

Like a hospital patient’s lips…

A calloused foot rests on a shovel

Under a torn sole…

Hands run through with heavy fire

Like a skull crushed by irons.

She, the earth, resisted me

With some ancient vengeance, but I

With a pickaxe, pickaxe—just like that, like that

I will outstubborn your stubbornness!

And frisky peas will raise their frills

And trunks of corn rise steeple-high,

And a monstrous potbellied pumpkin

Will fling out its serpentine braids like a Gorgon.

Ah, no snowdrop or crocus smells so of spring

As the first cucumber from the garden!

In the sun my sharp pick glitters like a fang,

Around me earth-clods bob up, crumble,

And a sea-breeze runs down my neck

And the sweat froze in a thin chill snake

And never, never has the pride of possession

Burned so with bliss unclouded through me;

And away in the valley the almonds were fading

And the peaches bloomed in their place.

Огород

Все выел ненасытный солончак.

Я корчевала скрюченные корни

Когда-то здесь курчавившихся лоз, —

Земля корявая, сухая, в струпьях,

Как губы у горячечной больной...

Под рваною подошвою ступня

Мозолилась, в лопату упираясь,

Огнем тяжелым набухали руки, —

Как в черепа железо ударялось.

Она противоборствовала мне

С какой-то мстительностью древней, я же

Киркой, киркой ее — вот так, вот так,

Твое упрямство я переупрямлю!

Здесь резвый закурчавится горох,

Взойдут стволы крутые кукурузы,

Распустит, как Горгона, змеи — косы

Брюхатая, чудовищная тыква.

Ах, ни подснежники, ни крокусы не пахнут

Весной так убедительно весною,

Как пахнет первый с грядки огурец!..

Сверкал на солнце острый клык кирки,

Вокруг, дробясь, подпрыгивали комья,

Подуло морем, по спине бежал

И стынул пот студеной, тонкой змейкой, —

И никогда блаженство обладанья

Такой неомраченной полнотой

И острой гордостью меня не прожигало...

А там, в долине, отцветал миндаль

И персики на смену зацветали.

(1924)

“What A Freedom” by Ilya Repin, 1903

Give me your hand, and let us enter our wicked paradise

Give me your hand, and let us enter our wicked paradise!...

In defiance of the plans of celestial industry and finance,

For us, May has returned in the midst of winter.

The green meadow is blooming,

The apple tree is all in blossom,

The fragrant boughs fan the earth, inclining

Towards an earth that smells as good as you do…

And butterflies make love in the air…

We are a year older, but it doesn’t matter, —

Old wine is a year older too!

And even more delicious are those dishes that mature…

My love, my gray-haired Eve! Farewell!

Дай руку, и пойдем в наш грешный рай

Дай руку, и пойдем в наш грешный рай!..

Наперекор небесным промфинпланам,

Для нас среди зимы вернулся май

И зацвела зеленая поляна,

Где яблоня над нами вся в цвету

Душистые клонила опахала,

И где земля, как ты, благоухала,

И бабочки любились налету…

Мы на год старше, но не все ль равно, —

Старее на год старое вино,

Еще вкусней познаний зрелых яства…

Любовь моя! Седая Ева! Здравствуй!

(1932)

“The Two Friends” by Tamara de Lempicka, 1923

Let Us Be Happy at Any Cost

Yes, my friend, happiness came into my life!

Now fatal weariness closes my eyes and soul.

Unrebelling, unresisting,

I weaken, and the bond slackens

That once cinched us so tightly.

The wind, unfettered, blows free and high, and higher,

Everything blooms and all is quiet —

Goodbye, my friend!

Can’t you hear?

I part with you, my distant friend.

«Будем счастливы во что бы то ни стало…»

Да, мой друг, мне счастье стало в жизнь!

Вот уже смертельная усталость

И глаза, и душу мне смежит.

Вот уж, не бунтуя, не противясь,

Слышу я, как сердце бьет отбой,

Я слабею, и слабеет привязь,

Крепко нас вязавшая с тобой.

Вот уж ветер вольно веет выше, выше,

Все в цвету, и тихо все вокруг, —

До свиданья, друг мой!

Ты не слышишь?

Я с тобой прощаюсь, дальний друг.

(1933)

“At the Dressing Table” by Zinaida Serebriakova, 1909

Yes, I am Alone

Yes, I am alone. At the hour of parting

You predicted orphanhood for my soul.

Alone as the first man in the universe

on the first day of creation!

But the vain oath of your anger

Is fated not only for me —

Those who are pure of soul confess

Orphanhood, too, do they not?

There is no one better and higher

Who would not, if only once, and grieving

Wince at that line of Tyutchev’s —

“How can another understand you?”

Да, я одна

Да, я одна. В час расставанья

Сиротство ты душе предрек.

Одна, как в первый день созданья

Во всей вселенной человек!

Но, что сулил ты в гневе суетном,

То суждено не мне одной, —

Не о сиротстве ль повествует нам

Признанья тех, кто чист душой.

И в том нет высшего, нет лучшего,

Кто раз, хотя бы раз, скорбя,

Не вздрогнул бы от строчки Тютчева:

«Другому как понять тебя?»

(1915)

This article was downloaded from https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich/archive/how-to-stay-alive-and-horny-under-authoritarianism/ at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:24 PM EST.

NONE | NOV 10, 2024, 7:02 PM EST | SOURCE

When the Roman Empire is your Roman Empire

Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where Talia and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.

— David Swanson

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Pedro Pascal in “Gladiator II”

In the Spring of 2000, six months before a presidential election that would rattle America’s foundations and alter its trajectory, Ridley Scott unleashed “Gladiator.” Starring Russell Crowe as general-turned-brawler Maximus, the film was lauded by critics and the public alike, cleaning up at the Oscars and kicking off a wave of Rome-mania. Over the last year or so, as we’ve been living through another nightmare election season, Roman fever has returned, and it’s about to crest with the release of “Gladiator II.”

Last fall, in the wake of a viral TikTok video, a New York Times headline posed the question: “Are Men Obsessed With the Roman Empire?” The answer turned out to “yes.” The reasons proffered included basic nerdiness, an increased preoccupation with masculinity, and the precarious state of the American empire. While I plead guilty to the first and third reasons, in my case there’s another: it’s a comfort and distraction in a time when I’m desperate for both.

“Gladiator II” is set right around the time that most historians date the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire, a topic I’ve been thinking and reading about a lot in the last few weeks, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with Scott’s new movie. My fascination with the subject began in college when I discovered The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius—a battered paperback edition translated by Robert Graves—and has ebbed and flowed over the decades, through histories, movies, novels, articles, and travel.

At the moment I’m working my way through English writer Tom Holland’s trilogy of books about the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire. I’m also in the midst of a rewatch of “Rome,” HBO’s bravura period epic from the early 2000s, and have recently returned to some of the classic sword-and-sandals extravaganzas from Hollywood’s GoldenCAge: “Spartacus,” “Ben Hur,” “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” “Quo Vadis.” As entertainment, they haven't aged particularly well, but this week they’ve provided some intangible relief.

“La morte di Cesare” by Vincenzo Camuccini, 1804

What really interests me is the history, so ahead of “Gladiator II,” I thought I’d put together a short pop culture syllabus of ancient Rome. By pop culture I mean that these picks are ostensibly fictional portraits of an empire that spanned continents and centuries.

If you want non-fiction, go back to the sources: The Twelve Caesars, which recounts the reigns of every ruler from Julius Caesar through Domitian in such salacious detail you may need a shower after reading it; Plutarch’s life of Julius Caesar; Caesar’s own accounts of his campaigns in Gaul; and the Annals and Histories by Tacitus. As for the end of things, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the standard. (If you’re anything like me, however, you’ll content yourself with an abridged edition—the original runs to seven volumes.)

If these older histories feel too stodgy and it’s contemporary non-fiction you’re looking for, I’m finding Holland’s trilogy both informative and wildly entertaining. Much like fellow popular historians Mary Beard and Adrian Goldsworth, Holland deftly renders complex political intrigue, and depicts the broader Roman world in all its seedy, earthy glory. I’d recommend the work of all three.

But we’re here to discuss fiction. The below recommendations include what I think are the best works of popular culture about ancient Rome from across the media spectrum: literature, film, theater, television. History moves linearly, so I’ve organized these selections in roughly chronological order, split into four different eras, and ending with “Gladiator II”. (Like a lot people—Shakespeare included—I’m most interested in the first era, when the Republic fell and the Empire rose.)

At worst the works below should offer the entertainment and distraction you need. And at best, they’ll spark an interest that sends you to Holland and Beard, and then pulls you back further to Suetonius and Plutarch. The Roman Empire was so sprawling as to encompass innumerable historical precedents and parallels for the present, and to warrant countless perspectives on its story. That’s why its attraction has never really waned, and why over two millennia after Octavian became Augustus, we’re still thinking about the Roman Empire.

The Decline of the Roman Republic

The Roman Republic’s foundation is usually dated to 509 and the overthrow of Tarquinus Superbus, the final king in a monarchy stretching back to Romulus. Between then and the fall of the Republic almost half a century later, the small city on the seven hills grew to become a global power. While contemporary accounts of the first 400 years of that stretch have been scanty, the final century is among the most well documented periods in ancient history.

Masters of Rome

Set: 110-27 BC

After conquering best-seller lists with The Thorn Birds, Australian author Colleen McCullough turned her gaze back in time with this seven-volume series, which opens with the rise of Gaius Marius in 110 B.C. Post-Suetonius, this was my introduction to the warlike Romans whose compulsion towards power paved the way for Julius Caesar—Marius, Sulla, and Pompey—as well as other figures whose import has been obscured in the glare of Caesar’s glory, like Clodius, Catiline, Crassus, and Cato. Meticulously researched and propulsively readable, McCullough’s books highlight the crucial role the women of Rome played in the political skullduggery that rocked the city for a century.

“Spartacus”

Set: c. 73 BC

Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic paved the way for “Gladiator,” and unlike other classic sword-and-sandal epics like “Ben Hur” and “Quo Vadis”—fictional tales in historic settings—”Spartacus” is based on an actual events, Tony Curtis’s Brooklyn accent notwithstanding. It’s a story of gladiatorial revolution that has inspired numerous works, including a fun Showtime series that nevertheless failed to reach the heights of HBO’s “Rome,” which arrived on screens several years earlier.

Cicero Trilogy

Set: 79-43 BC

A decade before he wrote the Vatican potboiler Conclave—coming to movie theaters this fall in a big-screen adaptation—Robert Harris told the story of Rome’s greatest orator through the voice of his personal secretary. As Tom Holland wrote in a Times review, Harris’s books tap into “what is perhaps the supreme fascination of ancient Rome: the degree to which it is at once eerily like our own world and yet profoundly alien.”

“Rome”

Set: 49-31 BC

Emboldened by the success of shows such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City, HBO swung for the fences with this blockbuster epic featuring all our favorites: Caesar, Brutus, Calpurnia, Marc Antony, Cleopatra, Cicero, Octavian. The primary protagonists are Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, a pair of Roman centurions who Caesar mentioned briefly in his personal writings. Here they’ve been given the Rosencantz and Gildenstern treatment and taken center stage, bringing viewers into the bowels of plebeian Rome, which we seldom see in more elevated tellings. Sadly, the series only lasted two season, but you can see the bones of HBO’s Game of Thrones in its scope and ambition.

“Julius Caesar”

Set: 46-44 BC

Based on the work of Plutarch, Shakespeare’s historical tragedy has become so embedded in popular culture that it’s difficult to tease out the fact from the fiction. So brilliant and sturdy are the bards’s words that “Julius Caesar” still resonates today: a 2017 production in Central Park depicting a contemporary, Trumpian Caesar was met with outrage. We’ll see if there are any upcoming revivals in the future, but for now it’s worth revisiting the 1953 version starring Marlon Brando as Marc Antony.

The Julio-Claudian Dynasty

In my opinion, no contemporary depiction of the Roman Empire’s first century compares to the classical works by Suetonius and Tacitus. Frankly, the heights of depravity achieved by Caligula, Nero, and the rest is so outrageous as to beggar believe—which is probably why no one has really taken a shot at it since 1977’s porny “Caligula,” starring Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren. The works of historical fiction included here, in contrast, take readers into the minds of two of the emperors rather than the bedrooms.

Augustus

Set: 50 BC

This epistolary novel by John Williams, which won the 1973 National Book Award, charts the life and career of arguably the most consequential figure in Rome’s history. “The portrait Augustus creates, refracted through not only (invented) letters but also journal entries, senatorial decrees, military orders, private notes, and unfinished histories,” Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in The New York Review of Books, “is at once satisfyingly complex and appropriately impressionistic, subjective.”

I, Claudius

Set: 41-54 AD

The BBC miniseries, starring a murderers row of Shakespearian actors, may have been a sensation when it aired in 1976, but it’s aged in a way that the 1932 novel by Robert Graves on which it’s based has not. According to “Sopranos” creator David Chase, who called it one of his favorite books, “when you're reading it, you want to go there every day. You want to follow events there, instead of the ones in your own life.”

Pax Romana

As the Gladiator-mad Romans knew all too well, when it comes to popular entertainment, blood and discord are a lot more popular than peace and tranquility. Maybe that’s why there have been so few enduring depictions of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty, whose so-called “Five Good Emperors” gave the empire a century of order and prosperity. Still, there have been a few: after the success of “Gladiator,” which starts at the end of this Golden Age, Hollywood released two forgotten features—”Centurion,” starring Michael Fassbender, and “The Eagle,” starring Channing Tatum—as well as the the Netflix Series “Those About to Die,” which debuted last summer and stars Anthony Hopkins as emperor Vespasian.

Memoirs of Hadrian

Set: 70 AD

Written in the form of letters from emperor Hadrian to his adopted son Marcus Aurelius, Marguerite Yourcenar’s revered epistolary novel is “a kind of trans-historical miracle,” wrote Joan Acocella in the New Yorker. “If you want to know what ‘ancient Roman’ really means, in terms of war and religion and love and parties, read Memoirs of Hadrian.”

The Decline and Fall

Things fall apart, even things as seemingly durable as the Roman Empire. Though its ultimate demise has been pegged to a number of dates—the Western Empire collapsed in 476, but the Byzantine empire lasted for another millennia—the transition from the enlightened rule of Marcus Aurelius to the despotic one of his psychopathic son Commodus is usually deemed the beginning of the end. It’s where Gibbon begins his story, but if that’s too heavy a tome to tackle, these movies at least give viewers a taste of things.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

Set: 180-190 AD

This 1964 costume extravaganza, starring Alex Guiness as Marcus Aurelius, Christopher Plummer as Commodus, and Sofia Lauren as Lucilla, might as well have been called “The Fall of the Hollywood Epic,” so emphatically did it bomb with audiences (it actually bankrupted the producer.) I still have some affection for it, especially Plummer’s chewy performance. The plot is so close to that of “Gladiator” that it must have been an inspiration.

”Gladiator”

Set: 180 AD

While it is set in the same milieu at “The Fall…,” Ridley Scott’s telling veers even further from the historical record. This is a Hollywood blockbuster, not a history lesson: the New York Times review said it “suggests what would happen if someone made a movie of the imminent extreme-football league and shot it as if it were a Chanel commercial.” Like lots of successful movies, it inspired a wave of inferior imitators, but that’s just a testament to its thrills.

Gladiator II

Set: 212 AD

Out November 22, this sequel to “Gladiator” is set two decades later, with Paul Mescal starring as Lucius, the Coliseum-bound son of Maximus. Connie Nielson returns as Lucilla, the real-life daughter of Marcus Aurelius, and the on-screen mother of the fictional Lucious. I haven’t seen it yet, but based on the trailer, Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger as co-emperors Geta and Caracalla deliver performances every bit as deranged as Joaquin Phoenix’s psycho turn as Commodus in the original.

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When the Roman Empire is your Roman Empire