The rise and fall of Rome’s first family

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

It has been 50 years since I, Claudius, the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels of Roman elite intrigue and excess, first aired. Rewatching it, one ignores the slightly shaky sets to become absorbed in Jack Pulman’s magnificent Shakespearean script brought to life by a remarkable cast: John Hurt as a supremely decadent Caligula, Derek Jacobi’s seemingly hapless, though ultimately cunning title character, and, perhaps above all, Siân Phillips as Livia, Augustus’ manipulative Machiavellian-to-the-max wife, who will stop at nothing to preserve the interests of the state and Rome’s first family – which is much the same thing. The 12 episodes add up to a startling account of power politics, lust, and statecraft.

How Weimar’s democracy died

Victor Sebestyen’s Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy works well as a complementary volume to Katja Hoyer’s recent history of a city to be forever associated with democratic failure (and, given recent events, horribly timely, too). Sebestyen, born in Budapest and, among other things, the acclaimed biographer of Lenin, is an acute observer of political power, or the lack of it. He paints a vivid picture of interwar Germany – this is a history of Weimar Germany rather than Weimar itself – of what the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov described as the ‘dangerous glamour and worldliness, of tawdry cynicism, where art and riot flourished side by side’. This fine study’s 15-year span ends when Hitler becomes chancellor in 1933. We know the rest.

The old, weird America

Soon after the Second World War, the American avant-garde filmmaker Harry Smith felt a need to compile his collection of commercial 78 rpm recordings made by an eclectic cast of all but forgotten musicians – black and white, male and female, of folk, blues, and spirituals – in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The result was the sprawling Anthology of American Folk Music, first issued in 1952, one of the greatest of all 20th-century musical projects, and certainly one of the most influential.

Music critic Greil Marcus thought it captured the ‘old, weird America’ in which Scots-Irish hillbillies, itinerant African Americans, and Louisiana Cajuns preserved and reinterpreted their ancient musical traditions. Dock Boggs’ Sugar Baby conjures up a landscape of guns and hooch; Blind Willie Johnson’s John the Revelator is a call-and-response for the end of the world; while Le Vieux Soulard et Sa Femme by the husband-and-wife team of Cléoma Breaux and Joseph Falcon is a bewitching, discomforting tale of love and loss. And there is so much else.

Among those influenced by the Anthology was the young Bob Dylan. He sought to recreate its sound-world and cover some of its songs with The Band, similar adherents to the mythology of Americana, when he retreated to rural New York to record the Basement Tapes, just as the rest of the rock fraternity draped themselves in hippiedom. This timeless world was repackaged again in 1997 by Smithsonian Folkways, complete with a facsimile of Smith’s madly epigrammatic summaries of each song, which read like poems by Jorge Luis Borges.