did anyone read the emperor books?
Has anyone read Conn Igguldens emperor books? I love the story and beleive they should make it into a movie and it'd be awesome. what do u all think?
shareI am on the third one now, Orcana. Vercingetorix was just revealed and I thought I'd pop on here and see what I could remember from this nicely done movie. I think that turning those four books into movies would be a massive project, like Lord of The Rings, if done the way Iggulden has written them, but I agree that it would be great to see them on screen. The only bad part about that idea though is the best part of the books: the detail. You know the smells and tastes and weather of ancient Rome. That is hard to translate onto the screen.
Conscience makes cowards of us all.
I have'nt read the emporer books but if your interested in a really good series around this time period try colleen mccullough master's of rome series. It starts from the time of marius and ends with caesar. The detail she ghoes into is unbelievable. She has clearly spent alot of time and effort researching this topic to get most of the facts as accurate as possible.
share[deleted]
Masters of Rome is very well-written as a story and it's ok in terms of its overall historical accuracy, but it has an awful conservative bias. I'm on book 3 so far and every popular reformer is portrayed as nothing more than an opportunistic "demagogue" who can't possibly genuinely favor democratic and egalitarian reforms but must only want to woo "the rabble" (who are apparently too stupid to have real opinions or to know what's good for them) so as to make himself a king or something. Whereas conservatives, though sometimes portrayed as personally greedy and flawed as individuals, are in general written sympathetically as having only the purest motives for their political views and actions. The portrayal of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and his supposed attempt to make himself a king was awful, he was written like a cartoon villain, and the whole thing just ruined the first book for me. I got deja vu when the author came close to doing the exact same again in the second book with the nasty portrayal of Publius Sulpicius Rufus, who was (surprise!) historically another popular reformer who was also brutally murdered by the conservatives for his reforms. Meanwhile Sulla's reactionary anti-democratic coup, meant to protect the interests of the Senate oligarchy and roll back a century's worth of democratic reforms, was portrayed as right and justified, with Sulla as some misunderstood tragic hero in the whole thing. But then when Marius, together with Cinna, marched on Rome afterward to undo Sulla's reactionary anti-democratic reforms, Marius was portrayed as nothing more than a bloodthirsty lunatic who was just out for power for its own sake. So it's ok for the optimates to march on Rome and kill their political enemies to protect their interests, but if the populares do the same thing in return then it's suddenly bad. In general the Marius-Sulla rivalry is portrayed as nothing more than a battle between two big egos out for personal glory with, especially in Marius's case, very little in terms of a wider political agenda.
Overall I like the series and i'm going to continue reading it, but the conservative pro-optimate and anti-popularis bias, the "Great Man" portrayal of history at the expense of wider sociopolitical context, and the disdainful elitist portrayal of the poor (sorry, I mean "the rabble", to use a term McCullough seems fond of), all put a bad taste in my mouth and have significantly dimmed my enthusiasm for it.
"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor."
- Voltaire