Sinful Sunday: Domitian and Queer Empowerment in "Those About to Die"
The Peacock peplum series brings imperial queerness out of the closest and renders subtext into text, with results that are intoxicating, terrifying, and brutal.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
I must admit that I was very wary when I heard about Those About to Die, the new gladiator-themed series streaming on Peacock. To begin with there was the fact that it was being released on one of the less-prestigious streamers. I mean, not to be cruel or dismissive, but Peacock is not particularly well-known for its prestige productions. Then there was the fact that Roland Emmerich was going to be directing several episodes. The man might have a distinct sense of blockbuster style, but I’ve yet to see one of his movies that makes a great deal of narrative sense, and the ones set in the distant past (most notoriously 10,000 B.C.) are so bizarre that I always find myself by turns amused and bemused.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I started watching the series and found that not only is it a pretty good drama in its own right; it also features one of the most compelling and unequivocally and unapologetically queer villains I’ve ever seen in a sword-and-sandals setting. Amidst all of the charioteers, crime lords, daring heroines, and enslaved gladiators, one character captured me from the moment he appeared: Domitian, the younger son of the aging emperor Vespasian (played with suitable Shakespeearen gravitas by Anthony Hopkins). It’s clear from the moment we meet him that he’s queer, and not just because he’s snarling and campy; he explicitly has a male lover, the slave boy Hermes (Alessandro Bedetti).
There’s something deliciously decadent about Jojo Macari’s performance in the role. I’ve heard a lot of reviewers say that he’s channeling Joaquin Phoenix from Gladiator, but I think what he’s doing is both more interesting and ultimately more compelling than that. With his thin, almost reptilian features, his bulging eyes, and his perpetual sneer, he always seems ready to burst out of the frame. I applaud Macari for being willing to lean into the villainy and the snarling camp of it all rather than going for something more restrained. He’s Caligula and Nero and Commodus and Crassus all rolled into one.
Unlike his hirsute brother Titus, who’s more skilled on the battlefield than on the Palatine, Domitian has a sharp sense of how power operates in Rome. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that he uses this knowledge against his brother as much as he does for him, since he yearns to be the one to sit atop the political hierarchy. Whereas Titus is (for the most part) a man of honor and firm principles–though he continues to conduct an affair with the exiled Judaean princess Berenice, all while keeping her people in bondage–Domitian always has his eye on the main chance. Even though he is passed over by his father when it comes time to declare an heir, he bides his time and, when the chance comes to assassinate his brother and ascend the throne he takes it. There’s something remarkably chilling and exciting about the final scene of the season, in which he at last sits in the emperor’s seat at the newly-inaugurated Colosseum, his eyes gazing intensely into the camera, secure at last in his power and his might. Queerness has triumphed, but at a terrible and bloody cost.
And there’s no question that Domitian is also exceedingly bloodthirsty. He loves the pulse of blood in the arena, and he is one of the motivating forces behind the construction of the Colosseum. Unlike Titus, for whom bloodshed is always a means to an end and to be avoided when possible, Domitian seems to savor it to an almost obscene degree. More to the point, he also realizes that entertaining the masses is a key element of the Flavian hold on power. To use a well-worn aphorism, they want bread and circuses, and they will worship the one who gives it to them. Yet even here his power is challenged, particularly by the Numidian Kwame (Moe Hashim), and Domitian derives sadistic pleasure from trying to destroy him. In what is perhaps the grimmest and most horrifying scene in the entire season, he even goes so far as to have a child executed just to spite the upstart gladiator who has, against all the odds, managed to secure his freedom.
Throughout the season, it’s unclear to what extent Domitian has ever had true feelings for anyone. The closest he comes to any sort of meaningful connection is with his slave boy Hermes. There are some remarkably tender moments between the two of them, and for his part Hermes does seem to have some genuine feelings for his master. In particular, he intervenes at crucial moments in order to keep Domitian from giving in to his darker, more sadistic impulses. Bedetti endows his character with a certain twinky, doe-eyed innocence, and as a viewer you can’t help but feel sorry for him.
Because unfortunately for Hermes, Domitian (like many patrician Romans) doesn’t see their bond as one of equals, still less does he feel any real loyalty to his lover. When he catches Hermes having sex with another slave, he proceeds to have the other boy brutally killed, then imprisons Hermes himself and later has his tongue cut out so he can’t reveal Domitian’s own scheme to overthrow his brother. These are clearly not the actions of a devoted lover, but they are definitely those of a Roman noble who believes that his slaves really are his property and that his feelings for them will always be dictated and determined by their power difference.
This tragic queer love story–if we can call it that–reaches its dreadful climax when Domitian has Hermes tied to the brow of a ship and set afloat in the Colosseum. It’s only when the poor boy has his head bitten off by a crocodile that the cruel Flavian shows even the slightest bit of remorse, with his jaw clenched so tightly you can almost hear his teeth cracking. It’s this moment, more than any other, that shows us (and Titus) just what kind of a person Domitian really is and how rotten his soul has become. As the emperor pithily puts it, the goddess Discordia seems to live inside of him. Given that Domitian is willing to throw his own lover to the crocodiles for the glee and delight of the masses, is it any wonder that he then proceeds to have his brother killed? (To be fair, he doesn’t do the deed himself–that falls to his ally Tenax (Iwan Rheon, a crime boss from the streets–but he does savor the moment and lets Titus know that he takes a great deal of pleasure in bearing witness to his death).
Now, it has to be said that the version of Domitian in Those About to Die seems to have more in common with Nero than it does the real man, at least in terms of his personal life. After all, Nero was well-known for his love of the slave boy Sporus, who he supposedly had castrated so he could more thoroughly resemble his late wife Poppaea, and he was even said to have married him. He was said to have done the same with Pythagoras. It doesn’t take a great deal of squinting to see shades of this in Domiitan’s bond with Hermes, a boy who, like so many others in the Roman world, becomes nothing more than a dispensable hole and a mouth, something to be used and then thrown aside.
Obviously, Domitian partakes in a long tradition of depicting the Roman imperial elite as decadent and cruel monsters, prone to indulging in all of their effeminate and debauched sexual appetites. It’s thus not surprising that many have taken the show to task for being both unoriginal and homophobic in its choice to partake in a particularly pernicious form of queer representation. For me, though, that’s precisely what makes this Roman emperor so refreshing. Rather than going the subtextual route as so often been the case, Those About to Die lets Domitian’s freak flag fly. He loves boys, and he doesn’t care who knows it. While it’s clear that sacrificing Hermes to the torment of the arena has cost Domitian dearly, the fact that he now sits at the top of the Roman state surely means that it’s only a matter of time before he finds another object of his affection.
To see someone like Domitian revel in his queerness and his villainy is a pleasure in and of itself. It’s a reminder that gay people have every right to inhabit all sorts of roles, both as sinners and saints. Just as importantly, as I’ve written before, there’s something strangely and intoxicatingly empowering about figures like Domitian. Lest we forget, we live in a world in which queer people are once more faced with persecution, both legal and otherwise. Our rights are constantly under threat by those in power, whether in state legislatures or the Supreme Court itself. We are, once again, at the whim of a fickle populace who may yet return deeply queerphobic conservatives to power. Domitian provides us, for at least the ten episodes of Those About to Die, with the fantasy that power is in our hands to do with as we wish.