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God.” When Caligula sentences Marcellus to death, Diana takes the robe
and joins Marcellus, calling him her husband. As they walk out together
to the archery field to meet their ends, Caligula shrieks mockingly: “They’re
going to a better kingdom!” Senator Gallio salutes his son as he passes,
and Diana gives the robe to her Christian manservant, and asks him to
give it to Peter.
Ancient Background
The Robe alternates its action between two main locations, from the glittering
city of Rome to the dusty town of Jerusalem in the Roman province
of Judaea. The narrative time of the film is set in the period from approximately
ad 32 to 37, in the dynasty of the Julio-Claudian emperors, spanning
the final years of Tiberius’ reign (ad 14–37) and the beginning of
Caligula’s brief rule (ad 37–41) (Grant, 277–80). When the emperor
Augustus died in ad 14 after an influential forty-year reign, his successor
was Tiberius (born in 42 bc), the son of his last wife Livia, who encouraged
Augustus to adopt her son as a potential heir. The dynasty thus
begun was called the Julio-Claudian line, referring to both the Julian family
of Augustus through his great-uncle and adoptive father Julius Caesar,
and the Claudian connections of Livia and her first husband, Tiberius
Claudius Nero. In trying to ensure a succession of heirs who were closely
related to him, and engineering various marriages and adoptions among
his relatives, Augustus generated a complex and unsteady network of Julio-
Claudian familial relationships that are often difficult to sort out. The
Roman historian Tacitus begins his discussion of Tiberius’ reign with an
account of Augustus’ final years (Annales 1.1–4). After the untimely death
in 12 bc of Marcus Agrippa, his most loyal general and the husband of his
daughter Julia, Augustus began to rely more and more on Tiberius, Livia’s
older son. A serious and rather aloof man, Tiberius served Augustus well
on military campaigns and political assignments, and seemed content to
assist Augustus in preparing the two young sons of Julia by Agrippa, Gaius
and Lucius Caesar, as heirs to the Augustan throne.
However, Tiberius was dismayed when Augustus forced him to divorce
his beloved first wife, Vipsania, to marry the young widowed Julia, and
not surprisingly the new couple soon drifted apart. By this time, Julia was
tired of being a political pawn, so she began a series of flagrant erotic
affairs that caused her morally strict father to have her exiled in 2 bc.
Tiberius was also fed up with politics, and in 6 bc asked Augustus to allow
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