Plebs: The Best Men

Water-Man is getting married, and since Marcus and Stylax are his closest friends, it's up to them to organise his stag do.

Stag dos in sitcoms are always a good opportunity to flesh out one or two secondary characters a bit, and this one does that nicely. I always enjoy seeing more of Water-Man, and it's nice to see Claudius (who sends out messages to all staff, so I guess he's the equivalent of the person who runs the staff mailing lists?) getting fleshed out a bit more as well. Is it wrong that I really liked the sound of the ghost tour of Rome? But then, I am interested in ancient ghost stories and Roman afterlife beliefs, so I guess it would be weirder if I didn't.

We also get to meet Stylax's new driving instructor, and I'm desperately trying not to be bothered by the fact traffic was banned in Rome during the day because I am enjoying those scenes a lot (I have a weakness for quirky driving lessons or tests - the best example of which has to be the Assassin's Guild final exam in Terry Pratchett's Pyramids). Balbus himself is a bit of a stereotype, but then, they all are, and the idea of him sleeping in his chariot after his wife throws him out is pretty funny.

Grumio spends much of the stag do high on henbane, which leads to some amusing images as he hallucinates chickens everywhere. Henbane was known as a hallucinogen called hyoscyamos in the ancient world (Pliny the Elder talks about its negative effect on the mind, as well as the fact it induces vertigo; Natural History 25.17) and probably was taken re-creationally, especially as ancient writers sometimes compared it to wine. Half the internet seems to believe the priestess of Apollo took it to inspire oracles (at Delphi, presumably) and claim Pliny as the source of this information, but since none of the sites I've looked at provide a reference to Pliny and our best information for the priestess at Delphi comes from Plutarch, who doesn't mention anything about drugs taken orally (lots of sweet-smelling incense is involved, according to Plutarch), I'm rather skeptical of that - though if anyone does know of a reference for it, let me know. I'm also ignoring the fact that neither any form of drug, nor prostitution was illegal in the ancient world, so there's no reason for the guards to be after Landlord for drug dealing.

I'm enjoying this second season of Plebs so far, and I really like the way modern analogies like the driving lessons continue to be mixed up with genuinely ancient plots, like Water-Man's father arranging a marriage for him because it will be good for business. My main quibble with these first two episodes is that we've seen hardly anything of the girls. It's probably too much to expect them to have stories and character development of their own beyond providing lust objects for the boys, but in these two episodes Metella in particular feels like she's been given a line or two just to justify paying the actress, and even Cynthia has only turned up for a few minutes to yell at Marcus. Hopefully they'll have a bit more to do in the next episode.

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