In AD42 the Emperor Claudius made his grandmother a god. Born 99 years before, Livia Drusilla had lived through some of the most seismic events in Roman history. Her father, a patrician of sternly conservative opinions, had sided with the murderers of Julius Caesar in their attempt to save Rome’s traditional republican system of government from dictatorship. His death in battle at Philippi, and the terminal defeat of the republican cause, forced the young Livia and her husband, Tiberius Nero, to roam the Mediterranean as refugees. Only a general amnesty permitted their return to Rome.
Domina, a new eight-part drama from Sky, begins with this dramatic story. The collapse of Rome into civil war after the Ides of March is an episode familiar from
