PhilPaine.com

Ray Steven­son as Titus Pul­lo and Kevin McK­idd as Lucius Vorenus

HBO’s Rome is a superb series. There are some his­tor­i­cal inac­cu­ra­cies: Octa­vian was ship­wrecked in his youth, but nev­er kid­napped, and he was not in Rome when Cae­sar was assas­si­nated. Nei­ther was Cicero. Cae­sar is shown offer­ing to give land in Pan­nonia to the 13th Legion, though Pan­nonia wasn’t in the empire at that time. But as far as pre­sent­ing Roman soci­ety, and the mores and behav­iour of Romans, the series is quite accu­rate. It quite prop­erly shows the casu­al vio­lence and bru­tal­ity of a soci­ety that was not informed by any real eth­i­cal prin­ci­plrs, but mere­ly by cus­tom, caste con­scious­ness, vengeance, and bar­baric con­cepts of “hon­our”. Much of our world remains like that, today, and it is a pro­found dis­tor­tion of his­tory to ignore it, as most his­tor­i­cal film and fic­tion usu­ally does. The real­i­ty of slav­ery and Roman sex­ual prac­tices are shown with rea­son­able accu­racy. The death of Cae­sar is shown as it is in Plutarch’s account, rather than Suetonius.

The act­ing is uni­formly superb. Kevin McK­idd and Ray Steven­son are bril­liant as the two cen­tral char­ac­ters, Roman sol­diers who find them­selves (a bit improb­a­bly) with some of the key polit­i­cal events of the time. The series jumps back and forth between their per­sonal con­cerns, and the machi­na­tions of the his­tor­i­cally known char­ac­ters. The series explores the role of women in Roman pol­i­tics, with fine per­for­mances by Pol­ly Walk­er as Atia of the Julii and Lind­say Dun­can Servil­ia of the Junii. Antony is well-played by James Pure­foy, espe­cially in the scenes show­ing the dis­in­te­gra­tion of his per­son­al­ity in Egypt. Tobias Men­zies is a delight as Bru­tus, reject­ing any influ­ence from the Shake­speare char­ac­ter in favour of a fine-tuned char­ac­ter study of some­one you might find today in Amer­i­ca’s Con­gress or the British Parliament. 

Max Pirkis as Octavian

But the per­for­mance that real­ly hit the mark was that of Max Pirkis, play­ing the young Octa­vian. This was only Pirkis’ sec­ond role (after play­ing a mid­ship­man in Mas­ter and Com­man­der) but he gave it an aston­ish­ing believ­abil­ity. The role was split with Simon Woods, who played Octa­vian as an adult, and man­aged to make the tran­si­tion con­vinc­ing. These per­for­mances were made pos­si­ble by excel­lent script­ing, and sup­ported by the best pro­duc­tion val­ues I’ve seen in any his­tor­i­cal series.

I strong­ly rec­om­mend Rome to any­one who is inter­ested in see­ing seri­ous his­tor­i­cal fic­tion on tele­vi­sion, rather than just an excuse for bat­tle scenes and stilt­ed speech­es. The fac­tual errors, such as they are, are mere­ly quib­bles. After all, nobody minds that Shake­speare had a clock chime in his Julius Cae­sar.