HBO's Rome in Retrospect

I have long had a keen interest in media depicting ancient Rome, with HBO’s telelvision series, Rome, something I return to again and again, like a moth to the flame, because it has it’s good moments, but overall it isn’t very good at all. It’s kind of a mess, and it doesn’t know exactly what it wants to be. Whereas almost all media about Rome puts the focus on the Roman aristocracy, and this show does that, too, with its historical focus on the fall of the Roman republic via Julius Caesar’s ascention and assasination, and via the rise of the first emperor Augustus, it also gives us a look at the common man via characters, Roman centurions, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. We get to watch Kevin McKid as Lucius act out a rather boring stoic masculinity and Ray Stevenson as Pullo act out a sort of brutish simple man. It’s okay. It’s fine, really, but I have to admit something about it bothers me, these two roles being not all that interesting, but my heavens, they are downright awful roles compared to Ciarán Hinds’ portrayal of Julius Caesar. The man is Caesar, like they brought him back from the dead. When I think about Caesar it is Hinds’ face I see in my mind’s eye.

I recommend this series mostly because in terms of something getting at the grit and grime of Roman life, I don’t think anything else even comes close. I often have the daydream that I can time-travel back to ancient Rome and walk around for a while, and inevitably I wonder, would I even survive one single day in ancient Rome, me being a comparatively soft American? How would I clip my nails? What if I got a splitting headache? But what I really love about imagining this era is its lack of antibiotics, that everything is for keeps. That’s what I have trouble imagining. Death is so common, as in, it is just a normal part of day-to-day life, and we American’s don’t face that at all, and something about that is dishonest, while simultaneously, when these Romans go ahead and decide that suicide is the appropriate action, contemporary sensibilities dictate that this is always the wrong course of action, so there’s a real conflict there, a real conflict of understandings, and it flows from antibiotics, I think. Without antibiotics, things would be retored in a heartbeat.

The Roman way is much more honest, because we as American’s are culturally forced to agree that all people should whither away with bed sores in nursing homes, because we push the dying into their own special homes mostly because we want to pay other people to deal with it. Surely because we don’t want seeing it to shatter our precious illusions. It seems to me that Rome probably had far fewer illusions about things. It seems much more honest.

I also recommend this series if you’re keen to see Polly Walker’s beautiful tits. They are spectacular.