The Roman Empire lasted for nearly 1500 years. HBO’s Rome couldn’t make it to its third season. Like Firefly and Deadwood, it’s part of a rare cohort of prestige series from the early 2000s whose reputation rests entirely on a handful of episodes. A very large handful.
Twenty years after its debut, Rome endures as one of modern television’s most ambitious might-have-beens. It had a fantastic pedigree (John Milius was a co-creator) and its territorial ambitions were vast: the outdoor set at Italy’s Cinecittà Studios—the largest in television history—was practically a small city in itself, including a full-scale reproduction of the forum and various wealthy and poorer neighborhoods. This drove a cost of $9 million an episode, and ultimately the cost was what killed it.
Despite the title, its real genius was in its characters, not the city they lived in. Although we hang out with all the famous names of the late republic—Julius Caesar, his nephew Octavian (later the first emperor, Augustus Caesar), Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Cicero, Brutus—the real story is told through two different pairs of Romans, real figures on the fringes of history. Since so little is known about them, they can become what the series needs them to be: our guides through an unfamiliar world.
The first team-up is Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (the late, much missed Ray Stevenson), based on two actual legionaries mentioned in Caesar’s History of the Gallic Wars: he reports that Pullo and Vorenus were bitter rivals until Pullo was caught behind enemy lines and Vorenus rescued him.
Their growing bond of loyalty is Rome’s beating heart. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—or Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe—Vorenus and Pullo have front-row seats for tragedy. Pullo is described as “cheerful and brutish,” while Vorenus is a “sullen Catonian”: that is, a follower of Cato the Younger, who regarded Caesar as a tyrant. Pullo is pure id, while Vorenus is the superego weighted down by conscience. Since they’re both in Caesar’s 13th Legion, each of them will eventually have to pick a side. That may put a strain on their friendship.
The other pairing gives us a Dynasty-style family feud, only with more whip scars and attempted poisonings. Polly Walker plays Atia of the Julii, Caesar’s niece, fierce to her enemies and foolish in her affections. Her rival for her uncle’s attention is Servilia of the opposing Junii clan (Lindsey Duncan), Caesar’s longtime mistress and mother to the man who will eventually assassinate him.
Atia and Servilia are fire and ice, locked in an escalating deathmatch. Just as Vorenus and Pullo suggest what it’s like to fight in Rome’s wars, Servilia and Atia show us what’s at stake: not the survival of democratic rule, but the survival of families.
As Julius Caesar, Ciarán Hinds bestrides the series’ first season.
He’s droll and subtle when he needs to be, a tidal wave when people get in his way. After the Egyptians dispatch Pompey (Kenneth Cranham), mistakenly thinking it will please him, Caesar bellows: “He was a CONSUL of ROME!” Even if you don’t know what that means, you do by the way he says it.
Famous names orbit around him: a feckless Mark Antony (James Purefoy); a deceptively mousy Cleopatra (Lyndsey Marshal); Cicero (David Bamber), shown here not as the statesman of history books but a gutless politician; and Brutus (Tobias Menzies, who’s built a career playing upper-class twits).
Yet it’s a man who never existed, Caesar’s servant Posca (Nicholas Woodeson), who feels the most rooted and real. They bicker like old marrieds but their affection is real.
Most lethal of them all is young Octavian, a cub who will someday devour his keepers. In the first season he’s played with cold brilliance by Max Pirkis (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). The showrunners should have kept him in the role but they didn’t, and that was a bad move for a series already in trouble. Simon Woods takes over in the second season, playing the empire’s founder with all the brittle, blue-eyed earnestness of Liesl’s Nazi boyfriend in The Sound of Music.
Like The Sopranos that preceded it and Game of Thrones that followed, Rome relies on the patented HBO formula of multiple interlocking subplots. Caesar’s progress toward tyranny carries the others, and this gives the first season its dramatic heft. His absence is sorely felt in Season 2, which often gasps for a throughline and Flanderizes its characters into farces of their former selves.
The real forces guiding Rome are the unseen gods of Rome, who have apparently (in Caesar’s words) taken Vorenus and Pullo as pets. These two soldiers often nudge history forward without meaning to. In the second episode, “How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic,” he literally does just that. In later episodes, they compass the death of Pompey, the birth of Cleopatra’s son—she says it’s Caesar’s but we know better—and, most tragically, the side-by-side deaths of Vorenus’s wife Niobe (Indira Varma) and Caesar himself.
It’s here that the series becomes more than just a sexier I, Claudius. Beneath their tough hides, Vorenus and Pullo are badly damaged from years of service in Caesar’s wars. Today we have no trouble recognizing Pullo’s reckless behavior as PTSD. Vorenus’s wounds are camouflaged by a strict code of honor. After years apart, he desperately tries to repair his marriage to Niobe, unaware of the real reason he can’t: the baby she introduced as his grandson is her child by another man.
Niobe knows that Vorenus will kill her and the child if he finds out: when he finds out. Eventually it goes down, but not the way you think it will.
As with every TV series set in Rome, we are awash in a sea of British accents. But this is no drawing-room drama with togas. The producers wanted to show Rome as we now believe it really was: not a capital of gleaming marble, but an overcrowded inner city where even the finer quarters had pornographic graffiti on the walls.
Rome throws us into a boiling cauldron of melding cultures. Greek scholar-slaves, Jewish exiles, tradesmen from India and sub-Saharan Africa. Rome captures that world-spanning city in all its ugliness and garish thrills.
The series presaged Game of Thrones in its ability to make obscenities seem normal, if only because it was normal to the Romans. Although we come to love Pullo, we do watch him murder a slave and command his female slave Eirene (Chiara Mastalli) to take off her clothes. It’s no better among the quality. Atia idly orders her daughter Octavia (Kerry Condon) to submit her body to Pompey. Later, she sends her thirteen year-old son to lose his virginity in a high-class brothel, to a young sex worker who is barely older than he is.
The series shows us this behavior without excusing it, and it gives the story a bloody taste of reality. Even in their own time, Romans prided themselves more on their brute strength than their laws and aqueducts. The frequent passing shots of Romans at work—trading slaves, butchering hogs in the crowded streets—reveals a city that doesn’t apologize for bloodshed. This is how an empire gets made.
All of this promised an epic that was meant to unfold across five seasons. When the bills from Cinecittà came due, HBO blinked. Despite high viewership and massive cultural buzz—this was back when the job of every Sunday episode was to get talked about on Monday—the news came that HBO’s second season would be its last.
This forced the showrunners to furiously rewrite four seasons into just ten episodes. Rome never recovered from Caesar’s murder, and neither does Rome.
To say that Season 2 is rushed is like saying that Caesar needed a new toga after the Ides of March. Watershed moments that should have taken a whole season to build up to—Brutus’s last stand at Philippi, Antony meeting Cleopatra, how Octavian eliminated his rivals and became Augustus—keep tripping over each other’s sandals.
In spite of this, there is a largeness to Rome that fans of historical drama still remember fondly. The attention to detail is phenomenal. The characters think and act as people of their time (almost: according to HBO, everybody in ancient groomed their pubic areas). Considering how much history there is to cover, it’s remarkable how little about Roman life has to be explained. The actors embrace their reality, and therefore so do we.
As with anything that dies too soon, we can only remember the show in its youth and vitality. Maybe if it had gone the full five seasons, Rome would have eventually lost its way like Lost. Even if it had survived budget cuts, the showrunners would have had to pull way back on those big set-piece battles. We might have been left with a Rome that dwindled away dismally instead of burning out fast and hard.
Instead, Rome endures like the eternal city itself. Not for its sadly truncated storyline, not for its infinitely explorable sets, not even for its jaw-dropping cliffhangers. It lasts because the characters gave it a reason to. The cast and writers breathed life into old statues and made empty streets ring with noise. It made long-dead people live again.
Ray Stevenson’s death put an end to our dwindling hopes that Rome would return. And so all we have is memory. If you’ve got a MAX subscription, you can bring those memories back whenever you need them.
That’s history’s job, after all.
