Did I hear the guy locked up in the cell right? Something about he’d kill a young lamb as an offering or give peaches? HBO has a thing about peaches. 
All I have to say is that contemporary religious prayer is for pussies; showering in the blood of a freshly gored ox…now that’s prayer!
No, he offered pigeons as an alternative, if he couldn’t find a lamb. Who was the god he was praying to? Didn’t catch the name.
BlackKnight, my wife noticed the same thing; she doubted that Roman women got bikini waxes.
Why was Cato wearing a black toga?
As is fairly typical with a new series with unknown actors, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out who everyone was. Was the woman having sex the same as the woman in the bath, and the same as the woman sacrificing the bull? (Yes, as it turns out…)
Scipio Africanus was in one scene with his wife at the “lewd woman” show. Was he still alive in 52 BCE?
It’s going to be very interesting to watch the overlap between this series and Shakespeare. They’re going to have to cover Ceasar’s assasination. Brutus has already been introduced (he looks more like an upper-class twit than “an honorable man.”), so at some point we’re going to have to have the dueling funeral oratories in the Forum between him and Marc Antony. That seems like the most unenviable assignment imaginable for a screenwriter. “We want you to take this dialouge from Shakespeare and, you know, punch it up a little bit. Add some pizzaz. Make it today. You know, edgy…”
I was wondering that, too. Could have been part of his Stoic philosophy not to wear flashy clothes?
Pigeons makes more sense than peaches now doesn’t it? I must have been in Deadwood mode last night. Thanks for the clarification.
Sorry, I just remember our professor discussing it in one of my college Latin classes. I did Google one quick link here that mentions it in passing. (Warning: PDF). If I remember correctly, I think that Colleen McCullough also mentions it in her series about Caesar. I’d love it if someone with expertise in Greco-Roman rhetoric would fill me in.
To answer my own question, wikipedia indicates that Scipio Africanus had been dead for over a century by 52 BCE. Perhaps it was one of his descendants and not actualy Africanus, or perhaps I misheard the name.
Well, the classical quadrivium and trivium [the basis for the medieval, rennaisance and modern educational system] had roman roots … and the patrician men frequently were tutored in many aspects of rhetoric and logic, which did include gesturing and posture. There apparently were whole books on legal speachifying complete with hints on which gestures were best to insert into which types of speeches. My mom took speech therapy in uni and apparently the whole putting pebbles in the mouth to make you stop and think about pronunciation had roman basis. I also recall that Graves in I Claudius/Claudius the God mentioned something about a lawyers book that gave little set pieces with gestures that Claudius pans the lawyer that uses the book in one of his courts. I will have to dif out my copy and reread it.
I gather that actually attending court was fairly popular as a spectator sport - sort of a roman Johnny Cochran fest. I guess court TV was just live back then=)
I took the speaking gestures to be a sort of “punctuation”. When the speaker switched to the next item I noticed he gestured.
As for Cato, I didn’t see if he was going barefoot or not. From several sources I’ve read he had an obsession with Stoicism, and with the supposedly more austere habits of times past. So he went barefoot, and wore a toga with one shoulder bare, because he believed that that’s how it was done in “times past” A Republican Roman version of “holier than thou”.
Cato was a huge traditionalist. Early statesmen didn’t wear tunics under their togas, so he does the same.
Is it traditional for noble Roman women to have sex while servants wait nearby to hand her a glass of wine after their orgasm? Or is that HBO just taking advantage of being able to show T&A?
If I remember my Masters of Rome series correctly, isn’t Cornelia a bit of a snob? Doesn’t she consider marrying Pompey a step down? And I don’t remember Octavian heading off to Gaul to meet Caesar.
Are you sure they said Scipio Africanus and not Scipio Nasica? There was a Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Cornelianus Scipio Nasica, who’s usually called Metellus Scipio, a conservative senator who was Pompey’s father-in-law, and who died in the civil war fighting Caesar.
It must have been Nasica.
It was Metellus Scipio. He was a member of the Senate who backed Pompey against Caesar (and ultimately died in the ensuing war). That wasn’t his wife he brought to the lewd play, it was his daughter, Cornelia. who he married to Pompey.
Damn it, you guys beat me to it with the “Metellus Scipio” thing.
Some women’s natural pattern of pubic hair is sort of rectangular; I couldn’t tell if that was the case last night or if it was the product of grooming (and I was really looking). However, they’ve established a great tradition of full-frontal nudity on the part of actresses in the show; let’s hope it continues with Indira Varma.
Overall, I was very impressed. They’re obviously trying hard to make Rome come to life as a bustling, noisy city, full of flesh-and-blood people instead of statues (though there are plenty of statues too). The opening scene was one of the best representations I’ve seen of standard Roman infantry fighting. No wonder they were able to defeat much larger Gallic armies.
I would’ve thought that crucifixion would have been used as an instrument of execution, not of torture – that once you get someone up on the cross, they don’t come down alive; and that while it might encourage others to talk, this prisoner was toast. So I was surprised, when the centurion got the information he wanted, that he ordered the prisoner taken down. What a magnanimous guy.
Although the prisoner probably would’ve bled to death anyway, if they’d hit an artery while nailing him up…
He made the suggestion and was forced to carry out the order, but you could tell he wasn’t too thrilled about having to do it. Maybe that was the source of his “mercy”.
Me too. And I chuckled when the soldier who put him up sorta rolled his eyes when he was told to take him right back down.
“Uh…Sarge…we didn’t bring the claw hammer. We usually only pound nails – we don’t pull them out.”
I was glad to see a Roman officer shown with the proper crest - side to side, not front to back.
But I did see a lot of unpainted statues. Didn’t the Romans paint their statues? Or was that just the Greeks?