I got a different vibe from that. My take was that he was not thrilled at all to be carrying out the torture order, and his dejected attitude was his disgust with the whole thing. I thought letting the crucified guy down was an act of mercy.
I thought the whole scene was done to establish the character as a compassionate guy. Did anyone else see it that way?
Anyway, good start to the series. It more than held my attention all the way through, so I’m thinking it’ll only get better as the story arc builds and we get to know the characters.
I just saw it and thought it was interesting. FAR better than that tripe called “Empire” (already). Anyway, I thought the best part was Octavian detailing the reasons why Pompey would want to strike at Caesar with the two soldiers basically looking on in awe as to his cunning.
I didn’t think it that strange though. As a noble, if you want to be someone, what else is there other than politics and the cunning that goes with it. His mother, obviously, was a woman who was very in tune with that. So that’s probably all he grew up with. He knew the politics and heard the nobles around him discussing it all the time.
As for him saying it to the lower class soldiers, remember they still didn’t think of him as Octavian. By detailing the politics, he, without a doubt, showed his noble chops.
In all this talk about Octavian being so preternaturally clever, we seem to have missed the fact that he was wrong in his analysis. (BTW, I only caught this after watching for the second time tonight.)
In his speech to the soldiers, Octavian says that the loss of the eagle is useful to Caesar because Pompey “is no deep philosopher…and will take the symbolic loss as a real weakness,” and attack his old friend, a move Caesar doesn’t want to make first. Octavian gives the impression that he thinks that Caesar probably arranged the theft himself.
But seconds later, Pompey’s slave is found with the eagle, and dispatched. So it turns out that Pompey arranged the theft (with the fake blue Spaniards), and so was not being maneuvered by Caesar into striking first, but was in fact striking first, and in a somewhat more subtle fashion than Octavian would have given him credit for.
So although Octavian understood the basic outlines of the struggle between the co-consuls, he was blinded by class prejudice and family attachments.
BTW, did anyone else see parallels between Cato’s denunciation of Caesar’s illegal war and the present day? (The main difference perhaps being that there is no one in today’s Senate with Cato’s courage.)
Damn. I thought I was gonna be able to just watch this and not have to think about it.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the deal between Al Swearengen and Miss Isringhausen. Roman politics – that’s big brain stuff.
Looks like I’m going to have to watch each episode several times, and check in here as well. Not complaining. This’ll keep many of us happily occupied until Deadwood comes back in March, I think.
Not sure if there were other statues in particular, but one scene in the Forum had a bunch of statues, both finished and half-finished. I took that as an open-air art-mart where those with the right denarii could pick up a god and have it painted to suit their own tastes and decor.
Thanks HBO for reminding me why I don’t mind my cable bill (so much…)
Just watched it again, and I missed a lot the first time (could’ve been the wine I’d been drinking all day…). The scene where Octavian tells the two solidiers about Pompeii and Ceaser was just bad. Bad writing, bad directing, and bad editting. At least let the boy think about things for more than 1/2 second before he delivers his master’s thesis on the subject. I got much more of a sense that this is “Rome” as in “Dallas” or 'Dynasty". All they needed was Joan Collins to play the coniving woman-- after two viewings I still couldn’t tell some of the characters apart.
Just watched for a second time and am not nearly as lost as I was after the first viewing. I have no idea how close they are playing to historical accuracy, but they seem to be spinning a good story at any rate. Lots of the things I like in HBO’s series: unbridled sex & violence combined with a good story.
Hmmm… well that is something I never did notice :D. Seems he was outsmarted by his own hubris ;). Though it was a pretty good analysis. Though, thinking back on it, it just increases my love of that scene. Makes me think what Octavian thought after that realization.
Watched it in HD this evening (on The Movie Network, up here in Canada). I thought it was pretty good, and also found myself wishing that it hadn’t ended so soon. I set my PVR for the remaining episodes right then and there!
I read somewhere that they (the producers or writers or people who do the casting) will make good use of this. The nobility is supposed to have the “upper class” British accent, and the others will have the “normal” accent.
Insert the “shrug - I dunno” smiley. I couldn’t tell a difference, but I’ve only watched it once.
Maybe now’s a good time for me to ask a dumb question. Was Latin a spoken language or just written? When did they start speaking Italian?
Latin was the spoken language. It didn’t turn into Italian until a few hundred years later.
The British accents are used as an analogy to show class differences. Notoce how Brutus speaks with a bit of a Bertie Wooster, upper class twit affectation while some of the lower class characters like the Roman soldiers speak with more of a rough, uncultivated, working class accent. This kind of analogy is easier to do with Brit accents than American because the Brits still retain something of a class system.
The Brit accent works well in the context. Scorsese used in The Last Temptation of Christ, too, although I’m not sure he pioneered that technique.
“Vulgar Latin” is the term generally used for the language spoken by the common people, and that is what eventually evolved into Italian. But, there aren’t any texts that can definitively be called Italian prior to the 10th century. It’s likely that Latin was used as a written language, especially in Italy, well after it had all but died out as a spoken language, though, so that 10th century date is probably very conservative.
