A bit heavy on the foreshadowing…all I have to say is:
Uh oh. I hope I’m wrong.
Spoilers from here on out, most likely.
The death of Cicero was tense, well done them. I was wrong.
Atia having Jocasta’s family killed was funny. Nice touch with Voreneus and the messenger. Pullo gonna be a daddy (again)!
Such horseshit! I’m really pissed off at HBO now. They finally give us a battle and they fuck it up by the numbers. Would it have hurt them to be the slightest bit historically accurate?
They collapsed some events and changed the way that Cassius and Brutus really died, but it worked ok dramatically, I guess.
The casual manner in which Vorenus told his crew they’d be allowed to murder and rob everybody on his hit list was chilling. Sometimes V is colder than Tony Soprano would ever be.
Hey, Agrippa got some. I was happy for him.
Gee, and I thought that people would be happy to finally see a battle scene. I know that was something people were critical of in earlier episodes.
Anyhow, according to the Wikipedia article I’ve just been reading, Antony & Octavian had 19 legions against 17 for Brutus and Cassius. In the show, Brutus and Cassius said they had 14 legions, so the numbers were close.
What honks me is that the way it really happened could have been magnificent theater. Having Brutus and Cassius die in battle (sort of) was a total cop-out.
At least we got to see Octavia nekkid. Which makes this episode a keeper! 
A good-news episode all around, really. Octavia and Agrippa are getting it on, Pullo’s wife is pregnant, and three of the most irritating characters are dead. What’s not to love?
Need we also point out that Agrippa was most certainly not “of humble origins?” His family was of equestrian rank, and he was the person most responsible for Octavian’s many victories, including Actium. His training as an architect made Rome the city of marble that Octavian claimed to have made.
It looked like Octavian didn’t participate in the fighting. Is that historically accurate? Would he have been allowed to fight or is the Consul too important to risk?
Octavian hid in the marshes during the First Battle of Philippi. He had been “warned in a dream” about the days activities, and that Cassius’ army would smash through his and loot his camp. It was really Antony’s troops that carried the day.
Who was the wailing woman at the end begging for shelter?
That was Jocosta, the Paris Hilton wannabe that befriended Octavia. Atia had her father killed.
One thing that I wondered about, Octavian and Antony conspired to kill of the rich and noble enemies in Rome and part of the motivation was to take their riches to pay the troops. Then it appeared that the gangs of the Aventine would be keeping all the riches. Did they just do a bad job of explaining that the spoils would be split up?
FTR, I thought it was a fantastic episode. We got a battle (I don’t even mind that it looked like a cut scene in a computer game) and we got multiple scenes with female nudity!
Pretty much. I think the way it went was that the gangs got all the easy loot, and the Triumvirs got the property and the not-easy loot.
I remember the directive from Vorenus being something like, “Your men can take all the loot they can carry.”
They’re setting up for high drama when (spoiler only if you don’t know the real history)Octavian marries his sister to Mark Antony. Atia is not going to be happy.
Poor Pullo. Even a nice bit of sanctioned murder didn’t cheer him up. I think Eirene is going to come to her senses one day and cut his throat while he sleeps.
Well, I have to say that was the most polite murder I’ve ever seen.
“May I pick some peaches, sir?” ::stab::
Is that the name of Pullo’s wife? Why would she want to kill him? Pullo loves her, even so far as not re-enlisting in the army, as much as he’d like to. And you have to admit, he’s pretty stringent about following his admittedly pragmatic code of ethics.
Which included, of course, his apologizing to her for killing her lover. Hey, what do you want in man? 
You’re absolutely correct. There’s one thing you can say about Titus Pullo: the man is not a hypocrite. There doesn’t seem to be an ounce of deceit in the man, unless you count the, “Well, let’s put it this way: you won’t be seeing him again,” explanation he gave to Lydie concerning her husband’s dissapearance.
The most interesting thing about the show to me is the great job they do in capturing the Zeitgeist of the time. A very different morality. A very different way of looking at life and death as well as the day to day things. It’s enlightening in that regard.
The battle scene was okay, and frankly more than I expected. But from now on, they should stick to the drama side. Some of the editing tricks just didn’t quite work.