Rome thread redux (spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

I know the series came out a while ago, but since getting Amazon prime I’ve been watching the only two seasons of this series. I ended up really getting into it. A few thoughts:

I found both Lucius Varinas and Titus Pullo incredibly handsome in their own way, and really enjoyed their friendship. They were the ultimate odd couple, blundering their way through a rather notable point in Roman history.

Admittedly I found the widespread violence toward women uncomfortable, though the men in the series didn’t have it much better. Nearly everybody seemed destined for a rapey, stabby death, which makes me wonder just how violent and unstable Rome was during the time of Ceasar’s return and assassination. A few questions:

-Why didn’t Atia execute/banish her head slave who was initially seduced by her attempted assassin? Seems like having someone so close to you who is hot for boys in that kind of way would be a real liability, from a security standpoint.

-How did Titus Pullo manage to survive his brain surgery? he has a prosthetic copper ‘cap’ on the back of his head, but doesn’t seem worse for wear from it. Meanwhile Lucius’ 3rd man in the Collegium gets permanently crippled when their convoy is ambushed.

-It really annoyed me that Lucius never explained to anyone “Yeah I was angry I found out my wife had a baby out of wedlock and when I confronted her she threw herself off the balcony”. Instead, his children hate him for presumably murdering their mother. He also cursed them, which he never seemed to apologize for, yet at the same time he rescued them from slavery. Ultimately, though, it made me realize why they typically didn’t let Centurions marry; they seem to be rather abusive husbands and fathers (and Lucius struck me as a rather ‘lawful’ kind of guy among many other Roman scumbags).

-Does anyone actually get punished for murder in this series? People kill each other left and right, lovers get murdered in jealous rages, politicians assassinated, etc. The closest they got was Pullo getting tried for muder, yet Lucius (who was apparently elevated to a politician at the time) intervened…and there was no backlash from this.

-Did the news announcers really announce ads? It was pretty funny hearing the poor fat guy reluctantly having to promote some brand of bread and slave dealer like a radio personality hawking some grocery store and used car salesman. Also, I really liked his overexaggerated body language; “GAIUS” sweep “JULIUS” sweep “CAESAR!” flourish.

2

I really liked this series, and it would have been great to spread the story over four or five seasons.

3

I loved the program. As for your questions, the one I think I can answer is about the newsreader (played by Ian McNeice). As I remember from the short documentary films that were available on HBO On Demand at the time the program aired, the gestures made by the newsreader were based on what is believed really occurred. No idea if the ads during the news were accurate.

4

I loved this series, though I felt that it floundered in the second season. Not floundering like season 3 of Deadwood floundering, but it wasn’t as strong as the first. Lucius Vorenus’ storyline was almost too painful to watch, though it left me with a lifelong love of Kevin McKidd. And I’ve never seen an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

And David Bamber is always wonderful.

And is “they cast Tobias Menzies” all you ever need to know about a character? Because it’s all I ever need to know about a character.

5

Thanks for reminding me of so many of my favorite little things about the series – it’s very sad that there wasn’t a season 3. I think Pullo would have been an interesting dad.

Let’s see … The surgery. I know there have been thousand year old plus skulls found with evidence of brain surgery (ie, holes cut in them) and subsequent survival (growth of fresh bone tissue over or around the holes). So while the survival odds wouldn’t be great, it certainly was possible.

Attia’s slave? Not sure, but maybe there was another slave responsible security?

Why (or who) would Lucius explain to? IIRC, justice in Rome was a largely private matter.

6

It’s been too long since I watched the series to remember anything about Pullo’s surgery, however: trephination is “the oldest surgery”. Some burial grounds in Europe have trephination holes in something like 25% of the skulls.

It’s simple and effective when a person has an epidural hematoma due to a bad bump on the head, which was one of the most common battlefield injuries in those times. All you have to do is open the skull, and the hematoma–this particular kind doesn’t tend to clot–will drain. Pressure goes off the brain, person has a fair chance of recovering, especially if they are trephined before they begin to seizure.

When you see a trephined skull that has a much bigger chunk cut out, that is probably evidence of a subdural hematoma. Those happen under the brain’s dura, and they clot. To fix those the dura must be cut open and the clot picked away. Survival for that kind of surgery was, understandably, far lower than the straighforward hole-drilling.

Trephination with a power drill is still used for epidural hematomas today. I have a pamphlet about how to perform the operation in the field.

7

  • Atia’s head slave had proven in the past to be loyal and competent. The incident with the assassin was an uncharacteristic lapse in judgement. The slave expects to be punished severely but Atia decides it’s not necessary and she wants to keep him in his position. As for the liability of the slave’s sexual predilections, Atia tells him “Next time you want a boy just buy one at the market. Everyone knows you can’t just find them on the street.” So it’s not really a problem.

  • Ancient Rome had a complex legal system. People were tried for murder and other crimes all the time. In the context of the series, it was a time of civil war and political turmoil. Enforcing the law against petty criminals was a low priority for the authorities. I also thought some of the murdering on the show was a little less discreet than what would have been necessary in the real world.
    Roman law - Wikipedia

  • The news announcer was historically accurate, including hand gestures and advertisements. Gladiators, charioteers, and other famous people in Ancient Rome did celebrity endorsements just like famous athletes do in contemporary society. “I’m Strabo the Eviscerator, you probably remember me from my seven straight kills in the Coliseum. But today I want to talk to you about ship insurance. Like most wealthy patricians, I’m sure you’ve thought ‘Sure I’ve thought about investing in importing grain from Egypt, but what if the ship sinks?’ Well I’m here to tell you that if you buy insurance from Titus Aetius, and your ship sinks due to storm, tempest, or other act of Neptune, you’ll be compensated for the full value of your lost cargo. Right down to the last denarius.” And yes, the Ancient Romans really did have insurance too.

8

They found out they weren’t getting a third season mid-way through filming the second. Given that, I actually thought they did a pretty good job of wrapping stuff up. You can tell the plot is on “fast forward” in a couple points, but I found it pretty satisfactory. Especially given how poorly some shows do at wrapping up even when they know ahead of time a given season will be their last.

They were obviously setting up a third season in Judea with the Zealot characters before they had to drop them. To bad.

9

Yeah, but that’s kind of the Darth Vader paradigm. If you fire or force choke everybody when they fuck up, what you get is a bunch of terrified newbies working for you, whom you can’t trust because they’d rather die than own up to their mistakes.
Letting underlings learn from their fuck ups is smarter. Plus now that it is known she’s susceptible to seduction, Atia’s goons will watch out for that.

Historical. Trepanation was a pretty well-mastered science even back then - hell, there is archaeological evidence of successful trepanations dating back to prehistory, with bone growth around the hole indicating that the person(s) lived years after it was done.
As for his not showing any sign of brain damage… well, he was never a smart cookie, and he’s shown issues with impulse control since. Which might have been par for the course for him, but we don’t know that.

Because it’s his business, and being “outed” as a cuckold would have made him a laughingstock. Remember how Caesar ended his affair with the love of his life, just because of some graffiti and street heckles ? Public morality was kind of a big deal in Ancient Rome.
I think on some level he also deliberately seeks to be hated by his children as a fucked up form of penance - he regrets killing his wife & landing them in slavery and “needs” to pay for it. At the same time, he resents the kids for having been made slaves, having been raped and making *him *all sad and regretful.
He’s a complex and thoroughly fucked in the head character, is what I’m saying.

Huh ? Where have you heard that ? They let legionnaires marry just fine, with one exception : non-Roman citizens who joined the Legion to earn citizenship. These blokes got the right to marry at the end of their 20-or-so years stint, but that’s because marriage was a privilege of citizenship itself, not because they were soldiers.

Historical as well. Most of the people in the series are protégés of various influential people (or clients, would be the historical word). Rome wasn’t exactly a civilization of laws, not even back when it was a Republic.

Yup. In fact it went further than this : gladiators and chariot racers were all sponsored, just like today’s athletes.

[QUOTE=Sattua]
I loved this series, though I felt that it floundered in the second season. Not floundering like season 3 of Deadwood floundering, but it wasn’t as strong as the first.
[/QUOTE]

I agree with you, but it’s not altogether surprising. They knew they were getting the ax, so they were forced to condense a lot of what they wanted to say and show. Like, the first season covers about 5 years (from the crossing of the Rubicon to Caesar’s murder) ; the second one is 15 years or so AND they were also trying to shoehorn the premices of the whole Jesus thing in, which would have been the driving theme of season 3.

10

Also regarding the slave, Atia was so overjoyed to have both prove and thwarted Servikia’s plotting that she’d have forgiven anything. Possibly she was a little aroused from watching the torture as well. That was one of the few I felt sorry for, even if his actions did lead to the death of the poor kitchen girl.

The DVD sets for the series have a feature called ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME that’s one of the greatest special ever. It’s a lot like pop-up video for Roman history and explains the historical significance and accuracy of the sets, including the news reader. I bought the DVDs strictly because of that feature.

11

If memory serves, one of the commentary tracks on the DVDs also has some handwaving to the effect that Pullo and Vorenus are each in the upper percentiles of human physical resilience. If they weren’t, they would have been done in by wounds suffered in the Gaul campaign. Yeah, kind of lame, but there you go.

12

Public speakers had a repertoire of stylised gestures that were considered an integral part of rhetoric.

It’s called Chironomia.

13

Unlike the OP I don’t really think the series is particularly violent against women in its internal consistancy. We see one torture scene and a couple of slavegirl sex but otherwise? The men had it worse.

14

Best work Ciaran Hinds and James Purefoy have done IMHO. The portrayals of Caesar and Antony are easily the best of the “historical” characters. James Purefoy’s Antony in particular stands out since he got a full two seasons of first-rate work. By contrast Octavian gets short thrift - Max Pirkis’ young Octavian is fine, but season 2’s time-jumped portrayal by Simon Woods really falls down by comparison.

Particular props as well to the secondary character of Nicholas Woodeson’s Posca - an entirely believable slave/adviser/political fixer.

15

[QUOTE=Kobal2]
Huh ? Where have you heard that ? They let legionnaires marry just fine, with one exception : non-Roman citizens who joined the Legion to earn citizenship. These blokes got the right to marry at the end of their 20-or-so years stint, but that’s because marriage was a privilege of citizenship itself, not because they were soldiers.

[/QUOTE]

No, he heard right. Legionnaires were not allowed to marry until the regein of Septimus Severus about 250 years later. Officers like the First Spear Centurion Vorenus (think a Lieutenant Colonel in a modern Army were so permitted. Non citizens were allowed to marry, they could not join the legions, that was restricted to citizens (which means that Pullo, son of a slave could not have joined the Thirteenth), but rather the Auxillaries.

Roman soldiers often got around the no marriage restriction by taking up wit local women or forming a marriage like bond with a slavewomen. This violated the spirit of the law, and depending on the region and the COmmanding officer, might not be allowed. Incidentally, men perferred slavewomen, often because it was more difficult for CO’s to get them to stop a relationship with them, as opposed to free local women, they were after all property. It was also not uncommon for Roman soldiers to free and marry said slavewoman after retirement, at least oneArab soldier in Britain called Barates is recorded to have done so, and been quite upset at her death.

16

So, one dumb question has been bugging me since watching the show. In a few scenes (including, IIRC, the intro) there’s a large stone grid / calendar type thing overlooking the forum, and you see people moving metal indicators into different slots. What exactly was that thing? It seemed to be more than a simple calendar, at least.

17

According to All Roads Lead to Rome, it’s an exact replica of one unearthed at Pompeii that was used as a calendar both for dates and religious festivals. Different idols and objects in the dates indicated what day it was, whether there was a market that day, what religious or civil festivals were being observed, etc…

18

I guess I’m going to have to go against the consensus here. I didn’t like the series and I stopped watching it halfway through (and what I watched was what most people seem to feel was the good half).

I didn’t like the soap opera aspect, which to me has ruined a lot of other potentially good dramas. I don’t like it when massive historical events are reduced to the level of petty office politics.

And I didn’t like the characters of Varinas and Pullo for the same reason. It was a gimmick to throw two “normal” people into the middle of historical events.

It’s like studio executives don’t believe we can appreciate history unless they shrink it down.

19

Second the “All Roads Lead to Rome” popups. The first time I watched Rome I remember thinking some things had to be exaggerated, but the pop ups would verify that they were indeed real. The writers had a real love for Roman history and wanted to make the show as real as possible to depict life back then. Pullo and Vorenus were historical stand ins, but many of the elements that drove the story are based on actual historical events.

At some point after the show ended I saw what the writers had planned for the life of the series. Season 2 was supposed to end with the death of Brutus. Season 3 and 4 were supposed to be primarily the battles between Octavian and Antony with Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship developing over a much longer time period. Season 5 was supposed to time jump a bit and be about the introduction of Christianity to Rome. I’ve seen references that one of - uh, the Jewish guy, I forget his name - anyway, his son was supposed to be Paul of the New Testament. If true then that would have given good continuity from the early part of the series to Season 5 with him being the center of the story.

Great series!

20

Take that with a grain of salt, I originally saw the name in the IMDB cast list but don’t see it anymore.