HBO's Rome: The Show That Got Too Much Right
HBO’s Rome ran for two seasons from 2005 to 2007, cost approximately one hundred million dollars to produce, was cancelled before completing its intended narrative arc, and remains the most historically serious attempt to dramatize the late Roman Republic for a mass audience that has yet been made. Its cancellation, attributed to production costs after a fire destroyed the primary sets, was a genuine cultural loss. The show was not perfect. It was better than anything else in its field by a margin that makes comparison almost unfair.
The political mechanics are where Rome distinguishes itself most clearly from its competitors. The way Caesar’s faction operates — the mixture of personal loyalty, calculated generosity, debt, and implied threat that constitutes Roman political power in the late Republic — is rendered with a sophistication that most academic treatments do not match in accessibility. The Senate functions as a recognizable institution: factional, procedural, capable of genuine deliberation and equally capable of violence when deliberation fails. Cicero appears as a genuinely complex figure — brilliant, vain, opportunistic, occasionally courageous — rather than as either hero or villain. The relationship between Antony and Caesar is political before it is personal, which is the correct emphasis.
The social texture of the city is equally careful. The street life of the Aventine, the operation of a bakery, the domestic arrangements of a centurion’s family, the economics of a brothel — all of this is constructed from the archaeological and literary record with a consistency that rewards attention from anyone who knows the sources. The graffiti on the walls, the food on the tables, the religious practices of people who are not senators: Rome managed the lower registers of Roman life with the same attention it gave the elite narrative, which is exceptional for a prestige television production whose commercial incentives pointed toward spectacle over accuracy.
The two central fictional characters — Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo — are borrowed from a single passing reference in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, where two centurions quarrel briefly over credit for an action during the siege of Avaricum. The show takes these names and builds entire fictional lives around them, using them as a vehicle for experiencing the late Republic at ground level. The device works because the writers understood what aspects of Roman experience they were dramatizing: military loyalty, class mobility, the disruption of veteran reintegration into civilian life, the relationship between formal Roman religion and lived superstition. Vorenus and Pullo are not Romans in modern costume. They are recognizably of their time in ways that require genuine historical imagination to construct.
Where the show departs from the record is primarily in compression and dramatic convenience. Historical events that took years are compressed into weeks. Characters are present at events they historically did not witness — both Vorenus and Pullo appear at the assassination of Julius Caesar, which is dramatically necessary and historically impossible. The depictions of Cleopatra and Octavia generated controversy, the former for reasons of representation and the latter for reasons of characterization. The second season, produced under the pressure of cancellation, compressed events that should have occupied two or three more seasons into thirteen episodes, resulting in a narrative that moves through years of Roman history at a pace that sacrifices exactly the quality — the patient accumulation of political detail — that made the first season distinctive.
The nudity and violence that generated considerable commentary at the time of broadcast are, in retrospect, among the more defensible choices the production made. Roman elite culture was not squeamish about either sex or blood, and a sanitized Rome would have been a falsified one. The objections were primarily from viewers applying modern Western standards to a context that did not share them, which is a category error that the show was specifically trying to correct. The sex is present in proportion to its presence in the Roman sources. The violence is present in proportion to its presence in Roman life.
The cancellation before the intended conclusion means that HBO’s Rome has no satisfying ending. The second season closes with Octavian’s consolidation of power rendered in a summary that the show’s own standards required three more seasons to do justice. The production that was originally planned — covering the entire Augustan settlement, the principate’s construction, the careers of the characters through the period of civil war — would have been the most ambitious sustained dramatization of Roman history ever attempted. What exists is the exceptional fragment of a greater work, which is perhaps the most Roman thing about it.