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.

Rome has been a film subject since the beginning of cinema, and the relationship between Hollywood’s Rome and the historical record is complicated in ways that go beyond simple error-counting. Some of what cinema gets wrong is deliberate simplification for narrative clarity. Some is period convention — the sandal epics of the 1950s reflected Cold War anxieties as much as ancient history. Some is genuine incomprehension of a world sufficiently distant that even educated filmmakers cannot feel its difference. And occasionally, something unexpected gets it exactly right in ways that the filmmakers may not have consciously intended.