Rome

I have a soft spot for Bamber's Cicero in particular. Historians often paint Cicero as either a noble republican or a weasel, and Bamber plays him as both at once, which is the truest version.

🧠 What It Is Really About

The show's real subject is not the war or the conspiracies. It is what happens to a society when its institutions stop being respected. The Republic of Rome is a system everyone claims to love and no one actually obeys. Senators deliver speeches about virtue and then take bribes on the way out. Soldiers swear oaths and then sell them. Fathers arrange marriages as business transactions. Gods are bargained with like vendors at a market.

Against that rot, Vorenus is the painful counter-example. He actually believes the old values. The show uses him to ask a question every civilisation eventually asks: what happens to the honest man when the rules are dead?

The other great theme is class. Rome spends as much time in the tenement as in the Senate. You see the bread riots, the street gangs, the collegia, the back-alley temples. The politics at the top only make sense once you have watched the poverty at the bottom. That vertical range is why the show feels more like a novel than a docudrama.

🎨 Style and Atmosphere

Everything is dirty. That is the first thing you notice. The togas are stained. The walls are painted in garish reds and yellows because that is what Roman walls actually looked like, not the chilly white marble of the neoclassical imagination. Graffiti covers every surface. Goats wander through the Forum. The show's art department reportedly studied Pompeian frescoes and real archaeological evidence rather than Hollywood precedent.

The violence is sudden, brief, and mean. No slow-motion balletics. A sword goes in, a man goes down, and the camera does not linger. The sex is similar. Frank, often transactional, rarely glamorous. Rome was an HBO show in the full HBO sense, and it used that freedom to render antiquity at eye level rather than at monument level.

The score by Jeff Beal is unusual. Percussion, woodwinds, and wordless chant rather than the expected Hollywood brass. It sounds like a civilisation that has not heard an orchestra yet.

📈 Reception and Legacy

Critics loved it. Audiences were slower to arrive, and the cost proved fatal. The second season was rushed to cover material originally planned across three, which you can feel in the pacing. HBO and the BBC cancelled the show after season two citing its budget, a decision the network has publicly regretted. Bruno Heller has said he would have taken the story through the reign of Augustus and possibly beyond if given the chance.

The influence was enormous. Game of Thrones exists in something like its current form because Rome proved HBO could pull off a prestige historical epic with a huge ensemble and political complexity. Game of Thrones borrows the Roman template of whispering noblewomen, ambitious young men, and public violence as political language. Boardwalk Empire inherited the production-design ambition. Deadwood shares the same interest in filthy, profane speech as a realistic rendering of the past. Fans of Vikings or The Last Kingdom will find a similar pleasure in watching history depicted with mud under its nails.

🏆 Why It Works

Rome works because it treats its audience as adults who can hold two stories in their head at once. The big history lesson about the death of a republic runs alongside the small human story of two friends trying to survive it. Neither is cheapened by the other. Caesar's death matters. So does Vorenus walking home to a marriage he does not understand.

It also works because the actors are extraordinary. Hinds, Purefoy, Walker, McKidd, Stevenson. These are performers who have spent decades on stage and know how to land a line in iambic cadence without making it sound like homework. You get Shakespearean-scale acting without the Shakespearean embalming.

Fifteen years on, nothing else has matched it for texture. The sets still look more real than the CGI palaces that came after. The politics still read as a warning rather than a costume drama.

Two seasons is not enough. It is the great frustration of the show and the great reason to watch it now. What exists is nearly perfect. What never got made haunts the medium.

Ciarán Hinds

Supporting Actor