Rome Wasn't Built in A Day

The second season of HBO's Rome has me reading Edith Hamilton's The Roman Way and looking around the Internet to see what people are saying about the veracity and value of the series. There seems to be a consensus on the HBO Rome forum that this season is losing its way, migrating from the historical into the fantastical.

Last season, I was struck by how in spite of how much Latin I had translated about Pompey and Caeser and the Civil War, I had somehow missed the basics of the story. I had struggled with Lucan's Pharsalia, which was written in a florid and lurid mix of ten-year-old boy-style-gore and obscure and digressive poetical allusion. Small events would be engulfed in entire paragraph-long sentences of metaphor: As in the Cyntherian rites, when the hills would ripple with the golden fleece of lambs and young maidens would cry and the wolves would howl on the occasion of seeing the glorious promise of spring, and all of the winds and the heavens would conspire to bring the heavy javelins of Jupiter into the midst of clamour and tumolt, so did the young warriors crest the flank of battle, all too soon their blood boiling on the hard plains of Pharsalia.

Rome depicts the actual events in a straightforward way, with at least as much fidelity as Lucan, if I understand his standing correctly. He is considered a better poet than a historian, and if that is true, his history must be lousy!

Oh, the humiliation I endured in that terrible class from that tiny, antediluvian, misogynistic, seersuckered professor alternatively sneering at the girls, encouraging the boys, and fondly enunciating every syllable of the gore.

Every generation finds its way to the Romans. I recently found out that two of my acquaintances, most unlikely to have an interest in Classics, have become hooked on Rome. Good story, good acting, mediocre history, or perhaps just the usual abuse of history for the sake of art, and proof that sex and drugs and rock and roll are as eternal as Rome itself.

Blog posts on Rome:
Hybernaut Talks about Historical Inaccuracies
Glaukopidos Runs Down the Latest Episode

Rome on HBO