Rome

Rome debuted on August 28, 2005 and it ended on March 25, 2007 after two seasons and 22 episodes. Starring Kevin McKidd as Lucius Vorenus and Ray Stevenson as Titus Pullo, the show followed two regular centurions as Rome began the transition from a republic to an empire. The series originally aired on HBO in the US and BBC2 in the UK. It is currently available on DVD, BluRay and streaming on HBO Max, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Vudu, and Google Play.

Fans of toga drama will remember that Rome was a miniseries that ran for two seasons starting in 2005 on HBO and the BBC, in the UK. It is now available on DVD.

The story revolved around two Roman soldiers, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. Their lives and amours evolve against a background of the rise and assassination of Julius Caesar and the evolution of Rome from a Republic into an empire ruled by Octavian (later Augustus) Caesar. The emphasis was on the grittier bits of Roman life (more than a little on-screen sex). The common man’s view of history is always a popular theme, and the writers were very clever inserting Lucius and Titus into the action. According to Wikipedia the original plan was for the show to run for 5 seasons. In the two seasons we have today you can see the plot grinding deliciously forward. The first season works up to the assassination of Julius Caesar, and the sec-

ond one goes into the machinations of the Triumvirate. This is one of the most delightfully thrilling parts of classical history, great full-bodied drama. However the production costs were enormous. The creative team created a five-acre standing set, including a Forum that was 60% the size of the original. There were costly crowd and battle scenes, a training camp for the extras playing legionaries, all the extra costs of a historical production. All this expenditure gave the accountants cold feet. The plug got pulled, and it was announced the series would end with the second season. Right up until the last episode there is meaty character development and side plots, but in the last episode everything’s zipping by on fast forward, as Octavian defeats Antony and Lucius Vorenus is fatally injured. What’s annoying is that we can see how the final three seasons were going to go. IMDb tells us, “Seasons three and four would have revolved around the war between Octavian and Mark Anthony in Egypt, with season five focusing on the rise of Jesus in Palestine.” With this slight clue it’s an easy guess that season three might have ended with the Battle of Actium, and Season four with the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra. You always want to end each season with a bang. Even Shakespeare knew that Cleopatra’s encounter with a snake is major drama. But season 5, I’d bet, would focus on Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. At the end of the existing season 2 Lucius Vorenus gets severely injured. His friend Titus undertakes to get him home to see his children before he dies. Since going south to Egypt again is impossible, the only direction is north, to seek a ship in Palestine. You can see what’s going to happen, right? There were some notable miraculous healings going on around the Sea of Galilee in the first century BC. Would we get to see Lucius raised from the dead by the itinerant Jewish preacher? I would particularly have liked to have seen how the creators were planning to get around the calendrical issues. Most Biblical scholars assume that Jesus was born between 4 and 6 BC. This means that Augustus had been running the Roman Empire for more than 25 years before that first Christmas. It passes belief that Titus was going to take a quarter century to walk from Alexandria in Egypt to Palestine, carrying his dying friend Lucius all the while. If it takes you 25 years to die from an injury, you got better already. To get Jesus to show up in the narrative there had to be some major fiddling with either the Bible’s time line or Roman history. Since the series is called Rome, I would bet it’s Scripture that was going to the wall. If we accept that postulate, then how was this going to work? I can immediately pick out some of the likelier miraculous healings in the New Testament as candidates. The one in Mark 2 would be very suitable, when Jesus heals a paralyzed man. The house was crammed with people hearing him, and the sick man’s friends couldn’t get him inside. So they climbed onto the roof, pried away the thatch, and lowered the sick man down in front of Jesus. I could indeed see Titus Pullo doing this. But possibly the best candidate is from Luke 7:1, the healing of the centurion’s servant. There is some wiggle here about who exactly it was being healed because, in a parallel account in John 4:46, it’s a royal official, not a centurion asking for help. The centurion goes to Jesus and begs Him to heal the sick servant at home. Jesus says okay, be right over. But the centurion says, Just like a commanding officer, you can just command something, and it gets done. Just say it, and he’ll be healed. Jesus is on record as being impressed with the centurion’s confidence, declaring that no one in Israel has so much amazing faith. And of course He says it’ll happen, and the sick man is healed. Titus is easily slick-tongued enough to do this, and we can count on Jesus to assess his inner character rightly. A socially distant miracle, this is less impressive and visual than prying off the thatch of a house and lowering the sick man down on ropes. But there’s a nice opening for ambiguity here. While Titus is talking Jesus around, who is taking care of Lucius? I could imagine these other friends making the rounds of all the proper temples, Apollo, Asclepius, and so on. Sadly, we will never know. Even after the axe fell the show was sufficiently popular that there was some talk of reassembling the cast for a movie. But nothing came of this, and we must accept that this is all of Rome that we’re going to get.