Rome/Empire review part 1

Something awful happened a few weeks ago: I finally reached the last episode of the last season of The Wire. This was bad because it meant I would have nothing to do in the evenings, except maybe try to get a social life, which of course would be absurd.

Gratuitous picture of Hadrian's Wall

Happily Mithraea came up to visit around this time, and we took a long-overdue trip to Hadrian’s Wall. Later we were in HMV when I noticed a Rome-themed drama I’d never heard of – Rome: Blood and Sand. I bought it on the strength of the box art, and because the blurb on the back said:

ROME boasts “powerful acting,” says the Wall Street Journal, with a hot young cast that includes [a bunch of people you’ve never heard of] and Emily Blunt. Filmed entirely in scenic Italy, ROME tells the thrilling story of a hero’s rise amidst the greed, blood, and lust of anctient [sic] Rome.

Emily Blunt struggling to cope with so much powerful acting

So I paid my eight pounds Sterling and walked home, clutching the DVD excitedly.

I was already intrigued by the name of the mini-series, because there’s another show called Rome, and also a show called Spartacus: Blood and Sand. What could this be? A bizarre mish-mash of the two? A cheap attempt to cash in?

Actually, both. It was hard to find on IMDB, because the show, broadcast in 2005, was originally called Empire, not Rome. In fact the DVD menu screen still has the title Empire. So changing the title on the front of the box to Rome and ripping off the subtitle Blood and Sand is a pretty transparent attempt to trick idiots (like me) into buying it.

Now I am confused

We’ll put aside for the moment the fact that the blurb also claims that the first emperor Octavius was Julius Caesar’s nephew, rather than his great-nephew. The box art is unintentionally hilarious for another reason: the tagline.

Really? Because I assume that this is referring to the hero of the mini-series, Octavius. And unless Wikipedia has been lying to me all these years, didn’t he found the Roman empire? Maybe ‘one man’s fight to found an entire empire!’ just doesn’t sound as good.

So even before we pressed the play button, the signs were promising. And it would only get better. This show, which on the surface looks like a tacky TV mini-series, turned out to be a radical re-interpretation of Roman history. It has changed everything I thought I knew about the founding of the empire. For instance, I never knew that the young Octavius fled from Rome, was taken into slavery, and was then sent to the ‘Combat Dungeons of Arkham’. My education was about to begin...