HBO’s Rome, Episode 3

I’m beginning to wonder about this show. The broad historical plot appears to be moving along quite nicely and looks to be at least basically accurate; Caesar has crossed the Rubicon and entered Italy with a single legion and Pompey has executed a tactical withdrawal to the south of Rome. However unlike in the show, historically Pompey simply forgets the treasury and it’s not stolen out from under him. On the other hand I’m having some trouble buying into the believability of some of the subplots.
There are quite a few going on and it’s rapidly becoming a little tricky to keep track without a scorecard. There’s the Atia, Octavia, Octavian subplot which I think I’m enjoying the most and the one, so far, that I find the most believable. Having Octavian consistently demonstrate that he's smarter than everyone else I'm finding to be one of the more entertaining running dialogues, especially when everone just sort of stares at him when he starts analyzing things and the Atia character is a wonderfully evil lady MacBeth type. I wonder how many people watching this show don't realize who Octavian is, or at least who he will become. Then there’s the Brutus and Servilia subplot where Brutus is apparently metamorphasizing from a frivolous upper class dandy into a man of the republic. At least I think that’s what’s going on. Last, but not least, we have the Vorenus and his wife Niobi, the Vorenus and Pullo and the Pullo getting into trouble subplots. These are the ones that seem a bit far fetched.

As I understand the ancient Roman military a soldier’s first loyalty was to his Legion, his second was to his Commander and only then was loyalty to the republic or empire an issue. And this makes perfect sense. A legionnaire was in for 20 years. His mates in the Legion and his Commander were the ones that would decide whether he would live or die, not to mention how much loot he managed to accumulate. National loyalty was a bit too abstract. So why is Vorenus trying to resign from the 13th Legion? First of all I don’t think he legally can and second of all I doubt the thought would even enter into a Roman Centurion’s mind.

In the meantime Pullo is the only one curious enough to check out the wagon “liberated” from the treasury thieves and now has a wagon load of gold to play with and, I suspect, a love interest of his own. I guess this subplot was the reason for the non-historical episode of Pompey sending ONE SOLDIER to supervise the loading of the treasury gold. I can't wait to see where this one goes. Why is it I suspect that somehow Pullo isn't going to end up retiring to Syria as a millionaire.

The sex was toned down in this episode which was a good thing, but this was sort of a transition episode I think. We’ll see how things develop from here.