toledoblade.com --

From what we've seen of ancient Rome in countless TV and movie depictions, it's likely that we have a mental image of the place that goes something like this:

It's an amazingly clean city, full of gleaming marble statues and columns. The people all pad around in sandals and sparkling white togas (did they have Clorox back then?), and the members of the Senate, most of whom seem vaguely effeminate, spend their days debating such important topics as democracy and aqueducts. Women, if they're seen at all, are usually nibbling grapes or sipping wine from golden goblets.

Well, guess what? There was another side to the Roman Republic, and if we're to believe what's about to be shown on HBO - and historians say we probably should - it was a far grittier, more violent, and - dare we say it? - a lustier place than we ever imagined.

Tonight (9 p.m.) marks the premiere of the premium cable channel's most ambitious series, Rome, which chronicles nothing less than the fall of the republic and the rise of an empire. The 12-week series was filmed over 14 months on location in Rome with an all-British cast. Its five acres of backlot and six soundstages make it the largest standing set in the world, and the series' $100 million price tag makes Rome the most expensive production in HBO's history.

If Rome falls after just one season, HBO will find itself eating quite a sizable investment.

Of course, it wouldn't be a tale of ancient Rome without a healthy ration of intrigue and betrayal involving Julius Caesar (played this time around by Ciaran Hinds, Road to Perdition); Marc Antony (James Purefoy, Vanity Fair); Caesar's old pal and co-ruler, Pompey Magnus (Kenneth Cranham, Gangster No. 1), and lots of other members of the empire's upper crust.

The story begins in 52 B.C. as Caesar wraps up his conquest of Gaul after eight years of war and prepares to return to Rome. A favorite of the empire's common folk, Caesar has plans for radical social change at home, but Pompey and the rest of the ruling class, who have consolidated their power in Caesar's absence, have other ideas.

But the somewhat familiar historical events of a turbulent era serve mainly as a backdrop for the personal stories of everyday life in ancient times. At the center of much of Rome's action are a pair of working-class soldiers in Caesar's 13th Legion, Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd, Kingdom of Heaven) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson, King Arthur).

Ray Stevenson, left, and Kevin McKidd pay working-class soldiers in HBO's new series Rome, which premieres tonight at 9.
( HBO )

Zoom | Photo Reprints

Lucius is a fair-minded but brusque centurion, who reluctantly befriends Titus, a hard-drinking, brawling legionnaire. They, too, are returning to Rome after eight years, but they inadvertently get themselves caught up in the plots to dispose of Caesar.

The series has so many characters that it's hard to keep track of who's out to get whom. One unforgettable character, though, is Caesar's niece, Atia (Polly Walker, Patriot Games), one of the greatest screen villainesses this side of Cruella de Vil. Equally willing to hand over her married daughter Octavia for the pleasure of puffy old Pompey, or to send her 11-year-old son Octavian off on a perilous journey to impress Caesar, she'll also sleep with everybody but Zero Mostel if she thinks it will work to her advantage.

One predictable result of the all-British cast - among the BBC's more obvious contributions to the series - is that it makes it seem like everybody in ancient Rome, from Caesar right on down to the stable boys, was born in the shadow of Westminster Abbey.

This seems to be the year when television has decreed that there's no place like Rome. ABC had a miniseries called Empire earlier this summer - a lame effort, with ratings to match - while the History Channel will run Rome: Engineering an Empire next week and the National Geographic Channel is planning a series called Hannibal v. Rome.

But HBO's lavish series promises to be the grittiest of the lot. It's got epic battle scenes, but it's got bloody barroom brawls, too. It's got genteel debate on the floor of the Senate, but it's also got slap flights between senators. It's got primitive brain surgery - ouch! - and weird pagan rituals, including one in which a woman is showered with blood that's pouring out of a freshly sacrificed bull.

It's also got profanity, full-frontal nudity, and, oh yeah, it's got sex. Boy, has it ever got sex.

In short, Rome is to toga-and-sandal epics what HBO's Deadwood is to Gunsmoke and The Sopranos is to Father Knows Best.

Besides the graphic sex and violence of the series, viewers will see a much different version of ancient Rome than they ever have before. Based on months of research by producers and consulting historians, Rome goes a long way toward erasing the "Holly-Rome" image of the pristine, white marble, patrician city that is commonly seen in period movies.

Rome in 52 B.C. was a city of 1 million people, by far the largest city in the world at the time. It was a crowded, noisy, bustling place, bursting with people from all over the world, and there was great wealth along with abject poverty.

Jonathan Stamp, an archaeologist and the BBC's historical consultant, says the series goes to great effort to accurately depict ancient Rome.

"We are doing everything we can to make these episodes historically authentic," he says, "which means researching and incorporating every kind of detail we can about the way our characters behave, the way they interact, how they dress and gesture, the kind of streets they walked down, the way they conducted their private and public lives."

Joseph Bennett, the series' production designer, says that all the research pays off in a Rome that viewers won't expect, but one that's historically accurate.

"The buildings had color, the streets were dirty, there were masses of multi-racial people living in very close quarters, and it's not what you're used to seeing," Bennett says.

"We combined the academic research of what Rome was like with inspirations from places like Calcutta, Delhi, Cairo, or Mexico City, where you have extreme wealth living alongside extreme poverty. Rome was the center of power and opportunity, so people flocked to it from everywhere. So you think, what would that have been like? Well, it would be crowded, noisy, in a constant state of flux."

The series' producers were so intent on making things appear real that they even had a production rule on the Italian set that whatever dropped to the ground during filming was left where it fell, whether it be vegetation, wood scraps, food, or debris.

The production's attention to detail extends to the coins used by its characters. They were minted at the Vatican and bear the likeness of the show's "Caesar," actor Ciaran Hinds.

Like the settings and props, great care was taken in creating the costumes worn in the program, according to costume designer April Ferry, who oversaw the creation of 4,000 outfits, including hundreds of chain-mail tunics weighing more than 35 pounds each.

"We've done a lot of research in books and museums to see what people actually wore at the time, because a lot of what you've seen before in films of this period is wrong," Ferry says. "Rome had people from all over the known world at the time, and they didn't all dress alike. So we're going after the ethnic differences and all the color and vibrancy that was there."

The Italian craftsmen who made the clothing were the sons and daughters of the people who created outfits for such past screen epics as Cleopatra and Ben-Hur.

Rome was initially conceived in 1998 as a miniseries after Anne Thomopoulos, an HBO programming executive at the time, caught an airing of I, Claudius, a 1972 BBC miniseries about the Roman Empire.

"I was completely hooked," says Thomopoulos, who is one of the series' executive producers. "It had all the great elements of history [and] it was really intelligent and compelling to watch, but the characters' humanity was more important than historical dates."

She suggested a project to producer William Macdonald, who had an interest in historical drama. He was intrigued with the idea of developing such a show for the cable network.

"HBO has a talent for taking ordinary people and putting them in unique moral universes," he says. "Sex and the City was four average American women in the unique sexual moral universe of Manhattan. The Sopranos is a man with family and job issues in therapy, but he happens to be in organized crime.

"We wanted to tell a story about what Roman life was really like, and not have it be purely about grand historic figures."

After Macdonald delivered the first three scripts in 2001, HBO brass decided the tale was strong enough to make it into a continuing series instead of just a miniseries. Because that would take a bigger commitment of time and money, though, HBO needed a co-production partner. It found one in the BBC, which had previously worked with the American cable channel on the award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers (and which also was the network behind I, Claudius, which, you'll remember, started the whole thing.)

To make sure that Rome is seen by the largest number of possible viewers, HBO is using the most aggressive campaign it's ever tried, one that's the television equivalent of saturation bombing.

Each of the series' first three episodes will be shown seven days a week at varying times on either HBO, HBO2, or HBO Signature. In addition, throughout the series run, the previous week's episode will air Sundays at 8 p.m., just prior to the debut of that week's new episode.

Even non-HBO subscribers can catch the first two episodes of Rome, when the channel offers its next free preview, Sept. 3-7. And it's no accident that Rome is premiering now, squarely between the summer season of new cable shows and the traditional fall premieres of new network shows.

"Our goal is to put Rome in front of every demo and every audience segment by appearing every day of the week and in all the appropriate time slots from 8 p.m. to late night," notes David Baldwin, a programming exec for HBO.

With the premium cable channel losing such stalwarts as Sex and the City and Six Feet Under, and basic cable channels like FX and TNT coming on strong with shows such as Over There, Rescue Me, The Shield, Nip/Tuck, and The Closer, HBO is betting plenty that, for millions of viewers, Rome is where the heart is.

Contact Mike Kelly at: mkelly@theblade or 419-724-6131.

Permanent Link

RECENT RELATED ARTICLES

• HBO chronicles auto-plant shutdown in workers’s voices | 09/06/2009