Chronological order?

Well, the Gracchus episode was pretty good, I thought, and certainly struck me as better than the Caesar and Nero episodes - though that may simply be because I knew very little about the Gracchi and so was unable to even recognize any liberties the scriptwriters might have been taking with the facts. But the virtue of this episode was that it was very clearly about Roman politics and not just a famous personality - a rarity these days.

Of course that's precisely the reason they didn't show them in chronological order: as a series opener the Gracchus episode would probably have been a serious turn-off to many viewers. And so the UK series opened, inevitably, with the famously naughty Nero. This episode included a scene of the eponymous villain kicking his wife to death in public, a piece of dramatic licence I found entirely unacceptable in a programme that purported to be a drama-documentary.


Call me Ishmael...