Bona Dea (sorry, ROME joke), you worked so many ideas into that article about the series and Roman sexuality that I feel I need to go link to it (I have a web site on the history of women in ancient Rome and you say it far better than I ever did). And I must admit, reading about Roman sexuality sometimes makes me feel they come from the planet Trafalmadore - or, conversely, you had at least three paragraphs that could have signed growing up in the Midwest in the '50's, with their perilous suspicion of decadence and sex.

Wow!

That said, however, I am still firmly of the opinion that ROME is the best series on it I've ever seen on TV. I memorized "I, Claudius" decades ago, and while it's wonderful and I will always cherish it, the sheer fact that they filmed 98% of it inside a studio with the conventional set dressings, means that until I saw this series I had no concept of the actual city of Rome itself, which is as much a character in ROME as anything on two legs. While I agree with you that they may have missed an opportunity here, for us Roman-lovers, it was such an enlightening series in terms of making the human beings behind the Penguin classics real, that I think it deserves high marks for that. Of course, in Britain, you may have been lucky enough to escape some of the truly horrific post-Gladiator mini-series on ancient Rome that have cropped up in the US in the past few years. Fantasy Island meets Caesar II. So of course, I've got to cheer for this one. Maybe I will live long enough to see a perfect video version of ancient Roman history, but I'm not counting on it! Until then - my continual belief! - ROME has doubled the daily visitors to my own Caesar site to 3,000 per day. That implies that, however many people are out there enjoying the series, untold numbers are going to the Web looking for 'the truth.' And maybe they will all end up reading The Phillipics one day, as I did - starting *wince* with Colleen McCullough's mysteries aeons ago!

So may we raise a glass to getting it right and NOT getting it right? ;)