Julius Caesar as a Television Series: Franceinfo Revisits “Rome”

Paris – 26 July 2026: This Sunday, Franceinfo turns its attention to a series that understands ancient Rome less as a marble backdrop than as an overcrowded, noisy and dangerously vibrant city: “Rome”. In the summer series “L’Empire des séries”, Laurent Valière uses the HBO production as an opportunity to discuss Julius Caesar and the transformation of history into television. In France, the series is currently available on HBO Max.

The 22 episodes produced between 2005 and 2007 begin with Caesar’s return from Gaul and continue through to the reordering of power after his death. At the center is initially the statesman himself, played by Ciarán Hinds: a military commander with political instinct, but no marble monument. James Purefoy gives Mark Antony the energy of a man for whom charm and ruthlessness are often separated by only a cup of wine.

The artistic device of “Rome” lies in intertwining the major names of the era with the fate of two soldiers. Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, freely developed characters based on a brief mention by Caesar, lead viewers through alleys, barracks and homes in which the Republic goes about its daily life. Senate decrees, civil war and dynastic alliances thus appear not as distant textbook material, but as matters of families, money, dependencies and wounded pride.

This perspective allows the series to examine social hierarchies as closely as the strategies of its famous protagonists. Patricians, slaves, merchants and legionaries move through the same city, yet live in worlds strictly separated from one another. Political decisions extend into marriages, property relations and religious rituals. The fall of the Republic thereby becomes tangible as a gradual transformation, not merely as a sequence of familiar battles and assassinations.

Historical accuracy should not be confused here with an illustrated chronicle. The series condenses events, invents relationships and shifts perspectives in service of its drama. Its appeal lies above all in its atmospheric credibility: Rome appears dusty, cramped and harshly divided by class. Power is exercised there in the Senate just as much as in courtyards, bedrooms, markets and public rituals.

For HBO, “Rome” was an ambitious British-American-Italian co-production, made before the later global television boom. Its recreation of the ancient city and its unsentimental view of violence shaped a style of storytelling that later prestige productions would build on. Yet it remained at two seasons; the second therefore noticeably condenses the developments surrounding Octavian, Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

Franceinfo’s return to the series is devoted to a work that neither reverently smooths over antiquity nor reduces it to a mere backdrop. “Rome” tells of the end of a republic whose institutions formally endure while personal loyalties and military power are already hollowing them out. Its Rome is not a ruin, but a society in restless motion.