The way in which sexuality and religion are dealt with in both series is also quite relevant to the times in which they were filmed but on the other hand, their representation of the role of women as, essentially, mothers, seems to conform to the same stereotype.
This conception of Roman history is also built into Rome ’s structure, as the lives of two common soldiers are intertwined with major historical events and characters, giving a fresh perspective on well-known occurrences. Whereas I, Claudius is set almost exclusively within the ruling Imperial family and considers history as that of “great men”, Rome on the other hand clearly plays on the fascination for class distinctions and more specifically on the division between Patricians and Plebeians.
For example, the social and cultural background radically altered between two critically acclaimed BBC television series about Ancient Rome: the 1976 I, Claudius, an adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels, and the 2005 first season of Rome, a BBC-HBO coproduction. On top of its arguably philosophical and/or pedagogical intentions, the representation of Antiquity in literature and film has always conveyed much about the ideology of the periods in which it was written or filmed.
