the slave girl Pullo falls in love with has two expressions: my eyebrows feel bewilderment!' and my eyebrows feel angry! Grrrr!'.

Hey now, she also has "My eyebrows feel mildly perturbed!"

But yes, this review is spot-on. I actually didn't mind the gratuitous violence and sex, mostly because I'd just come away from watching The Tudors, and was relieved to find a well-written historical drama for a change.

Re: misogyny. it's an interesting point. I actually saw the whole Niobe story arc as the writers pointing out how powerless Roman women were and how few options they had- she couldn't very well kick Vorenus out since she needed the money, and she knew that she and her child would be killed if she admitted to the affair, so she was essentially pushed into a corner. What I didn't like about that arc was adding Evander into the mix- it seemed like a cheap way of going "ah, but what she did was WRONG, because it was her SISTER'S HUSBAND, you see." I also disliked the portrayls of Clropatra- we've spent the past thousand or so years cleaning the dirt off of her image, did they really need to use her character for a centurion gangbang scene?

I've only recently seen Rome but, yes, I agree - this review is spot on. I loved The Tudors too so I'm well into the "dirty" brand of costume drama. I like it because often epic historical dramas deal with enormously complicated political events that would hugely inaccessible if they didn't shoot them through a personal lens - this worked particularly well for The Tudors, I think, but also (mostly) works for Rome.

So far I'm only halfway through the first series but Cleopatra is in a centurion gangbang scene?!! What the fuck?!

"Gangbang" might've been too strong a word. She offers herself to two of the centurions (no prizes for guessing who) so that she can have a baby and claim Caesar as the father. This kind of thing always irritates me in period dramas- when you're dealing with historically powerful women who were villified by the (male) historians of their time, you have something of a responsibility to present them as they really were, not as the sensationalists made them out to be.