Empire's birth pangs

When we last saw our heroes, or whatever they are, centurion cum senator Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) had just watched his wife jump to her death; in fact, he had been about to kill her, having discovered that the child she told him was his grandson was in fact her own. His old friend and fellow soldier Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson) was lighting out for the territories with the freed slave Eirene (Chiara Mastalli), whose fiance he had recently murdered in a fit of jealousy. And Julius Caesar (Ciaran Hinds, in an appropriately limp performance) was lying on the floor of the Senate, quite dead.

And so we find him, still dead, when "Rome" returns to HBO this Sunday night for a second and reportedly final season of this period soap opera, although there is, of course, much activity around him, as all the survivors try to find their place in the New Rome Order. Though none of its many historically based if not wholly factual characters know it yet, this is the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, to which most of them profess fealty -- certainly none of them suspect that the instrument of its transformation into the well-known Roman Empire will be weedy young Octavian (played for a few episodes this season, as last, by Max Pirkis, and thereafter by Simon Woods). Not even he suspects it. But he will make the chariots run on time, later, as Augustus Caesar.

"Rome" is smart, dirty fun. As a co-production of HBO and the BBC, with a largely British cast, it has something of the dry wit of "I, Claudius" but is also soaked in the get-naked-and-cuss explicitness of American premium cable. (It is rather more circumspect in regard to violence, which happens mostly offscreen.)

Whereas the traditional modern attitude toward this material is to at least pretend to make it the occasion for some useful contemporary moral, "Rome" -- like its HBO slate-mate "Deadwood" -- attempts instead to re-create the social order and prejudices of a gone time in a way that resonates with and plays against our own without exactly judging it. Because the old rules are not ours, the markers by which we usually read a narrative -- e.g., murderers will be punished -- don't quite work. And because nearly all the adult characters have blood on their hands, it becomes possible to root for any of them, and to sympathize, in some crooked way, with almost the worst of them. While still finding them strange.