ROMAN MATRONS BEHAVING BADLY.

ROMAN MATRONS BEHAVING BADLY. Our family is enjoying the new season of ROME on HBO (second episode tonight). The story is wonderfully told. It portrays how competent Roman soldiers were, what wonderful killing machines. The character of Augustus is convincing, the kind of man who could as a teenager receive one trump card (admittedly being Caesar’s heir was a high trump) and win the Roman Empire. But ROME portrays Atia, Servilia and Octavia as scamps, as we would put it in the Midwest. (Octavia, with only incest and lesbianism on her report card so far seems to be the nicest). Historically, Servilia appears to have been Julius Caesar’s mistress. But, according to Wikipedia, Atia (“Atia was a religious and caring matron.”) and Octavia (“respected and admired by contemporaries…for maintaining traditional Roman feminine virtues”) were respectable Roman matrons. And respectable Roman matrons set the historic standard for respectability.