One of my old Classics professors used to say that he never understood why anyone writes novels. He would explain, “If you’re writing a philosophical novel, why not write philosophy, and if you’re writing a historical novel, why not write history?” For him, someone wanting fantasy or adventure had an ample supply with works like Homer’s Odyssey and Xenophon’s Anabasis, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Caesar’s Commentaries. Similar thoughts come to me as fans commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the premiere of a popular television series, Rome. Produced by the BBC and HBO, it ran for two seasons, won Emmy awards, and was brilliant, epic, and often pornographic.

To their credit, the people who created this series went to great lengths to get the ancient cultural details right. Since the days of Kenneth Clark’s vastly successful TV series, Civilisation (1969), illustrated books have accompanied nearly all such televised ventures. Rome was no exception, and in 2007 a hardcover book showed family-friendly scenes and gave synopses from both seasons of the series. It also offered background from Bruno Heller, one of the writers for the series, and Jonathan Stamp, the show’s historical consultant.

According to Bruno Heller, the proposal to write for television about the last decades of the Roman Republic was both intriguing and daunting. He and the other writers for the show wanted to find a way to set their Rome apart from all the many previous “sword and sandal” movies and television programs. “We started,” wrote Heller, “with the notion of telling the story from the perspective of two foot soldiers, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, the only two rank-and-file soldiers mentioned by Caesar in his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars.”

With that basis in a classical text, the next step was to do a lot of historical research. Jonathan Stamp made clear that Rome was never meant to be a documentary. “Rome was not intended to be one hundred percent historically accurate,” he wrote, “but we did everything we could to make it one hundred percent authentic.” He noted that their goal was “to bring to life a world that an ancient Roman would have recognized, in all its details: from hairstyles to religious rituals, from the chain mail worn by Roman legionnaires during battle to the food served at an aristocratic dinner party.”

To that end, the men and women making Rome spared no effort recreating ancient Rome on several acres outside modern Rome at the Cinecittà film studios. Slums and Senate house, villas and temples, all were as spot on as the ladies’ dresses and the soldiers’ uniforms. Jeff Beal composed eerie and martial music evoking the time period, his soundtrack being commercially issued on compact disc. Artists replicated ancient frescoes and graffiti like those preserved at Pompeii, and costumers used only cotton, linen, silk, wool, and leather. And yet, something like my old professor’s comments come to mind: Why go to all that trouble only to get so much of the history wrong?

For example, from portrait busts we know what Cato and Cicero looked like, but the actors portraying them bore no resemblance to those great men. Likewise, the murder of Cicero and the suicide of Brutus veer from the historical accounts, even to the point of Pullo being Cicero’s lone assassin. In fact, Plutarch recorded Cicero’s killers as two soldiers named Herennius and Popillius.

Without question, though, Rome made for compelling drama on prime-time television. Each week, viewers could tune in to see ancient Rome in vivid realism. All the same, it would be like recreating to the last button and buckle 1860s Washington, D. C., only to have Brad Pitt or Timothée Chalamet play Abraham Lincoln and have him die from poisoned coffee served to him by his vixen of a wife.

Still, much of what drew fans to Rome, for all its historical mistakes, its vulgarity, and its undraped interactions, was the robust, if at times rocky, friendship between Pullo and Vorenus. Although almost nothing else is known about them, their sometimes contentious loyalty to one another forms part of the historical record. The writers of Rome, along with actors Ray Stevenson and Kevin McKidd, respectively, turned Pullo and Vorenus into interesting and often sympathetic characters, helping keep alive their laconic fame that began some fifty years before Christ.

In the series, Pullo comes across as a walking id, driven by impulse, emotion, and desire. In contrast, Vorenus strives (and often fails) to embody Stoic self-control, integrity, and a strong sense of patriotic duty. Whereas Pullo shrugs at the possibility of a radical change of government, Vorenus stands committed to the constitutional ideals of the Republic. It may be a cliché, but opposites often do attract.

After eight years in Gaul fighting under Julius Caesar, they return to Rome. Vorenus longs to get home to his small apartment on the Aventine and be reunited with his family. Meanwhile, Pullo, unmarried, has made no secret of how he plans to expend his long-frustrated energies. As the two men part company, Vorenus offers helpful information that for him conveys his abiding, sometimes grudging, respect for Pullo: “The cleaner brothels are in the Suburra.”

Very likely most fans of Rome, including ambivalent fans like me, dusted off their copies of Caesar’s Commentaries to re-read what he wrote about Pullo and Vorenus. In 1980, Anne and Peter Wiseman published an illustrated English translation of Caesar’s work under the title, The Battle for Gaul. There, in Book 5 of Caesar’s Commentaries, the Wisemans rendered Caesar’s Latin: “In that legion there were two outstandingly brave individuals, Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus, both centurions who were getting close to the senior grade. They were always arguing about which of them was the better soldier, and every year they vied with one another over the question of promotion.” Caesar then recounted how these rivals ended up rescuing one another in battle.

In 1956, in his Caesar as a Man of Letters, F. E. Adcock observed of Caesar, “Nearest to his heart are the centurions, who have the soldierly virtues of the legionaries raised to a higher power.” For that reason, Caesar “goes out of his way to praise their exploits of courage and steadiness.” Thanks to Rome, people can revisit their favorite editions of Caesar’s Commentaries and admire anew the virtues and exploits of Pullo and Vorenus.