There was a lot of killing and shagging in Ancient Rome – and this big-budget series shows most of it W hat would you do if you were the big boss of a Roman amphitheatre? Someone who could commission whatever kind of bizarre phenomena you liked, for the entertainment of the masses? Each to their own but if we were given the job, we would immediately fill the arena with butter, heat the ground up ever so slightly, and watch two teams try to play volleyball against each other. If you know your history, you’ll be aware that Roman emperors tended to go for the butter volleyball option far less often than the ‘pitting two petrified men against each other in a desperate fight to the death’ option. And this is the option in which the colossal new Amazon Prime Video series Those About To Die is interested.
The show, directed by Roland Emmerich and Marco Kreuzpainter and created by Robert Rodat, is about a constant jostling for power among both the elite and the poor. “If I am not ambitious..
. I am dead” is the kind of thing characters say every 20 minutes or so. And they have good reason to: as soon as you think you can trust someone, they’ve driven a knife through your mum.
Tom Hughes as Titus and Anthony Hopkins as Emperor Vespasian in ‘Those About to Die’. CREDIT: Peacock/Prime Video We’re in the Flavian dynasty, and Emperor Vespasian (Anthony Hopkins, who despite being front and centre in a lot of the marketing material appears sparingly) has two sons trying t.