Quote Originally Posted by Quirinus View Post
I liked the first season a lot better than the second... though admittedly I didn't finish the second season-- gave up after Phillippi, where it was painfully obvious that the battle of legions had less than a hundred participants. It wasn't that that put me off the series, though that was the last straw. It was the excessive, meandering melodrama. Maybe the first season had that too, but at least it followed a thread all the way to the Ides of March. After the assassination the show seemed to have lost its focus.

Though the Season One finale still remains one of the best single episode in a television series I've ever seen-- the assassination of Caesar was properly visceral and tragic, while there's a sort of irony in the catharses of Vorenus and Pullo.
You might want to try Waterloo and the Soviet production of War and Peace, which incidentally shared the same director. Sergei Bondarchuk had 15,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry with which to film Waterloo, while War and Peace was even more lavish, with upward of 100,000 extras.