Rome Recap: Death Mask
After Philippi, that resulted in the death of both Cicero and Brutus, I suppose that they decided to tone down the violence for a while in this episode. Not completely, mind you, but just a bit.
So to start things off, Servilia drags her mourning self out of bed and over to the Julii homestead, where she promptly coats herself in ashes and demands justice. For days. And days and days and days. I mean it goes on and on. After a while, Atia comes out, Servilia curses her, then she kills herself.
What a waste. It would have been better if they had just sent someone out to kill her after the first couple of hours, as I feel like I wasted entirely too much of my time listening to it, and it was compressed into a one-hour episode.
In more interesting news, Atia also managed to marry off that slut Jocasta, giving her to Posca for his "service". Maybe now she'll leave well enough alone and not be a drag on Octavia. As if she needs any invitation to drag her down. She did sleep with her brother, after all.
Over in the political arena, said brother Octavian is busy dividing up the empire with new best pal Mark Antony, and they swear that nothing will ever come between them. Everything will be shared even-steven. Unless something comes up that the other one doesn't know about, of course, and you just know it will.
So about three seconds later, Herod comes by, with a whole boatload of gold, and offers it to Antony in exchange for his support as the king of Judea. Antony, never one to back away from a woman or a dollar, decides that he simply can't pass up such a sum and takes the whole thing for himself. I'm surprised it lasted all three seconds.
About two seconds after that, Octavian gets word about the bribe, and more importantly that he didn't get any of it, so he decides that he needs to save face, and that there needs to be a marriage between the two houses - to show public unity. Happy as a schoolgirl, his mother gets ready to finally be wed to Antony, and you just know that she's going to be disappointed somehow. Sure enough, the two houses do unite, but it's not like you expect.
Octavian has Antony marry Octavia. Talk about twisted.
Down on the Aventine, Vorena is still dallying with her newfound love, but it seems she's now been discovered. When Memmio finds out what she has been doing, he tells her that he has to tell her father, with them being such close business partners and all. Unless she can spy on him and tell him what he's up to and all. Maybe then it would be okay for him not to tell. Only here would that make any sense, but she agrees to the deal.
Vorena isn't the only crazy woman in Rome, however, and we've already witnessed several. Gaia provokes a fight, and Pullo gets pulled into it, because he didn't stick up for his woman. So he's supposed to whip Gaia into shape, to show her how she's supposed to act as a slave. That's just what he does. He throws her on the table and gives it to her, though she didn't seem to have too many bruises on her. I don't think that's quite what the little woman meant to happen.
Gaia goes shopping and finds some sort of herb or poison or tea or something to end a pregnancy, but I think it's a mite quick for it to be her that's pregnant, don't you?
