Rome: The World's First Superpower

Having read many classical commentaries such as Plutarch, Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Suetonius and others (yes, including Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War), I guess I could be called a history buff, although hardly an expert.

This series on Rome is interesting, if not fleshed out with enough detail, suffers from many similar documentaries in which some scholar/narrator engages in what feels like a vanity show in which we watch the narrator lecture us from various locations. We see a lot less of the location than closeups of the narrator's face. We also get to see the scholar staring in awe at one historical location after another, and pretending that he/she is seeing all this for the first time.

The narrative is never "We are now in XXX and this is YYY". It's always "Now I am going to XXX to learn ZZZ", as though the narrator had no clue what would be found and what could be learned that is not already well explained in dozens of books.

Perhaps the History Channel feels this repetitious format is necessary to draw viewers, but it does get tiresome in program after program.

I'm more inclined to go with the line from Dragnet, "Just the facts", rather than watch.

In many ways, this is a week done documentary series but I can't get past the first error in the title. It makes me doubt the validity of everything else mentioned. While Time was a superpower, it definitely wasn't the first. Not in any particular order, but Egypt, Babylon, the Medes and the Persians, the Greeks under Alexander the Great, and even the Hittites all preceded the Roman empire. All of these were known as great superpowers who had conquered much if not all of the known world of the day. I understand most people do not no much about the Hittites but they were powerful enough that other major power signed peace treaties with them to avoid going to war with them until internal conflict destroyed them. I mostly mention all of this because if you're going to teach something is history, we need to teach it correctly. Well not as great as some of the other superpowers mentioned above, even the Assyrian empire predated the Roman empire. At least be accurate. I could even handle if you wanted to say that the Roman empire was the greatest superpower ever, even though personally I disagree with that belief.

Larry Lamb may be an award-winning actor and a self-described history buff, but he is certainly no historian, or at least not a very good one. I am a former ancient history teacher and it appears Lamb seems to have decided what the story is and sets out to rush through telling it his way without a whole lot of analysis and thought, aggrandizing his infatuation with ancient Rome along the way. To its credit, there are some good shots of structures and interesting artifacts, and a few good points made by real historians and archaeologists. But history is about looking at all sides of the story and determining the motives behind the facts. This series is sadly lacking on that front.