Graves invented the modern way of dramatising Roman politics: the imperial family as a household of ordinary appetites, told from inside, with the public history as a by-product of private grudges. Rome is built on that reading. The Senate is a room of men managing each other, Atia's household runs on favours and poison, and the famous events happen offstage of the domestic ones that caused them. The series adds the plebeian half, following two soldiers, which is its own move; the treatment of the patrician half as a family drama is Graves's.