ScottishMartialArts

My thoughts as well. If your primary motivation for attending university is to acquire employable job skills, I'd say save yourself the cost of tuition and acquire said skills on your own. Any reasonably intelligent person is capable of teaching him or herself how to program. Just teach yourself and get involved in mod projects, as that is far more likely to get you into the industry than merely possessing a Bachelors in CS. American higher education has acquired an increasing vocational focus over the last 60 years or so. As such, most High School students looking at colleges are thinking only in terms of career preparation, which misses the point of a university education entirely. What a university education has to offer is the intellectual development and the wisdom to live a more humane, thoughtful, and fulfilling life. That may be something you are interested in, and if so look for a University with both a CS major and a solid core curriculum that has a historical and humanistic focus balanced out by mathematics and the natural sciences. edit: just realized this thread is nearly three years old, and as such the original poster is probably well into his college career if he chose to go that route.

Just because there is little question of what will happen and how it will happen does not mean there is no dramatic impact. A suspenseful feeling of "what will happen next?" is only one of a myriad of emotions that a filmmaker or a writer can be trying to achieve. Often, the greatest dramatic impact lies not in suspense but in knowing what will happen to the characters before they do. Take the Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels which is about the battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. The South was so badly defeated on the third day that they were never able to recover. On the first day however, the totally kicked the Union's ass and on the second day ended in stalemate but only after the South came very, very close to achieving victory. The reader however, knows how the battle ends, how an entire Southern division was completely destroyed over the course of about 45 minutes. When the Southern soldiers and officers are expressing optimism for victory, when they discuss their hopes for the war finally ending and being able, once again, to see their friends who are fighting on the Union side, the reader becomes immersed in the tragedy that is about to ensue. The Killer Angels is such a highly regarded book because it so perfectly captures the character, the nobility and the tragedy of the American Civil War, and it would not have been able to do so if the reader did not already know what was going to happen. Obviously Rome isn't The Killer Angels. My point however is that a removal of suspense can sometimes enhance drama, rather than diminish. Having studied Roman history, it is only the Lucius Vorenius and Titus Pullo arcs that even have the possibility of holding out any real suspense for me. Even so, I still really enjoy the show and simply knowing what will happen hasn't even remotely diminished my enjoyment of it.

The show does a good job of getting the small stuff right and the big stuff wrong, mostly from trying to compress the chronology into a single TV season. To use the first episode of the first season as an example, the episode opens with Caesar having just defeated Vercingetorix and simultaneously receiving word of the death of his daughter Julia (who was married to Pompey). The death of Julia actually occurred two years earlier in the war so that by the time that the Gallic War was over, there was already a significant rift between Caesar and Pompey. For dramatic purposes, the show needs to start at the beginning of the break of Caesar and Pompey but to start in the midst of the Gallic Wars would not be conducive to the amount of episodes they have to work with. As a result, they compressed the chronology and shifted some key events around. That's an example of something big that is wrong, now for something little that is oh so right. Roman religion, like most polytheistic religions from antiquity, was not about getting some sort of deep spiritual satisfaction, an intimate personal relation with the divine, or salvation. Rather, it was almost a kind of technology used to increase the material prosperity of humans. The gods were incredibly powerful and could directly influence the affairs of humans for bad or good. Just as you would pay respect to a powerful King in the hopes that he would treat you well, a Roman gave sacrifice to the gods to develop a beneficent relationship (a cultus deorom, cultivation of the gods). With such a relation, the gods would see your crops grow rather than whither, give you success in war, and allow your wife to bear a son that survives infancy. As a result, Roman religion has a very contractual sound to it and resembles a business transaction: Venus of Child-Birth I will sacrifice to you a newborn calf if you will see my wife and baby safely through delivery. Should I be unable to attain a newborn calf at an economical price I will sacrifice 3 white geese in it's place should that be pleasing to you. Should the child be stillborn but my wife survive I shall sacrifice 1 white geese. Should my wife die but my child survive I shall sacrifice 2 white geese. If both survive and the child is a boy I shall.... etc. With that background out of the way, we can see that any production that portrays Roman religiosity in terms of spiritual fulfillment has completely and utterly missed the point. Rather than portraying antiquity as it was they would be projecting more modern approaches to religiosity onto the canvass of antiquity. In the first episode of Rome, Titus Pullo finds himself imprisoned. He makes a vow to Vulcan of Metal Bars, that if Vulcan will free him from his cell he will make appropriate sacrifice. I forget the details of the vow but the dialogue perfectly captures the contractual nature of a Roman vow. By getting that detail right, the do a tremendous job of establishing verisimilitude and a true to antiquity Rome.

Are you familiar with the literary technique of foreshadowing? Why do you suppose the film makers dropped all of the hints you just mentioned? Is it perhaps because they want the viewer to understand ahead of time that Antony will be attacked in the forum? It used to be entirely safe to assume that a moderately educated member of the West would have a decent grasp of Roman history. (Particularly of the Fall of the Republic, since that story was so instrumental to the thinking that went behind documents such as the US Constitution.) For the last 50 years or so, however, our society has nearly unanimously decided that there isn't much of value to be gained from a study of the past. That's two generations that have grown up that haven't studied Latin or had more than a cursory introduction to Rome in junior high school. As a result the only knowledge that the filmmakers can assume of the audience is a) a long time ago there was a powerful empire in Europe called Rome and b) Julius Caesar was somehow important. The filmmakers recognize however that there are certain stories that work better dramatically if the audience already has the outline of the story ahead of time, the Fall of the Roman Republic is one such story (just look at Shakespeare's historical plays on the subject). The filmmakers find themselves in a quandary because it would be helpful if their audience actually knew something about Rome but the reality is that the audience knows nothing. To resolve this quandary, the filmmakers are trying to make clear the outline of what is going to happen from the outset, and then fill in the dramatic details as they go along. It's immediately clear within the first 10 minutes of the second episode that Antony will be attacked in the forum. How it will happen, and the emotions behind it, is what the rest of the episode spends time developing.

Stuff I've read been reading in the past two weeks: Metamorphoses - Ovid (Gregory trans.) Theogony and Works and Days - Hesiod (West trans.) Homeric Hymns (Cashford trans) Iliad - Homer (Lattimore trans) A Short Introduction to Classical Myth - Powell The Republic - Plato (Bloom trans.) Complete Plays of Sophocles (Jebb trans)