Skarr, I agree with you - certainly McCullough's personation of Brutus is the weirdest of all. From the git-go, he's an utter bumbler with a mother who has all the charm of the Furies. And yet, in Cicero's letters, he comes off as - if very cool - a fairly scholarly and sedate type. IF you want to ignore, say, the little scandal of his being a moneylender at 40% interest and willing to hire thugs and armies to literally knock off his debtors if they didn't pay up (even Cicero was shocked at that one).

Of all the characters around Caesar, INCLUDING Caesar, I find Brutus hardest to fathom. I can see a couple of obvious choices with the HBO series: they're obviously playing on the Patrician/prole theme, and Brutus' family name is certainly enough to put him right up there with the most reactionary patricians. You also have the fact that he will kill Caesar in the end, hence (since Caesar is the star), they've got to put in some iffy character quirks to allow him to progress to that stage.

But I agree, it's interesting to wonder where they are going with this. Unlike the series "Deadwood" (in which the semi-heroic Wild Bill Hickock gets knocked off in the third episode), I'd be willing to bet that Caesar will last until at least the 10th episode here - if not the final season thriller. How on earth could one resist that for the season finale? We'll see a lot more of Brutus towards the end, I would bet.

One ponders that so much of our "heroic" Brutus comes straight from Shakespeare, who made some very interesting dramatic choices from Plutarch. Although Brutus was thoroughly admired in later times by that small minority who relished the Republic, it's Shakespeare's magnificence that turns him into the hero of that play. The real man is - for me - almost impossible to pin down.