Once again my lack of research prior to queuing led to quite the surprise when I threw this one in. I had no idea that it was a Penthouse production. There is no other way to say it--this was porn...with an ounce of history edited in. The balance of sex/story was skewed much too far in the porn direction to call this a good movie yet it was entertaining. As previously mentioned the HBO series Rome has much better balance with the emphasis on story and some debauchery intelligently interlaced in the plot.

Hedonistic debauchery, that I guess is fitting when portraying a period like this. The problem is not that it features such graphic sex, rather it focuses on it way too much, and completely randomly, where it isn't necessary. Just when the story starts to get interesting, we slip back into another needless orgy. And the film is lesser for it.

This is a great classic and really enjoyable.

In essence, this is a historical subject that is used to show a movie that is between soft porn and hardcore porn. Whereas it is historically certainly true that there were sexual excesses in those times amongst those people, the fact that there are constantly half-nude and fully nude people in the frame in this movie is just too much. It is kind visually interesting at the beginning, but after a time it becomes too much of the same and thus boring. There are other ways today to watch porn, if that is your objective. The story of Caligula disappears in this porn environment and the A-grade actors do not manage to lift it back up over that. A cinematographic unicorn of a movie, for movie buffs with open minds.