Niobe, you worthless, useless bitch. So, after you cheat with your sister's husband and get your innocent daughter labeled a whore to protect your own dubious virtue, you have the audacity to then throw your sister's infertility in her face and blame her for her husband's philandering? Fuck you, you faithless, self-absorbed cunt. I'm glad Persephone cursed you and gladder still that Verona the Elder called you on your constant, empty threats. Who are you to talk about matches with "someone worth your station," you hypocritical skank? If Verona wants to marry the drover and live a happy, simple life, the least you can do is let her, since you were the one mooning about loneliness and happiness to justify porking your brother-in-law.

Inexplicably, the narrative desperately wants us to sympathize with her. Maybe I could have if she weren't dragging others into her mess and browbeating them into complicity in her deception about the baby's true parentage. You want to lie? Fine, but the minute the lie you need to save yourself requires sacrifice from others who didn't agree to help beforehand, you lose all claim to sympathy and the high road, and you certainly lose the right to wag your finger at the daughter you pressganged into your ridiculous arrangement and lecture her about how "proper Roman ladies" conduct themselves. I'm sorry, writers, but Niobe is not some delicate, wronged flower whose feeble attempts at rapprochement with Vorenus absolve her of responsibility or consequence for her previous piss-poor decisions. I'm not going to get all dewy-eyed because an oblivious Vorenus makes love to her.

I do, however, want a Titus Pullo of my very own. He's like a big, dumb friendly dog, and I love his friendship with stuffy Vorenus.

Methinks young Octavian has no interest in women, brothel visit or no.

I haven't written in three days or read in one. I should buckle down on the latter because although there's no chance of completing my Goodreads reading challenge at this point, I'd like to make it respectable. The Passage is so grindingly boring, but I can't figure out have to remove it from my currently-reading shelf without it counting toward my reading challenge total, so I'll just have to power through.

Roomie and I needed a break from the exhausting bleakness of Sons of Anarchy, so we started S1 of Rome. Wow. What a bunch of ass trumpets on parade. It's a veritable cavalcade of douchebags, from Cato and Pompey, the conniving senators, to Atia, the scheming sister of Caesar who forces her daughter to divorce her husband so she can whore herself out to Pompey as a gift bride. Octavian, her son, is a sniveling shit. The soldiers aren't much better. Veronus is a gruff toolbag who treats his wife and children like crap and openly calls his daughters property to be doled out to husbands of his choosing. It's realistic; women were naught but property and social currency in Roman society, so I can't fault them for verisimilitude, but it's gross to hear someone state it so baldly. They try to soften him a bit later in the episode, but nope, he's still a prick. Titus Pullo is a drunken lout, but he's the only one of this lot I don't want to see dead.

Niobe, Veronus' wife, should be sympathetic, but since she cheated on her husband and fobbed off the resultant son on her thirteen-year-old daughter to save face, I won't be sorry when she bites it. To pass your social stigma on to your young daughter is cowardly and selfish. Think of a lie that won't blight your blameless child, you cow. Claim you found the baby in the midden heap. Veronus is an idiot for buying that bill of goods, by the way. His daughter barely has breasts; there's no way anyone with eyes could mistake her for a nursing mother. I know men can be oblivious and ignorant about reproductive matters and the effects of childbirth on women's bodies, but that oblivious?

I hate the vast majority of these cretins and can't wait for them to eat it in spectacular fashion.