Fueled by obscenity, HBO's series "Rome" shocks us back 2,000 years -- and reflects the horror show in Iraq today

In his book "Mythologies," the French theorist Roland Barthes turned his jaundiced gaze on, among other things, bad movie haircuts. In a chapter titled "The Romans in Films," Barthes mocked the dos in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1953 film "Julius Caesar." "[A]ll the characters are wearing fringes. Some have them curly, some straggly, some tufted, some oily, all have them well combed," Barthes wrote. "What then is associated with these insistent fringes? Quite simply the label of Roman-ness ... The frontal lock overwhelms us with evidence, no one can doubt that he is in Ancient Rome." For Barthes, these "Roman" haircuts, along with the constant "passionate" sweat that pours from everyone, are a "degraded spectacle, which is equally afraid of simple reality and of total artifice." By pompously pretending to be "natural," the Roman haircut is a sign of artistic bad faith.

Barthes' essay helped me understand why I'm addicted to HBO's series "Rome."