Once, back in the Victorian schoolroom, the Romans stood for virtue. Stern, uncomplaining and contemptuous of pain, they appeared to demonstrate just how far a stiff upper lip could take a people.

Times move on. The Romans are not much associated with self-discipline nowadays. Since the success of Gladiator their appetites have become a shorthand for excess and savagery.

Now, with the imminent arrival on BBC2 of a steamy drama-series portraying the rise of Julius Caesar, the Romans are about to become bywords for sex as well as violence.

Rome, which premieres on November 2, pulls no punches in its portrayal of a world given over to fornicatio. So raunchy is it that the entire series has had to be re-edited for sensitive Italian viewers, while at the press screening here in Britain even hardened hacks were left a trifle stunned by the drama’s relish for brutal thrustings and nudity.

It is hard not to see it as a missed opportunity, partly because the producers have chosen to place sex in the foreground so luridly, but also, and more importantly, because it sells the Romans — their notions of propriety, their desires and their nightmares — so short.

A drama that sought to be true to Roman mores would make for truly compulsive television. In a sense, this has already been made. For there is no character in the Rome series truer to the emotional life of Caesar’s times than Tony Soprano, the eponymous mobster in the long-running American series.

The world of The Sopranos, with its dark backdrop of violence, sexual double-standards and brutal codes of honour, can serve among many other things as a brilliant updating of Roman history.

This is something of which its producers were evidently well aware. So it is, for instance, that Tony Soprano compares himself to Caesar Augustus. “Everybody loved him,” Tony explains, “because he never ate alone. He was a fair leader and all his people loved him for that.”

So it is also that Tony’s mother, in an ominously oedipal twist, is named Livia, after Augustus’s supposedly ruthless and murderous wife.

It is hardly a coincidence that padrino, the Italian for a mafia godfather, should echo the Latin patronus, the term the Romans applied to an aristocrat who offered favours to clients while simultaneously demanding their respect and obedience.

This is a long way from the Rome we are about to see on BBC2.

Rome’s producers cheerfully insist that the explicit sexual content was essential for authenticity. As the lead screenwriter, Bruno Heller, put it: “The Romans took an unabashed and direct enjoyment in sex. Our series might be shocking but it is based on source material.”

Well, yes, up to a point. It is true that accounts of imperial Rome are ripe with allegations of scandalous misconduct, whether it be Caligula opening a brothel in his palace or Nero castrating a lover before using him as his bride.