Michael Apted, whose film credits include Gorillas in the Mist and The World Is Not Enough, said he was “pissed off” and “grumpy” about the BBC’s handling of the series, the first episode of which went out last week.

He said he had not been told the BBC was squeezing the first three episodes — the ones he directed — down to two. They were shown at full length in America by HBO, the BBC’s partner in the production.

The corporation maintained that the cut scenes were unnecessary because British audiences “already knew” the historical background of the struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey and did not need as much information as Americans.

Apted was engaged to film the first three episodes of the £60m series, a joint project between the BBC and HBO, the American cable channel.

But, says Apted, a funny thing happened on the way to the studios. HBO has shown all three of his 50-minute episodes in full, but the BBC has cut and spliced them into two programmes and removed much of the back-stabbing between Caesar and Pompey.

Some reviewers have compared the finished product to Caligula, the notorious 1979 film produced by Bob Guccione, the Penthouse publisher, who spliced sex scenes into the story without telling his cast.

“The BBC has not only sold this series on sex and violence, but now, in the way it has edited and cut the first episodes, it has made sex scenes more important than the senate scenes,” said Apted.

“I’m really pissed off with the BBC for bringing down my first three episodes to two and, in doing so, taking out much of the vital politics.”

“It has also made it confusing for viewers to follow. The balance is all wrong now. They’ve cut out vital scenes between Caesar and Pompey. Scenes which show the dirty tricks each tried. The political context has been lost.”

Apted, who has also directed the iconic ITV documentary series Seven Up, only saw the BBC’s edited version of Rome very recently. He is currently in Britain shooting the movie Amazing Grace, which tells the story of William Wilberforce and his attempts to ban slavery.

“What also makes me very grumpy is that I was told that the cuts had been introduced by the BBC because they thought British viewers already knew the historical background. But all that’s happened as far as the viewer is concerned is that it has made Rome hard to follow.

“I’m also annoyed because it makes me look as if I’m at fault with my directing. It reflects poorly on me.”

Apted, who, though British born and bred is also president of the Directors Guild of America, believes the BBC over-sold the programme on sex and violence. “I watched a discussion about it on BBC Breakfast the other morning and they were cooing about the sex.”

Apted also claims that he was never told in advance that the BBC had cut his first three episodes into two 50-minute ones. Other directors filmed the rest of the series.

“I only found out by chance a couple of weeks ago when one of the actors told me.”

By then the BBC, which has the contractual rights to edit as it wishes, had made its mind up.

Apted’s dismay is shared by Robin Lane Fox, a professor of history at New College, Oxford, and author of The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian. “The BBC is a victim of the delusion that if you dumb down you will get a bigger audience,” said Lane Fox, who was the historical adviser to Oliver Stone’s film Alexander.

However, if that was the intention, it seems to have worked. The 6.6m viewers who watched the opening episode of Rome on BBC2 last Wednesday was the biggest audience for the channel for more than five years.

“Sadly, when compared with the brilliance of I, Claudius, Rome trivialises, particularly the relationship between Caesar and Pompey,” said Lane Fox. “The real story should be that of the battle among the senators. But BBC viewers have not been given this. The amounts of sex and violence in episode one are absurd. It’s a shame as the acting is very good.”

Rome has received mixed reviews. While some praised it as entertaining, A A Gill, the Sunday Times television critic, writes in today’s Culture that it was “a mess of confusing storylines. Almost every utterance had to move great marble slabs of plot. It looked like a case of too many producers re-writing editing and patching up, which might well be an appropriate metaphor for the end of the republic, but it made for confused television”.

The BBC says it cut the first three episodes to two as “British viewers did not need so much back-story”.

The BBC blamed newspapers for concentrating on the sexual and violent content and said that its historical consultant maintained that ancient Rome was portrayed accurately.

On BBC1’s Points of View today, Roly Keating, BBC2’s controller, will say “Ancient Rome was a very violent society with utterly different moral values from ours. The series has been written to give the audience an authentic and unsparing portrayal of life in that era at all social levels.”

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