Character Arc
Lucius Vorenus is the spine of Rome — a centurion of the 13th Legion whose rigid code of honor, Republican piety, and devotion to discipline keep colliding with an age that is busy tearing the Republic apart. Pulled from the ranks of history (he and Pullo are two soldiers Julius Caesar actually named in his commentaries), Vorenus is the show's stern conscience: a man who believes in the gods, the law, and the chain of command in a city where all three are for sale.
His arc is a long, brutal education in how little his virtue can protect the people he loves. Reunited with a wife who believed him dead, dragged into politics as Caesar's man and later Mark Antony's, Vorenus rises far above his station only to watch his family detonate around him. The tragedy is that his greatest strengths — his certainty, his temper, his sense of duty — are exactly what doom his household.
Kevin McKidd plays him as a granite-jawed Roman trying to hold to old certainties while the world goes feral, and the friendship with the irrepressible Titus Pullo becomes the warmest, most human thing in HBO and the BBC's blood-soaked epic.