The Rome series is entertainment, and any historical accuracy is gravy . . . but there is lots of gravy. Great attention is paid to an accurate picture of daily life in Rome. The portraits of the great men -- Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, etc. -- are very striking. On another level, we see a kind of fantasy soap opera in which people -- Atia, Timon, Volenus -- run around scheming and sleeping with each other. This latter group consists of people who are scantly described by historians or else complete inventions. Sometimes the great men get involved in their adventures as well, as when the young Octavian befriends (of all people) Titus Pullo.

"Rome" follows the old tradition of historical drama founded by Shakespeare, where we see great men like Prince Hal mixed up in the gutter life of people like Falstaff and Mistress Quickly. The historian may resent such fictionalization, but he should acknowledge that Shakespeare was putting back in the history things that were taken out of it, because nobody bothered to write them down. It might have happened that way, things like that did happen, but there is no real way of reconstructing it.

Sometimes fiction is more true than history. We know much of what we know about daily life in Greece and Rome because it was described by comic playwrights and satirists. This passed beneath the attention of serious historians, so it enters the history books indirectly, through the field of literature.

One problem with literature, is that it may reflect the world of the author more than that of the ostensible subject. Shakespeare didn't know all that much about life in the 15th Century, but he knew LOTS about the 17th, which is lovingly described in his plays.

Another problem is that real history is too complicated: it has too many characters. Everyone who survived WW2 had a story to tell, but literature has to focus on a few characters and follow their story. In order to tell the whole story, you sometimes have to lump people together. In a WW2 drama, you might have some stage direction like: "Enter stage left, Arrogant Prussian General." The Arrogant Prussian General may bear the name of someone like Manstein, Keitel or Rommel, who may not have resembled the APG very closely and not actually have done the things the APG is shown to be doing. He is a "type," a composite character and is there to represent all those APGs who didn't make it into the show.

Concerning Atia, we actually know very little about her. Tacitus describes her as a model Roman mother, but this may be something of a hagiography: He was writing after her son Augustus was deified. (Was the Virgin Mary a model mother? Well, maybe . . . but who is going to say she wasn't?) Suetonius adds a few details concerning her ancestry. He says that Augustus was devoted to her, that she counseled him against taking up Caesar's legacy, and that she died when he was 20. This person bears hardly any resemblance to the HBO Atia, who schemes incessantly, sleeps around and carries on a bitter feud with Servilia, the mother of Brutus. "Atia" does, however, resemble Fulvia, the wife of Marc Anthony, a fascinating character who unfortunately isn't in the script.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulvia

So, we must recognize "Atia" as a composite character, a "type": the Scheming Roman Matron, already familiar to us from "I, Claudius". She is there to represent Fulvia and the other SRMs who didn't make it into the show.

As for whether Atia, the ideal mother described by Tacitus is more real than "Atia," the composite SRM, I believe that neither should be considered typical of Rome: Women are a very large and diverse group, in all times and places, and most of them don't fit closely any ideal standard or "type."