 " The Stolen Eagle " was written by executive producer and co @-@ creator Bruno Heller and directed by Michael Apted , who also directed the following two episodes . Heller said the era of the Roman Empire was " pivotal in Western history . If things hadn 't turned out the way they did at that particular point , the world that we live in now would be very different . " He decided to tell the story of the series from the perspectives of two common soldiers , Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo . According to Heller , " They are the only two ordinary soldiers mentioned by Caesar in his book , so the idea was to do a sort of <unk> and Guildenstern take . I essentially took the seed of that idea to try to tell a big historical epic , but from the street level , the <unk> 's point of view . " 
