Even if a story is set within imperial (or republican) Rome, the whole idea of an ascendant Rome is based on the colonies and provinces. So showing the Roman u

Even if a story is set within imperial (or republican) Rome, the whole idea of an ascendant Rome is based on the colonies and provinces. So showing the Roman upper classes (or even the wealthier urban merchants) being "Romans" means implicitly that they are the top crust of a vast empire feeding them wealth and power. That leads to 3) above pretty easily, since in the mind of the hegemonic movie-producing culture (Americans), their archetype of a foreign empire was, of course, the British (English). A more interesting criticism would be hearing how, say, the Spanish language is rendered in Latin American films about Rome or other historical empires. Do they put a Yankee accent in the Spanish language as such a marker? (I suspect it's probably more of a continental Spanish, though.) Would be interesting to know of other non-Anglosphere cultural products that use implicit (e.g. American accents) cues of the new Rome to denote the class status of historical depictions. Global HN'ers?