Did ships really battle in the Colosseum? The bizarre true stories that inspired Gladiator II

Ridley Scott’s epic sequel starring Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington has been broadly criticised for its historic inaccuracies. The BBC asks Roman historical past consultants to separate reality from fiction.

You may joke that for his work on Gladiator II, Alexander Mariotti had one of many hardest jobs in cinema. He was the movie’s historic script guide, which meant advising director Sir Ridley Scott when the script strayed from the file.

This text incorporates spoilers for Gladiator II.

Scott has made it clear that he would not care if his movies are traditionally inaccurate, nonetheless, even once they’re primarily based on actual individuals and occasions. In 2023, after TV historian Dan Snow identified a number of inaccuracies in Scott’s movie Napoleon, Scott mentioned Snow ought to “get a life“. However Mariotti, who additionally works as a historian and is a number one speaker on gladiators, fight and weaponry, knew what he was letting himself in for. “From the very begin I mentioned to them, ‘Look, I do know we’re not right here to make a documentary.’ I all the time know that we’re there to make movies and entertain,” Mariotti tells the BBC.

This hasn’t stopped the consultants from mentioning inaccuracies, nonetheless. When the primary trailer for Gladiator II was launched again in July, historians jumped to elucidate why the structure was incorrect, that Romans did not have newspapers to learn, and that they did not meet in cafés.

The plot of Gladiator II centres on Lucius (Paul Mescal) – the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and Maximus (Russell Crowe) – who as a toddler was compelled to go away Rome. Twenty years after the loss of life of Lucius’s father, Roman troopers invade his dwelling metropolis in Numidia, kill his spouse, then take him into slavery. After being bought by Macrinus (Denzel Washington), Lucius is was a gladiator. However whereas Lucius battles to outlive, being pitted in opposition to animals, ships and different gladiators contained in the Colosseum, Macrinus plots to overthrow the younger emperors Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn), so he can turn into the ruler of Rome.

Mariotti factors out that if the movie was strictly correct, then the phrase Colosseum would not even be uttered. Its authentic identify was the Flavian Amphitheatre, after the dynasty that dominated when the constructing was constructed. Folks solely began to name it the Colosseum centuries later, across the yr 1000 AD. The principle purpose why Mariotti is not overly involved by these errors is the large affect {that a} movie like Gladiator II has on viewers and tourism. “There’s a large amount of snobbery within the educational world in the direction of movie,” says Mariotti. “I am actually baffled by it, as a result of during the last 20 years Gladiator had a big impact. Earlier than the movie, you would get into the Colosseum at no cost. The next yr, individuals got here in droves.”

Though Gladiator II has quite a few historic inaccuracies, no less than a few of it’s primarily based in reality. Shortly after being captured, Lucius has to outlive a troop of baboons. Then when he arrives within the Colosseum, he and his fellow gladiators face a charging rhinoceros. However whereas it is believed that baboons and rhinoceroses had been taken to the Colosseum and proven off to Romans, they would not have gone up in opposition to gladiators. As an alternative, gladiators would have needed to battle lions, panthers and elephants. It’s believed {that a} rhino was present on the opening of the Colosseum in 80 AD, the place it fought a bull, bear, buffalo, lion and bison. “They might usher in bizarre animals from everywhere in the empire to battle,” says Paul Belonick, a professor at UC Regulation SF who additionally wrote Restraint, Battle, and the Fall of the Roman Republic. There isn’t any file of the rhino being mounted by a Roman soldier and ridden like a jockey, nonetheless.

When Emperor Titus held 100 days of video games within the Colosseum to mark its opening, Belonick estimates that round 10,000 animals had been killed in only a few days. “They had been killed in all types of inventive methods, too. Folks threw spears at them, acquired them with nets. Archers had been extremely popular. It is like watching a sharpshooter. They’d have small deer working round. An archer would stand in a selected spot, then take them down, and folks would cheer.” Typically these in attendance would get upset on the deaths of sure animals. The Roman historian Dio wrote concerning the crowd changing into very unhappy as a gaggle of elephants had been killed. He noted that the creatures “had been pitied by the individuals when, after being wounded and ceasing to battle, they walked about with their trunks raised towards heaven”. 

Arguably the most important motion sequence in Gladiator II can also be its most egregious deviation from historical past. When Lucius and several other different gladiators are compelled to participate in a mock naval battle, Scott seemingly revels in making the set-piece as over-the-top as attainable.

In actuality, if an emperor wished to outdo his predecessor, he would maintain a mock naval battle, recognized on the time as naumachia. These occasions would see water put within the amphitheatres, ships introduced in, after which the fighters recreate historic occasions. “They might often reconstruct naval battles of the Greeks in opposition to the Persians,” says David Potter, the Francis W Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman Historical past at The College of Michigan. “The crews of the ships could be individuals who have been condemned to loss of life.”

Whereas Gladiator II makes it appear as if the ships are transferring at full pace and the water is deep sufficient to have sharks in it, Roman amphitheatres had been solely stuffed with a small quantity of liquid. The ships by no means picked up sufficient pace to crash into one another both, as that they had flat bottoms in order that they might transfer round simply. Plus, the final naumachia is believed to have taken place on the Colosseum in 89 AD, greater than 100 years earlier than the occasions of the movie. The shortage of water additionally implies that the Colosseum by no means had sharks swimming round, ready for individuals to fall in. Though some historians imagine that crocodiles had been a part of the animal hunts, they’re not sure whether or not they had been included within the nautical fights.

Whereas there are sufficient data of mock naval battles for historians to imagine they passed off in Rome, there are nonetheless fairly a number of unknowns relating to how and the place they did. Belonick means that they most certainly passed off on the Circus Maximus, which is far decrease than the Colosseum and nearer to the Tiber river. “It could have been simpler to flood. Plus in the event you take a look at the form of it, it is a bowl. The Colosseum has all these underground tunnels. I do not understand how they’d have plugged it up. Some individuals simply assume they flooded the centre part, somewhat than the entire thing.”

Mariotti means that as a result of the Colosseum was constructed on the positioning of a man-made lake, that made it attainable to flood. “They constructed an unimaginable drainage system from the river to carry the water up after which drain it.”

The sequel’s depictions of gladiator fights are principally incorrect, too. Unfolding within the afternoon after the executions, Potter insists that they weren’t fairly as brutal because the Gladiator movies and different Roman epics would have you ever imagine. To start with, they weren’t all slaves or prisoners of battle. “Forty per cent of the gladiators had been most likely free individuals who turned gladiators to generate income,” says Potter. Reasonably than it being a battle to the loss of life, Belonick compares these contests to watching WWE or UFC. “More often than not it is to first blood or a second of give up. It was as soon as calculated that 9 out of 10 instances no person dies.” There was even a referee that stepped in to separate individuals.

That did not cease residents from betting on the gladiators, with Potter including that Romans would gamble on something. When anyone acquired injured, prestigious docs would come out to deal with them. Galen, essentially the most well-known physician from the traditional world, even began out as a physician for gladiators. In the end, the objective of the gladiator contests was to see completely different kinds of fight pitted in opposition to one another. “There’d be a man with a internet and triton in opposition to somebody with a defend and sword,” says Potter. “Somebody flippantly armoured in opposition to somebody in heavy armour”.

Very like its method to the Colosseum video games, a number of of the characters concerned in Gladiator II had been primarily based on actual individuals, however what occurs to them within the movie is fiction. In 211 AD, Caracalla and Geta turned the joint rulers of Rome. Caracella is then believed to have had Geta murdered. Geta is even thought to have died of their mom’s arms. Caracalla turned a massively unpopular emperor, with Potter describing him as a “vicious and nasty man”. Caracalla left the town in 216 AD to wage battle in opposition to the Parthian Empire, solely to be murdered by one among his personal troopers in 217 AD.

Macrinus allegedly recruited the soldier to commit the homicide. He turned the Emperor of Rome on 11 April 217, three days after Caracalla’s loss of life. “He is the primary particular person to turn into emperor who’d by no means been a member of the Roman Senate,” says Potter. Macrinus himself was executed simply over a yr later, in June 218, after Caracella’s aunt had launched a riot to get her grandson, Elagabalus, put in as the brand new emperor, although he was simply 14. “Being emperor turns into essentially the most harmful job you would presumably have,” says Potter, and for the following 100 years each one who reigned solely did so for a short while.

With work having already started on the script for Gladiator III, viewers can as soon as once more anticipate Scott to make use of these true tales as inspiration earlier than eschewing historic accuracy within the service of leisure. Mariotti sees no downside with this, as a result of in his view, it merely displays what artists have executed all through historical past. “What Ridley does is not any completely different to Shakespeare or Michelangelo. Even the portray Pollice Verso by Jean-Léon Gérôme, which impressed Ridley to make the primary movie – it is all traditionally inaccurate. But it surely’s about utilizing historical past to inform a narrative and train us a lesson. That is why we gravitate to them. They’re mainly tales about us.”

Greater than that, Mariotti believes that movies like Gladiator II join viewers to their ancestors. Particularly the scenes within the Colosseum, as a result of Romans had been attending these occasions for a similar the reason why individuals watch movies. “That was their cinema. That is the place they escaped from life. The place, for a few hours, they reworked right into a brave hunter or gladiator and had been proven components of the world they’d by no means see. That is what occurs when individuals watch Gladiator II. They’re doing the very same factor that the Colosseum was constructed for.”

Gladiator II is launched in US cinemas on 22 November.