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

Ridley Scott’s epic sequel starring Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington has been widely criticized for its historical inaccuracies. BBC asks Roman history experts to separate fact from fiction.

You might joke that for his work on Gladiator II, Alexander Mariotti had one of the toughest jobs in cinema. He was the film’s historical script consultant, which meant he advised director Sir Ridley Scott when the script strayed from the record.

This article contains spoilers for Gladiator II.

Scott has made it clear that he doesn’t care if his films are historically inaccurate, even when they are based on real people and events. In 2023, after television historian Dan Snow pointed out several inaccuracies in Scott’s film NapoleonScott said that Snow should “get a lifeBut Mariotti, who also works as a historian and is a leading lecturer on gladiators, combat and weapons, knew what he was getting himself into. to make a documentary.’ I always know we’re there to make movies and entertain,” Mariotti told the BBC.

However, this has not stopped the experts from pointing out inaccuracies. When the first trailer for Gladiator II was released back in July, historians leaped to explain why the architecture was wrong, which the Romans did not have newspapers to read and that they did not meet in cafés.

The plot of Gladiator II centers on Lucius (Paul Mescal) – son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and Maximus (Russell Crowe) – who as a child was forced to leave Rome. Twenty years after the death of Lucius’ father, Roman soldiers invade his hometown in Numidia, kill his wife, and then enslave him. After being bought by Macrinus (Denzel Washington), Lucius is turned into a gladiator. But while Lucius struggles to survive and is pitted against animals, ships and other gladiators inside the Colosseum, Macrinus plots to overthrow the young emperors Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn) so he can become the ruler of Rome.

Mariotti points out that if the film was strictly accurate, the word Colosseum would not even be uttered. Its original name was The Flavian Amphitheaterafter the dynasty that ruled when the building was built. People only started calling it the Colosseum centuries later, around the year 1000 AD. The main reason why Mariotti isn’t overly concerned about these mistakes is the huge impact that a film like Gladiator II has on viewers and tourism. “There is a great deal of snobbery in the academic world about film,” says Mariotti. “I’m really amazed by that, because over the last 20 years Gladiator had a huge impact. Before the movie, you could get into the Coliseum for free. The year after, people came in droves.”

Although Gladiator II has several historical inaccuracies, at least some of it is based in truth. Shortly after being captured, Lucius must survive a herd of baboons. When he then arrives at the Colosseum, he and his fellow gladiators are confronted by a charging rhinoceros. But although baboons and rhinoceroses are believed to have been taken to the Colosseum and displayed before the Romans, they would not have gone up against gladiators. Instead, gladiators would have had to fight lions, panthers and elephants. It is believed that a rhinoceros was present at the opening of the Colosseum in AD 80, where it fought a bull, bear, buffalo, lion and bison. “They would bring in strange animals from all over the empire to fight,” says Paul Belonick, a professor at UC Law SF who also wrote Restraint, Conflict and the Fall of the Roman Republic. However, there is no record of the rhinoceros being mounted by a Roman soldier and ridden as a jockey.

When Emperor Titus held 100 days of games in the Colosseum to mark the opening, Belonick estimates that about 10,000 animals were killed in a few days. “They were also killed in all sorts of creative ways. People threw spears at them, caught them with nets. Archers were very popular. It’s like watching a sharpshooter. They would have little deer running around. An archer would stand in a certain place, take them down and people would cheer.” Sometimes those present were saddened by the death of certain animals. The Roman historian Dio wrote that the crowd became very sad when a group of elephants were killed. He noticed that the creatures “were pitied by the people, when, being wounded and ceasing to fight, they went about with their trunks raised to heaven”.

The biggest action sequence in Gladiator II is arguably also its most egregious departure from the story. When Lucius and several other gladiators are forced to participate in a mock naval battle, Scott apparently revels in making the set piece as over-the-top as possible.

In reality, if an emperor wanted to surpass his predecessor, he would stage a mock naval battle, known at the time as naumachia. These events would see water put into the amphitheatres, ships brought in, and then the fighters recreated historical events. “They would usually reconstruct the sea battles of the Greeks against the Persians,” says David Potter, the Francis W Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History at the University of Michigan. “The crews of the ships would be people who have been sentenced to death.”

While Gladiator II makes it look like the ships are moving at full speed and the water is deep enough to have sharks in it, Roman amphitheatres were only filled with a small amount of liquid. The ships never gained enough speed crash into each other either, as they had flat bottoms so they could easily move around. Plus, the last naumachia is believed to have taken place at the Colosseum in AD 89, more than 100 years before the events of the film. The lack of water also means that the Coliseum never had sharks swimming around waiting for people to fall in. Although some historians believe that crocodiles were part of the animal hunts, they are uncertain whether they were part of the nautical battles.

Although there are enough records of mock naval battles to lead historians to believe they took place in Rome, there are still many unknowns about how and where they took place. Belonick suggests that they most likely took place at the Circus Maximus, which is much lower than the Colosseum and closer to the Tiber River. “It would have been easier to flood. Plus, if you look at the shape of it, it’s a bowl. The Colosseum has all these underground tunnels. I don’t know how they would have connected it. Some people just think they flooded the center section instead of the whole thing.”

Mariotti suggests that because the Colosseum was built on the site of an artificial lake, it allowed it to flood. “They built an incredible drainage system from the river to bring the water up and then drain it.”

The sequel’s depictions of gladiatorial combat are also mostly wrong. Unfolding the afternoon after the executions, Potter insists they weren’t quite as brutal as the Gladiator movies and other Roman epics would have you believe. To begin with, they were not all slaves or prisoners of war. “Forty percent of the gladiators were probably free people who became gladiators to make money,” says Potter. Rather than being a fight to the death, Belonick compares these contests to watching WWE or UFC. “Most of the time it’s for first blood or a moment of surrender. It was once calculated that nine times out of 10 no one dies.” There was even a judge who stepped in to separate people.

That didn’t stop the citizens from betting on the gladiators, and Potter added that the Romans would bet on anything. When someone got hurt, prestigious doctors came out to treat them. Crazythe most famous physician of the ancient world, even started out as a physician for gladiators. Ultimately, the goal of the gladiatorial contests was to see different fighting styles go up against each other. “There would be a guy with a net and triton against someone with a shield and sword,” says Potter. “Someone lightly armored against someone in heavy armor”.

Much like its approach to the Colosseum games, several of the characters involved in Gladiator II were based on real people, but what happens to them in the film is fiction. In 211 AD Caracalla and Geta became common rulers of Rome. Caracella is then believed to have Geta murdered. Geta is straight thought to have died in their mother’s arms. Caracalla became a hugely unpopular emperor, with Potter describing him as a “vicious and ugly man”. Caracalla left the city in 216 AD. to wage war against the Parthian Empire, only to stay murdered by one of his own soldiers in 217 AD.

Macrinus allegedly recruited the soldier to commit the murder. He became emperor of Rome on 11 April 217, three days after Caracalla’s death. “He is the first person to become emperor who had never been a member of the Roman Senate,” says Potter. Macrinus himself was executed just over a year later, in June 218, after Caracella’s aunt had launched a rebellion to have her grandson, Elagabalus, installed as the new emperor, even though he was only 14. “Being emperor becomes the most dangerous job, you could have,” says Potter, and for the next 100 years each person who ruled did so for only a short time.

With work that already has started on the screenplay for Gladiator III, viewers can again expect Scott to use these true stories as inspiration before eschewing historical accuracy in the service of entertainment. Mariotti sees no problem with this because, in his view, it simply reflects what artists have done throughout history. “What Ridley does is no different than Shakespeare or Michelangelo. Even the painting Police Verso by Jean-Léon Gérôme, who inspired Ridley to make the first film – it’s all historically inaccurate. But it’s about using history to tell a story and teach us a lesson. That’s why we gravitate to them. They’re basically stories about us.”

More than that, Mariotti believes that films like Gladiator II connect viewers with their ancestors. Especially the scenes in the Colosseum because the Romans attended those events for the same reasons people watch movies. “It was their cinema. It was where they escaped from life. Where for a few hours they turned into a brave hunter or gladiator and were shown parts of the world they never wanted to see. This is what happens when people see Gladiator II They’re doing exactly what the Colosseum was built for.”

Gladiator II opens in US theaters on November 22.