Fact and Fiction in Gladiator II: Those Who Are About to Lie Salute You
Remember when Ridley Scott’s 2023 biopic Napoleon set off a firestorm among finicky French historians? How shocked, shocked they were by the film’s factual inaccuracies (zut alors, Bonaparte never led the charge at Waterloo!). Well, it looks like the 86-year-old Oscar-winning director is at it again (see page 56), only this time it’s scholars of ancient Rome who’ll be storming Scott Free Productions. Although Gladiator II has been warmly received at early screenings, the 150-minute movie, which opens Nov. 22, is clearly chock-full of historical whoppers — like that scene in which a flooded Colosseum is filled with sharks. “Total Hollywood bullshit,” snipes Dr. Shadi Bartsch, a classics professor at the University of Chicago who has degrees from Princeton, Harvard and UC Berkeley and has written several books about ancient Rome. “I don’tthink Romans knew what a shark was” (though naval battles were held in the arena, she notes). The scene with rhinos charging into the Colosseum is sort of true — “Martial wrote a poem in 80 A.D. about a rhinoceros tossing a bull up to the sky,” Bartsch says — but not the two-horn breed shown in the film, only the one-horn type, and there’s no evidence that gladiators actually rode them, as they do in Scott’s movie. One of the most eyebrow-raising anachronisms involves the scene in which a Roman noble is shown sipping tea in a cafe while reading the morning newspaper … 1,200 years before the invention of the printing press. “They did have daily news — Acta Diuma — but it was carved and placed at certain locations,” says Bartsch. “You had to go to it, you couldn’t hold it at a cafe. Also, they didn’t have cafes!” As far as Scott is concerned, historical nitpicking didn’t bother him with Napoleon, and it doesn’t bother him now. “By the time you get to 2024,” he admits, “it’s all speculation.” — Jordan Hoffman
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This story appeared in the Oct. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
