But I think the HBO series Rome captured exactly this, or at least as much as it could in brief span. The life and struggles of freemen and slaves, not just the emperor. One of the greatest TV series ever, and cut off in its prime after only 2 seasons. Full set of Rome built on Cinecittà studios!
They had an outline of the story for several more seasons, and the showrunner has described how it would have gone. I am very, very grateful they decided to stop when they did -- they were about to ruin the show.
Unless they moved some things forward because they knew it was ending ending, I agree. As much as part of me wants to see where some of that goes, I know it wouldn’t have been good. Not like the rest of it was.
Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.
I think this is getting traction because of the new Odyssey movie coming out.
I find Mary-Beard satisfying to watch. I'm having trouble finding it but she was on a panel and asked about the fall of Rome and her response was something to the effect of "Asking why Rome fell is the wrong question. A better question is why was it so successful in the first place."
Her reasons were, if I remember correctly, though Romans were brutal, for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.
From what I gather, Mary-Beard's reasons for why Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people and succumbing to corruption. I remember her saying that Rome was on the knife's edge of collapse many times and that it was more about their successes that pulled them through than about avoiding failure.
Just as an aside, I've heard that the concept of cyclops might have been from finding old mammoth skulls. The hole in the middle is for the nose cavity could be mistaken for an eye socket. Many pictures show cyclops as having tusks.
> Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people
That's weird to say they were too insular and that at the same time there was large cohorts of non-romans. It read more like an opinion based on modern sensibilities than history
This sounds a little off since Roman citizenship expanded until 212 when it was granted to all free men in the empire. But perhaps she was talking about the failure to absorb "barbarian" tribes that came over the border later, that wanted to become Roman and sometimes thought of themselves as Roman.
The sack of Rome in 410 was a shock, but the end of the western Roman empire later that century probably wasn't understood as such at the time since they didn't know that decentralization would be permanent; after terrible civil wars, another emperor would usually reunite the empire. And even much later there were often claims to be a continuation.
Contrast with China where new dynasties would rise after the old one falls.
> they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship
That varied. The taxation was very oppressive and there is some evidence that QoL (based on skeletal remains) did improve in quite a few places after the empire collapsed for some time.
> for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.
Sounds quite a lot like Ghengis Khan, who oversaw the largest empire in history until the British one.
I keep reading this online and I find it to be nonsense. Over a thousand years earlier the Romans developed all the conquered lands. They built massive infrastructure projects: roads, ports, aqueducts, buildings. And brought sanitation and education. Ghengis Khan only brought peace and trade networks, something Rome also brought with them.
Next up, how Carthaginians were actually the good guys and child sacrifice was not that bad.
He didn't say Genghis Khan and the Mongols did everything the Ancient Romans did.
He said both had their rise to power rooted in a (for-the-time) unique meritocratic element, where people would join you compared to the alternative options due to the ability to advance.
Hollywood "vision" of everything is "wrong." This is because all they want is a story, one that is relatable, to the largest degree possible, to their audience, with all the stereotypes said audience has acquired over generations. Basically, it is nothing but Star Trek, over and over again. (Wanted to add, "... and that's OK" - but I am not sure.)
She talks for a while about how the Circus Maximus was really where the fun was (250k spectators, chariot races, betting, mixed seating). That sounds super fun. However, she also pitches that the Coliseum was like going to the opera - formal seating rules, formal dress, segregated seating.
On the one hand, okay - it was fancier. However, I do not believe that any public air ceremony with fighting, dying, and live animals in it will be sedate. I’ve been to open air events in many continents, and people just aren’t naturally all quiet like when life and death things are happening. I just cannot imagine this behavior outside of a religious ceremony.
Even at the opera or live theater, both of which darken lights, light a stage, architect for acoustic carry, there is often shushing, resettling, multiple cues for the audience to sort of ‘settle down’ and pay attention. The idea that 50k people are going to watch some captured Christians face down a lion and make no noise while they were their Tuxedo equivalents seems to me to be in its own way a weird and just off Anglicism. I guess I might be straw manning her pitch a little, but I think she just over pitches this idea — I truly think a society that did that would be very, very unusual, to the point of being extremely creepy.
I have a DVD set of old UFC events - I think UFC 1 to 84 or something - and I remember in one very early event in Japan the commentators talk about how silently focused the crowd is. Of course, some people do find Japanese culture extremely creepy, but many would say the same of ancient Rome.
I wouldn't actually expect to see those norms in Roman culture, given how Latin is naturally a very flowing language and I've never heard of Romans valuing silence like the Spartans (or Japanese for that matter). But I wouldn't consider it particularly strange either - to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
Hmm. Interesting; that surprises me. Enough that I did some googling: here's a quote from reddit that sounds more like what I'd expect:
> Japan has by far the best combat sports audience in the world. Most of the time they are so quiet that you can literally hear the corners talking and even the ring shifting as the fighters move around. But then when something cool happens they go crazy.
That's how I'd imagine it at the edges of the "quiet crowd" phenomenon; even then it's cultural, that is, I wouldn't expect the same culture that did this to also have brisk 250k person events that are generally raucous.
Check out old Pride events (or any older Japanese MMA.) Everybody is quiet (with a few isolated shouts of encouragement) until someone does something heroic, and then there's a polite and energetic round of applause. The only reason that Zuffa UFC sounds like it does is because they intentionally tried to steal audiences from US professional wrestling. They also spent years standing people up almost immediately when they were jiu-jitsuing each other because the wrestling audience would just start booing aggressively after about a minute, the result being that the UFC were very kickboxer and greco-roman focused and some real killers had all their weapons taken away from them by UFC's application of their "Unified Rules."
Japanese MMA was founded and branded by people who were saying that Japanese professional wrestling was too theatrical, and Zuffa UFC was branded by people who were saying that professional wrestling wasn't violent enough (if anything, they were competing with "backyard" wrestling.) UFC has improved since, but imo that's because it became a monopoly and had to absorb all the other MMA audiences (and fighters), and the wrestling fans who didn't get bored with MMA eventually got less stupid.
> to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
I also don't think there's any safe assumption of how Colosseum crowds behaved other than how contemporary narratives say they did. I agree that life and death brings an atmosphere of seriousness that wouldn't often exist at the Circus.
If the Romans regularly scribbled graffiti about gladiator fights and their outcomes, I would expect them to shout during them as well. It feels to me that such behavior naturally dovetails together: excited, rowdy, norm-breaking.
I'd assume the Circus Maximus was rowdier, given that chariot racing was "team" based (greens vs blues, etc), with betting evolved, and I imagine the action was a lot more exciting than the spectacle of seeing yet another public execution (death as bestias) from the nosebleed seats, or animal "hunt". During the french revolution the public executions (guillotine beheadings) sound like somewhat of a snooze-fest with the old ladies doing their knitting in the front (Les Tricoteuses).
From what I've read I wouldn't call games at the Colloseum formal, other than the senators (seated in the front) apparently having to wear togas. There were more (class-based) levels of seating, and restictions on women, but the Circus Maximus also reserved the best seating for the equestrians.
Opera, symphony, etc weren't the affairs we see today throughout their history: the quiet sterility is a modern behavior — and my understanding that it used to be quite a bit more like, eg, movie premiere crowds that made noise in response to the show.
I think the emphasis is on the class structure, formality, etc. rather than saying the Coliseum followed modern theatre etiquette. And the according comparison about status of attendees, etc.
Yes, Bernard Shaw used to complain in his reviews that no one listened to the music and constantly talked, as concerts were a social event, and you promenaded around.
So I think this backs my point - when she's referring to Opera, she's referring to a modern conception of opera, not an 18th century concept of opera. I agree that's more normal sounding.
Reading up Reissanance everyday-drama novellas from Spain/Italy in the 1600s/1700s but being placed into the Roman Empire would actually yield a similar society and behaviour than anything made from Hollywood.
Romance and picaresque dramas weren't that dissimilar to love epics from the Classical times. And ofc treasonry, backstabbings, and the like would be the same today, 300 years ago and millenia ago.
The townsfolk shouting and laughing against a poor dude being burned down between logs wouldn't be that different to similar peasants reacting in the same way to slaves fighting at the Circus.
The assumption that the Anglo idea of being well mannered, quiet and not rowdy at such an event is wrong IMO. The Roman upper classes probably got loud and very obnoxious by our standards, but assuming that the Romans perceived that as “low-class” is probably not correct
Hollywood produces fiction. Nothing presented in movies can be taken as representative of facts or reality. Even (or especially) if the movie is historical or "based on a true story".
To add on: this is how history has mostly always been transmitted to the masses. Plays and ballads and folk tales and other entertainment. History as serious study has normally been an elitist (I mean that descriptively, not pejoratively) pursuit.
And even then, everyone else is pretty much just stuck with wondering who to believe. Nobody has time to do their own research to that depth, and nobody is around to give any first-hand accounts. Everything we know about the past is a story told from a partiular point of view, supported by cherry-picked artifacts, with varying agendas behind it.
Things are not quite that bad - one of the major reasons we studied history over the centuries is we are looking for a way to ensure we will win the next war before the fighting starts. Thus there are a large group of military minded people (both generals and kings) who have incentive to find real truths not the nice folk fiction.
Mostly things are bad, but if you look there are people who did care about the truth - though they only cared about their little niche - everything else they could say whatever was entertaining.
At the same time, narratives (fictional or not) are how we understand the world, its history, its politics, its art, and it's even how we understand our own personal history, and how we reason about events around us, and what might transpire in the future.
It's not really possible to remove ourselves from this fact of being human. We can of course create a narrative about removing ourselves from narratives and experiencing the world directly, but that's not it.
There are things that I expect the authors to take creative license to further the plot. However there are a lot of background things that don't further the plot and so there is no loss to get them right - I'm disappointed in the latter.
> I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie.
Plenty of people do, though. I recall a friend many years ago who genuinely believed “the people ruled Rome” because he heard it in Gladiator. He was an otherwise intelligent, educated person but there was nothing I could say that would dissuade him.
Hollywood is in the entertainment biz, not education. Is there any subject that they don't lie about?
(Not saying they're malicious, usually. Just that looks-cool pretend will almost always rake in more revenue than reality. Without the hassles or expense of researching what the truth actually is, or changing their script/casting/costumes/whatever to bear a passable resemblance to it.)
Mary Beard's SPQR is an amazing book about Rome and I recommend it to any fellow history nerds. If it wasn't for that book, I wouldn't have gotten the "Cataline conspiracy" joke in Mountainhead.
I was pretty unimpressed with _SQPR_. It's a nice survey, but she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts, the domes that people could figure out how to replicate until the 1600s, etc. This was the book where I realized that I am fed up with the modern hermeneutic of skepticism, or put another way, the modern historian's smug sense of superiority. They weren't stupid, and they wrote what they did for a reason (which might not be the reason you wished they had), and in any case they are all the evidence there is.
I mean.. we suspect there's a level of fabrication by early Roman historians. In your specific quote - it's more that record keeping (to that detail) happened after-the-fact and based on oral traditions. Just take a look at Suetonius and how he describes his sources of information, things along the lines of "well, this is hearsay but I heard it from my relative who knew XYZ and therefor I think it's credible".
Framing the uncertainty around early record keeping is a good. Similarly, the second Servile war in historic documents matches the first Servile war almost like Star Wars ep7 matches ep4. That _hints_ at fabrication. So if they fabricate data in one place.. :)
> she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts
Did she,in the book, give a reason why the list can't possibly be right?
The same sense of muddled analysis (which I also found to be extremely off-putting) comes through in this interview:
> There's a lot of myths that you need to bust about the gladiatorial games, particularly in the center of Rome in the Colosseum. I think everyone's image of that is in some way based on modern movies on "Gladiator I," "Gladiator II." In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. And I think the thing that, for me, the biggest mistake they made is to imagine how the audience behaved. We do tend to think that somehow the audience must have gone wild, they were there because they wanted blood lust, they were erupting in passion, in anger, saying "Kill him," or "Save him," or whatever. Everything that we can tell about the audience from Roman sources themselves suggests that actually it was much more controlled than anything you see are in the movies. For start, it was completely sex-segregated, the women sat separately from the men. But more than that, everybody came dressed quite posh, you had to wear a toga to go. Now a toga is the official Roman dress for Roman men, but it's worn when you are doing something official, you don't wear it to the local bar in the evening. To go to the gladiatorial games, that was kind of official, and you had to wear your toga. Everybody sat not just segregated by sex, but they sat in rank order. Senators by law, the top rank of Roman society, on the front rows, and then the next rank down just above them, until you got to the very back where you found the slaves and the women. Now I think that we somehow have to just overturn our sense that it was kind of mad, "losing control" going on. I think it was probably more like an evening at the opera than an evening at a football match.
If you're going to make an assertion that seems absurd on its face ("The large crowds of wine-drunk plebs were subdued and mild mannered whilst observing blood sport!"), you should offer up evidence that actually supports your assertion. Her reasoning appears to have been: Men and women sat separately. The rich got preferred seating. You had to dress up (in a toga). QED, the atmosphere was like an evening at the opera. Huh?
Came here to post the same. I read SPQR last year and really enjoyed it, then watched a bunch of her documentaries & interviews on YouTube. She just seems to really enjoy herself talking about Rome/Romans which makes sense given how much of her life was devoted to it.
Possibly you know this, but there actually was a show about the Roman invasion of Britannia that was on only a couple years ago: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5932548/. Not vouching for the quality or anything. I only watched the first couple episodes and they were pretty ridiculous, also explicitly magical, not seeming to be aiming for realism.
I mean, you could probably level a very similar critique on how we view pretty much any society? Maybe I'm projecting, but it seems natural to think people assume looking at a society is a blend of looking at a picture and a mirror. You are trying to understand the movements on ways that you can relate to.
Ah, yes. Ancient Grome, Spéxico, Scotireland... tropes and stereotypes threw together
without actually understanding at all the multiple sides of either a culture of a hugely diverse country.
But I think the HBO series Rome captured exactly this, or at least as much as it could in brief span. The life and struggles of freemen and slaves, not just the emperor. One of the greatest TV series ever, and cut off in its prime after only 2 seasons. Full set of Rome built on Cinecittà studios!
They had an outline of the story for several more seasons, and the showrunner has described how it would have gone. I am very, very grateful they decided to stop when they did -- they were about to ruin the show.
The first season was awesome, but IMO second season was already pretty bad.
Little Wars TV did a deep dive into the production of Rome and where the five season arc would have gone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cIVJD1cmbk
Unless they moved some things forward because they knew it was ending ending, I agree. As much as part of me wants to see where some of that goes, I know it wouldn’t have been good. Not like the rest of it was.
Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.
You really didn't want to see Titus Pullo fighting the Picts??
Possibly the best thing John Milius has done -- I said what I said!
Indeed. I wish I had been able to see this when I was taking high school Latin in the 90s, at least the school-friendly version (if it exists)
I think this is getting traction because of the new Odyssey movie coming out.
I find Mary-Beard satisfying to watch. I'm having trouble finding it but she was on a panel and asked about the fall of Rome and her response was something to the effect of "Asking why Rome fell is the wrong question. A better question is why was it so successful in the first place."
Her reasons were, if I remember correctly, though Romans were brutal, for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.
From what I gather, Mary-Beard's reasons for why Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people and succumbing to corruption. I remember her saying that Rome was on the knife's edge of collapse many times and that it was more about their successes that pulled them through than about avoiding failure.
Just as an aside, I've heard that the concept of cyclops might have been from finding old mammoth skulls. The hole in the middle is for the nose cavity could be mistaken for an eye socket. Many pictures show cyclops as having tusks.
> Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people
That's weird to say they were too insular and that at the same time there was large cohorts of non-romans. It read more like an opinion based on modern sensibilities than history
This sounds a little off since Roman citizenship expanded until 212 when it was granted to all free men in the empire. But perhaps she was talking about the failure to absorb "barbarian" tribes that came over the border later, that wanted to become Roman and sometimes thought of themselves as Roman.
The sack of Rome in 410 was a shock, but the end of the western Roman empire later that century probably wasn't understood as such at the time since they didn't know that decentralization would be permanent; after terrible civil wars, another emperor would usually reunite the empire. And even much later there were often claims to be a continuation.
Contrast with China where new dynasties would rise after the old one falls.
> another emperor would usually reunite the empire
Well he did, in the 530-550s to a significant extent. That of course didn’t work out because of the plague, climate change and other factors.
> they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship
That varied. The taxation was very oppressive and there is some evidence that QoL (based on skeletal remains) did improve in quite a few places after the empire collapsed for some time.
> for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.
Sounds quite a lot like Ghengis Khan, who oversaw the largest empire in history until the British one.
I keep reading this online and I find it to be nonsense. Over a thousand years earlier the Romans developed all the conquered lands. They built massive infrastructure projects: roads, ports, aqueducts, buildings. And brought sanitation and education. Ghengis Khan only brought peace and trade networks, something Rome also brought with them.
Next up, how Carthaginians were actually the good guys and child sacrifice was not that bad.
He didn't say Genghis Khan and the Mongols did everything the Ancient Romans did.
He said both had their rise to power rooted in a (for-the-time) unique meritocratic element, where people would join you compared to the alternative options due to the ability to advance.
Hollywood "vision" of everything is "wrong." This is because all they want is a story, one that is relatable, to the largest degree possible, to their audience, with all the stereotypes said audience has acquired over generations. Basically, it is nothing but Star Trek, over and over again. (Wanted to add, "... and that's OK" - but I am not sure.)
She talks for a while about how the Circus Maximus was really where the fun was (250k spectators, chariot races, betting, mixed seating). That sounds super fun. However, she also pitches that the Coliseum was like going to the opera - formal seating rules, formal dress, segregated seating.
On the one hand, okay - it was fancier. However, I do not believe that any public air ceremony with fighting, dying, and live animals in it will be sedate. I’ve been to open air events in many continents, and people just aren’t naturally all quiet like when life and death things are happening. I just cannot imagine this behavior outside of a religious ceremony.
Even at the opera or live theater, both of which darken lights, light a stage, architect for acoustic carry, there is often shushing, resettling, multiple cues for the audience to sort of ‘settle down’ and pay attention. The idea that 50k people are going to watch some captured Christians face down a lion and make no noise while they were their Tuxedo equivalents seems to me to be in its own way a weird and just off Anglicism. I guess I might be straw manning her pitch a little, but I think she just over pitches this idea — I truly think a society that did that would be very, very unusual, to the point of being extremely creepy.
I have a DVD set of old UFC events - I think UFC 1 to 84 or something - and I remember in one very early event in Japan the commentators talk about how silently focused the crowd is. Of course, some people do find Japanese culture extremely creepy, but many would say the same of ancient Rome.
I wouldn't actually expect to see those norms in Roman culture, given how Latin is naturally a very flowing language and I've never heard of Romans valuing silence like the Spartans (or Japanese for that matter). But I wouldn't consider it particularly strange either - to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
Hmm. Interesting; that surprises me. Enough that I did some googling: here's a quote from reddit that sounds more like what I'd expect:
That's how I'd imagine it at the edges of the "quiet crowd" phenomenon; even then it's cultural, that is, I wouldn't expect the same culture that did this to also have brisk 250k person events that are generally raucous.Check out old Pride events (or any older Japanese MMA.) Everybody is quiet (with a few isolated shouts of encouragement) until someone does something heroic, and then there's a polite and energetic round of applause. The only reason that Zuffa UFC sounds like it does is because they intentionally tried to steal audiences from US professional wrestling. They also spent years standing people up almost immediately when they were jiu-jitsuing each other because the wrestling audience would just start booing aggressively after about a minute, the result being that the UFC were very kickboxer and greco-roman focused and some real killers had all their weapons taken away from them by UFC's application of their "Unified Rules."
Japanese MMA was founded and branded by people who were saying that Japanese professional wrestling was too theatrical, and Zuffa UFC was branded by people who were saying that professional wrestling wasn't violent enough (if anything, they were competing with "backyard" wrestling.) UFC has improved since, but imo that's because it became a monopoly and had to absorb all the other MMA audiences (and fighters), and the wrestling fans who didn't get bored with MMA eventually got less stupid.
> to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
I also don't think there's any safe assumption of how Colosseum crowds behaved other than how contemporary narratives say they did. I agree that life and death brings an atmosphere of seriousness that wouldn't often exist at the Circus.
If the Romans regularly scribbled graffiti about gladiator fights and their outcomes, I would expect them to shout during them as well. It feels to me that such behavior naturally dovetails together: excited, rowdy, norm-breaking.
Actually we have the descendants of both with us now and they are roughly the same size in terms of spectatorship
Circus Maximus - Nascar - 250,000 spectators
Coliseum - Football - 50,000 - 80,000 spectators
I'd assume the Circus Maximus was rowdier, given that chariot racing was "team" based (greens vs blues, etc), with betting evolved, and I imagine the action was a lot more exciting than the spectacle of seeing yet another public execution (death as bestias) from the nosebleed seats, or animal "hunt". During the french revolution the public executions (guillotine beheadings) sound like somewhat of a snooze-fest with the old ladies doing their knitting in the front (Les Tricoteuses).
From what I've read I wouldn't call games at the Colloseum formal, other than the senators (seated in the front) apparently having to wear togas. There were more (class-based) levels of seating, and restictions on women, but the Circus Maximus also reserved the best seating for the equestrians.
Opera, symphony, etc weren't the affairs we see today throughout their history: the quiet sterility is a modern behavior — and my understanding that it used to be quite a bit more like, eg, movie premiere crowds that made noise in response to the show.
I think the emphasis is on the class structure, formality, etc. rather than saying the Coliseum followed modern theatre etiquette. And the according comparison about status of attendees, etc.
Yes, Bernard Shaw used to complain in his reviews that no one listened to the music and constantly talked, as concerts were a social event, and you promenaded around.
SOme history here too https://ledbooks.org/proceedings2019/tag/silence/
So I think this backs my point - when she's referring to Opera, she's referring to a modern conception of opera, not an 18th century concept of opera. I agree that's more normal sounding.
Reading up Reissanance everyday-drama novellas from Spain/Italy in the 1600s/1700s but being placed into the Roman Empire would actually yield a similar society and behaviour than anything made from Hollywood.
Romance and picaresque dramas weren't that dissimilar to love epics from the Classical times. And ofc treasonry, backstabbings, and the like would be the same today, 300 years ago and millenia ago.
The townsfolk shouting and laughing against a poor dude being burned down between logs wouldn't be that different to similar peasants reacting in the same way to slaves fighting at the Circus.
The assumption that the Anglo idea of being well mannered, quiet and not rowdy at such an event is wrong IMO. The Roman upper classes probably got loud and very obnoxious by our standards, but assuming that the Romans perceived that as “low-class” is probably not correct
Well that's "think about the Roman Empire" ticked off my daily todo list.
Hollywood produces fiction. Nothing presented in movies can be taken as representative of facts or reality. Even (or especially) if the movie is historical or "based on a true story".
To add on: this is how history has mostly always been transmitted to the masses. Plays and ballads and folk tales and other entertainment. History as serious study has normally been an elitist (I mean that descriptively, not pejoratively) pursuit.
And even then, everyone else is pretty much just stuck with wondering who to believe. Nobody has time to do their own research to that depth, and nobody is around to give any first-hand accounts. Everything we know about the past is a story told from a partiular point of view, supported by cherry-picked artifacts, with varying agendas behind it.
Things are not quite that bad - one of the major reasons we studied history over the centuries is we are looking for a way to ensure we will win the next war before the fighting starts. Thus there are a large group of military minded people (both generals and kings) who have incentive to find real truths not the nice folk fiction.
Mostly things are bad, but if you look there are people who did care about the truth - though they only cared about their little niche - everything else they could say whatever was entertaining.
At the same time, narratives (fictional or not) are how we understand the world, its history, its politics, its art, and it's even how we understand our own personal history, and how we reason about events around us, and what might transpire in the future.
It's not really possible to remove ourselves from this fact of being human. We can of course create a narrative about removing ourselves from narratives and experiencing the world directly, but that's not it.
I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie. How could I expect that when I went into the theater to be entertained for 1-2 hours?
I think if someone wants to know more about ancient Rome, it's on them to spend the time learning about it outside of an entertainment venue.
There are things that I expect the authors to take creative license to further the plot. However there are a lot of background things that don't further the plot and so there is no loss to get them right - I'm disappointed in the latter.
> I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie.
Plenty of people do, though. I recall a friend many years ago who genuinely believed “the people ruled Rome” because he heard it in Gladiator. He was an otherwise intelligent, educated person but there was nothing I could say that would dissuade him.
> How could I expect that when I went into the theater to be entertained for 1-2 hours?
Well were you?
Sometimes it produces fiction with really good historical accuracy.
It's an 80-minute interview. Really wish they would include a full transcript.
It’s available here https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/myth-truth-ancien...
Next they're going to tell me Bewitched didn't accurately portray modern-day witches...
I've been enjoying her "Instant Classics" podcast
Hollywood is in the entertainment biz, not education. Is there any subject that they don't lie about?
(Not saying they're malicious, usually. Just that looks-cool pretend will almost always rake in more revenue than reality. Without the hassles or expense of researching what the truth actually is, or changing their script/casting/costumes/whatever to bear a passable resemblance to it.)
original link: https://www.openculture.com/2025/11/why-your-vision-of-ancie...
This is the actual original link: https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/myth-truth-ancien...
Mary Beard's SPQR is an amazing book about Rome and I recommend it to any fellow history nerds. If it wasn't for that book, I wouldn't have gotten the "Cataline conspiracy" joke in Mountainhead.
I was pretty unimpressed with _SQPR_. It's a nice survey, but she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts, the domes that people could figure out how to replicate until the 1600s, etc. This was the book where I realized that I am fed up with the modern hermeneutic of skepticism, or put another way, the modern historian's smug sense of superiority. They weren't stupid, and they wrote what they did for a reason (which might not be the reason you wished they had), and in any case they are all the evidence there is.
I mean.. we suspect there's a level of fabrication by early Roman historians. In your specific quote - it's more that record keeping (to that detail) happened after-the-fact and based on oral traditions. Just take a look at Suetonius and how he describes his sources of information, things along the lines of "well, this is hearsay but I heard it from my relative who knew XYZ and therefor I think it's credible".
Framing the uncertainty around early record keeping is a good. Similarly, the second Servile war in historic documents matches the first Servile war almost like Star Wars ep7 matches ep4. That _hints_ at fabrication. So if they fabricate data in one place.. :)
> she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts
Did she,in the book, give a reason why the list can't possibly be right?
Actually you can just Google that phrase and find out. These lists were compiled later and... well, you can look it up for yourself.
The same sense of muddled analysis (which I also found to be extremely off-putting) comes through in this interview:
> There's a lot of myths that you need to bust about the gladiatorial games, particularly in the center of Rome in the Colosseum. I think everyone's image of that is in some way based on modern movies on "Gladiator I," "Gladiator II." In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. And I think the thing that, for me, the biggest mistake they made is to imagine how the audience behaved. We do tend to think that somehow the audience must have gone wild, they were there because they wanted blood lust, they were erupting in passion, in anger, saying "Kill him," or "Save him," or whatever. Everything that we can tell about the audience from Roman sources themselves suggests that actually it was much more controlled than anything you see are in the movies. For start, it was completely sex-segregated, the women sat separately from the men. But more than that, everybody came dressed quite posh, you had to wear a toga to go. Now a toga is the official Roman dress for Roman men, but it's worn when you are doing something official, you don't wear it to the local bar in the evening. To go to the gladiatorial games, that was kind of official, and you had to wear your toga. Everybody sat not just segregated by sex, but they sat in rank order. Senators by law, the top rank of Roman society, on the front rows, and then the next rank down just above them, until you got to the very back where you found the slaves and the women. Now I think that we somehow have to just overturn our sense that it was kind of mad, "losing control" going on. I think it was probably more like an evening at the opera than an evening at a football match.
If you're going to make an assertion that seems absurd on its face ("The large crowds of wine-drunk plebs were subdued and mild mannered whilst observing blood sport!"), you should offer up evidence that actually supports your assertion. Her reasoning appears to have been: Men and women sat separately. The rich got preferred seating. You had to dress up (in a toga). QED, the atmosphere was like an evening at the opera. Huh?
Came here to post the same. I read SPQR last year and really enjoyed it, then watched a bunch of her documentaries & interviews on YouTube. She just seems to really enjoy herself talking about Rome/Romans which makes sense given how much of her life was devoted to it.
+1 to the recommendation.
Ah, coming from the good old british revisionist
I got something too, something that nobody wants to depict:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia...
Possibly you know this, but there actually was a show about the Roman invasion of Britannia that was on only a couple years ago: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5932548/. Not vouching for the quality or anything. I only watched the first couple episodes and they were pretty ridiculous, also explicitly magical, not seeming to be aiming for realism.
I mean, you could probably level a very similar critique on how we view pretty much any society? Maybe I'm projecting, but it seems natural to think people assume looking at a society is a blend of looking at a picture and a mirror. You are trying to understand the movements on ways that you can relate to.
Ah, yes. Ancient Grome, Spéxico, Scotireland... tropes and stereotypes threw together without actually understanding at all the multiple sides of either a culture of a hugely diverse country.
The association between story and reality is completely arbitrary.
(Science? Science is a craft for creating stories closely coupled to reality. It's a special case and not as popular as you might think.)
To get popular a story needs to be simple, satisfying, logically consistent with the other stories... I think that covers it.
Reality? LOL. We are bronze-age mud-worshippers.