Times Gladiator Lied To You

Are you not entertained? Because you're certainly not being educated or anything. 

To be fair, Gladiator is a fictional story about a fictional man living in a real historical era, so it gets a little more leeway than a story like, say, the story of the Scottish hero William Wallace, who was a real person living in a real historical era. Still, you do expect a certain amount of truth whenever you're watching a film that's set in a time and place that you can actually read about in history books.

Alas, you're not going to find a whole lot of truth in either one of those stories, at least not as you've seen them on the big screen and not until someone who actually cares about historical accuracy comes along and revisits them. So just where did Gladiator go wrong? Here are some of the many places that you were not being told the truth while you were not (or were, no one's judging) being entertained.

There's nothing wrong with inventing fictional characters to help tell a fictional story set in an actual historical era — as long as those fictional characters are existing within either entirely fictional scenarios or entirely historically accurate scenarios. When it's sort of in between those things, well, that's when it starts to become a problem.

Maximus, the protagonist of the movie Gladiator, is a fictional character. According to Project Gutenberg, he might be sort of loosely based on a historical personality named Claudius Pompeianus, the Syrian who married Marcus Aurelius' daughter Lucilla and who Aurelius might have once considered as a pick for the next Caesar. There was also a historical Claudius Maximus, who was a philosopher and politician who also served as Marcus Aurelius' teacher. He's not a super well-known character and was only mentioned a few times in the classical sources.

Pretty much everything the fictional Maximus does in the film is also entirely made up. There's no evidence that Claudius Pompeianus ever plotted against Commodus and neither one of them went on to become a gladiator. But that's also forgivable — the intent of the film was more to provide a sense of the era, and that can be accomplished with an untrue story populated by untrue characters. But can it be done if the details are also untrue? Hmm.

Here in the West, we decided long ago that the most noble political systems are the ones that most closely mirror our own. We're not down with the whole emperor thing and it's therefore easier to root for a royal person who believes in giving a voice to the masses. Therefore, if you're going to paint a royal person as noble, you have him waxing poetic about the importance of voting.

Marcus Aurelius was not pining for the days of the Republic, though, as he was depicted in the film. According to the New York Times, in the years before his ascension there had been a trend towards selecting a successor from a list of qualified candidates rather than simply handing rule down to the eldest son, which is kind of sort of better than a hereditary title, but it's still a pretty long way from democracy. And Marcus Aurelius was actually the first emperor in more than 80 years to deviate from that new tradition by choosing his son Commodus as his successor.

There's no evidence at all that Marcus Aurelius — who was himself an emperor — disliked or wanted to abolish the position of emperor. Such plans would have been nonsensical for a guy who is also clearly thinking about naming a successor.

Let's see, how else can we made the audience hate Commodus? How about if we have him kill his own father? Extra hate points! Cool.

That didn't happen, either. Commodus was pretty despicable but killing his dad would have been absolutely pointless, since it was pretty clear to everyone that Aurelius had every intention of making him emperor. At the age of 13, Commodus joined his father on campaign and officially became a man. By the age of 16 he was a consul, and basically served as a co-emperor alongside his father until the age of 19, when Aurelius died and the throne was passed down to him. It's clear he didn't have to worry that he wasn't going to succeed his father because he'd been groomed for it for practically his entire life. 

So how did Marcus Aurelius die really? Most sources just say "natural causes," though there is some speculation he may have died from Galen's plague, an epidemic that began in 164 that some scholars believe was actually smallpox. What we do know is that he wasn't smothered to death by his own son — that would have almost certainly made it into the history books.

Roman Gladiators were sort of like human versions of race horses. It's tempting to compare them to illegal fighting roosters or dogs, because they fought each other for the entertainment of spectators, but like a racehorse, a human being is a lot more expensive to train and prepare than a rooster or a pitbull, and even pitbull fights aren't usually to the death.

Roman Gladiators were athletes, not sacrificial lambs. They weren't free, but the people who "owned" them — called lanistae — valued them and spent a lot of money on their training and upkeep. If gladiators only had a 50/50 chance of survival every time they went to work, then it wouldn't have been a very lucrative business, unless you were lucky enough to own the one guy that no one could ever manage to beat. And if that was you, you'd have a mighty difficult time finding another owner willing to pit one of his best guys against yours.

According to History, there might be the occasional fight to the death just to get spectators worked up, but that always came with some extra compensation for the lanistae. Most of the time, gladiators would fight until one of them was clearly beat, and then they'd both get to go back home and lick their wounds. No one is saying that being a gladiator was like being a modern-day professional wrestler (fake), but it wasn't necessarily a deadly profession, either.

Okay so everyone calls Maximus "Spaniard" which means he's from Spain (or more accurately Iberia or Hispania, since Spain didn't actually exist at the time). After the Romans took over, the primary language spoken in the region was Latin (which is the language Spanish descended from). But according to Romae Vitam, when the soldiers ride up to Maximus' farm, his son says "Mama! I soldati!," which is neither Latin nor Spanish — it's Italian. Italian descended from Latin, too, but like Spanish it didn't start to emerge as a distinct language until around 800 AD, centuries after the events depicted in the film. Really, how hard would it have been to have the little boy in the film say "milites" instead of "soldati?" Unless no one could actually be bothered to find out what language would have been spoken in Hispania during that time ... which is starting to sound kind of likely.

Commodus did like to fight in the arena. In fact he liked it so much that that was pretty much his only duty as emperor towards the end of his life. But Commodus was never really in any danger in the arena, since he entered fully armed and battled opponents who were carrying wooden weapons. So the idea that he might have died in the arena is patently ridiculous.

In fact, everyone hated Commodus so he met his end in much the same way as a lot of other unpopular historical figures — he was assassinated. According to History of the Roman People, the straw that broke the gladiatorial tiger's back was his plan to move into gladiatorial barracks, kill two consuls, and name himself as sole consul. At least, that's what the rumors said. Anyway, everyone was pretty fed up including Commodus' mistress Marcia, who poisoned his dinner on December 31, 192. Unfortunately the conspirators' plans were ill-timed because Commodus got so drunk during the end-of-the-year party that he threw up most of the poison, so they had to send in a guy to strangle him while he was recovering in the bathtub. 

Commodus was so hated, in fact, that they were just going to throw his body into the river, and his successor had to step in and make sure he got a proper send-off, though no one is really sure why he gave a damn.