20 Ancient Rome Scenes Hollywood Keeps Getting Wrong

Gladiators fought in organized games, or munera, in which fighters typically belonged to an owner who had invested considerable money in their training and healthcare. A referee, the summa rudis, oversaw the action, and most fights ended when one of the gladiators merely raised a finger in surrender. It has been estimated that 80 to 90 percent of professional gladiators made it through their battles alive. Those condemned criminals who were thrown into the arena without the protection of the summa rudis were a very different matter.

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also known as Caligula, reigned over Rome between the years 37 and 41 AD. He built a marble stall for his beloved horse Incitatus, complete with an ivory manger. Both the Roman historian Suetonius and the historian Cassius Dio said that Caligula had only joked, or threatened, to name Incitatus as consul, the highest elective position of the Republic. He never did. Historians generally believe his motivation was not love of a beast, but contempt for a spineless Senate.

In the arena, crowds would signal a gladiator’s fate with a thumb gesture. Old writers describe turning or extending the thumb as a call for death, like miming a blade, and folding the thumb into a closed fist as a call for mercy, like sheathing a sword. None of them ever say the thumb pointed down. That comes from the famous Pollice Verso painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1872, which early Hollywood directors took literally.

Emperor Nero (54-68 A.D.), shown in Hubert Robert’s painting, The Fire of Rome, is on a balcony during the Great Fire of Rome in 64 A.D. and plays a violin. That can’t be right because the instrument wasn’t invented until about 1,400 years later. In fact, according to the historian Tacitus, the emperor was some 35 miles away at his seaside residence in Antium when the blaze began. He came back afterward, let the homeless into public buildings, and arranged for them to receive emergency provisions.

It’s true that Commodus, who reigned from 177 to 192 AD, really did fight in the arena as a gladiator. But he didn’t die in the arena. He died in a very different way. The conspirator Marcia, a mistress of Commodus, tried to kill him by poisoning his wine on December 31, 192. When that failed, another conspirator, a wrestler named Narcissus, went in to finish him off and strangled him in the bath in the Imperial Palace.

Julius Caesar was stabbed to death on March 15, 44 BC, inside Rome’s Theater of Pompey, by a group of senators that included Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. In movies, he utters “Et tu, Brute?” But that famous Latin curse doesn’t exist in the surviving texts of his era. Shakespeare coined it in his 1599 play, Julius Caesar. The Roman historian Suetonius reports that some witnesses claimed to have heard Caesar mutter, in Greek, “you too, my child?” He probably would have understood Greek, since most members of the Roman upper class spoke fluent Greek. According to the biographer Plutarch, Caesar drew his toga over his head and never uttered another word.

In Ben-Hur, the bad guy, Messala, has blades on his chariot to destroy his opponents. In reality, scythed chariots were actually Persian and Hellenistic weapons designed to cut through enemy infantry in battle. The Romans didn’t race with them. Rome’s chariot races attracted audiences of between 150,000 and 250,000 at the Circus Maximus. These racing chariots were lightweight and designed for speed, and dangerous modifications were banned. However, even without blades, chariot racing was deadly, since drivers often crashed at high speeds.

We see banquet scenes with fat Romans going into these “vomitoria” to purge their food and keep eating. That’s wrong. Vomitoria were wide, vaulted corridors under the stadium seats to allow a mass of people to exit and enter easily. There were 76 at the Colosseum when it was inaugurated in 80 AD. Wealthy Romans apparently purged themselves after a meal, but never in a room built for that purpose.

Crowds in films, and even soldiers, extend a stiff, straight arm with their palm facing down. There is no evidence of this gesture in any Roman coin, relief, or painting, but it was created by 18th-century painters, notably Jacques-Louis David in his Oath of the Horatii in 1784. A silent film called Cabiria displayed it in 1914, and then fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1930s adopted it, saying it was taken from the ancients. Although there are Roman statues that raise one arm, they depict a gesture asking for silence before a speech.

In Ben-Hur, we see slaves chained to the oars of a Roman war galley being beaten by a cruel captain. In reality, Rome’s navy was staffed by trained, paid free men, such as citizens, freedmen, and allied provincials. Naval engagements required highly choreographed maneuvers for ramming enemy vessels, and commanders needed rowers they could trust to perform under combat pressure, a role rarely entrusted to enslaved laborers. The Roman historian Suetonius reports that Emperor Augustus emancipated 20,000 slaves so they could serve as oarsmen, but he did so only as an emergency measure during civil war.

Movies set in Rome are made with uncolored white marble statues and columns, but this is wrong. Analysis of paint traces has shown that Roman statues, reliefs, and temples were brightly painted, including skin tones, colorful clothes, dark hair, and stone eyes inlaid into the statues. The paint was removed by centuries of exposure, and later artists assumed the colorless marble was the original state. Romans liked marble because of its quality, not because of how colorless it was. They considered it to be a canvas.

Background extras in historical films about Rome frequently wander through the marketplace in flowing white togas. Yet the toga was actually a cumbersome wool garment that required up to 18 feet of cloth and a servant to wrap around the wearer. Only adult male Roman citizens were permitted to don the toga on special occasions, such as when attending a trial or a meeting of the Senate. During their day-to-day lives, even Roman citizens wore practical knee-length tunics, as did women, slaves, and men employed in labor. Formal attire for women was a different type of garment called a stola. Togas were costumes, not everyday attire.

In movies from the Punic Wars through Caesar’s time to the Late Empire, legionaries wear the same banded iron plate armor. Archaeology reveals the reality: banded iron plate armor was only used from roughly 9 AD, under Emperor Augustus, to around 250 AD. Before then, soldiers in the Republic, including the ones marching with Caesar, were protected by chainmail. Late Empire legionaries went back to mail and scale too, because plate was too expensive and hard to maintain on the remote frontier.

In battle scenes, Roman legionnaires are shown wearing form-fitting brown leather chest pieces and studded leather arm bracers. In reality, they wore metal: chain mail, metal scale, or a plate of iron. Leather decomposes rapidly when exposed to sweat and rain and offers little protection from iron weapons; therefore, it was never given out as a piece of body armor. But it did serve a purpose, for example, in their sandals and padding. Movies show leather armor because actual armor is more difficult to move around in and costs more money.

We see the Praetorian Guard, a personal guard of the Roman emperor established by Emperor Augustus and abolished in 312 AD, wearing an exuberant purple. The original Tyrian purple was made from the crushed bodies of thousands of snails, and by law, its high cost meant that it was used only for emperors and on the borders of senators’ togas. The Praetorians wore regular military armor and simple white or red tunics. In the city of Rome, they even wore ordinary togas to maintain the facade of civilian rule.

Cavalry charges in movies always have Roman horsemen sitting in metal stirrups. Roman horsemen never rode with stirrups, as stirrups didn’t arrive in Western Europe until about the 6th or 7th century AD. They rode with a four-horned saddle, consisting of four stiff, leather-covered wooden pommels that pressed against their hips and thighs, which was enough to throw a javelin or wield a sword in battle. Stunt riders today use stirrups because it’s against regulations to ride without them.

While movies like Gladiator portray captured Roman citizens being branded and sold as slaves without question, Roman law protected against such treatment. Under a law known as the Lex Fabia de plagiariis, citizens were immune from illegal enslavement in Rome, and anyone who illegally enslaved them faced death. A Roman citizen could invoke “Civis Romanus sum,” meaning “I am a Roman citizen,” to demand a magistrate’s protection and trial, although some corrupt magistrates ignored this law as well.

Soldiers in movies often call their leader “General,” which is not a historical rank. Rome’s high command typically came from elected political offices, sometimes combined with military powers, though legion commanders called legates were appointed rather than elected. The terms included consul (the top elected official in the Roman Republic), praetor (a senior magistrate who could also hold military command), legatus legionis (commander of a legion), and imperator (an honorific title bestowed on a general by his soldiers upon victory). Centurions and other lower-level officers had clear, defined responsibilities on the battlefield. But the highest-ranking position in Rome was a combination of political and military command.

Religious epics feature Christians being tossed to lions in the Colosseum. However, no text or inscription from the first four centuries has been discovered that places Christian executions in the Colosseum. Even the most famous of the persecutions, those ordered by Emperor Nero after the Great Fire of 64 AD, took place years before the Colosseum opened its doors, in locations like the Circus of Nero next to Vatican Hill. The persecutions did happen. It was just the wrong venue.

We see scenes from crucifixion in which Roman soldiers hammer nails into the center of the victim’s palms. But it’s not possible to suspend a person from his or her palms, as testing shows that the soft tissue of the palm easily tears under the victim’s weight. Instead, the nails were driven into the wrist area between the bones of the forearms, with additional nails used to secure the feet. A skeleton discovered in Jerusalem in 1968, which shows a nail driven through a heel bone, confirmed these mechanics. The image of the nails in the palms comes from medieval and Renaissance religious art.

This content was created with the help of AI.