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.
The first season was awesome, but IMO second season was already pretty bad.
You really didn't want to see Titus Pullo fighting the Picts??
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)
Possibly the best thing John Milius has done -- I said what I said!
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.
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.
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
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.
It's an 80-minute interview. Really wish they would include a full transcript.
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.)
Next they're going to tell me Bewitched didn't accurately portray modern-day witches...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[flagged]
I agree but the argument is better framed as Mary Beard is a modern scholar with a rigid intersectional world view that is highly moralistic and highly judgmental from the perspective of modern norms around violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
In other words, she doesn't like them--and apparently she is self-righteous about it, too.
I'm not acquainted with her work, but after reading the transcript your comment seems... highly moralistic and highly judgmental?
The whole interview reads as very sober, she mentions elements that are at odds with the pop culture understanding. She very explicitly takes head on this type of criticisms.
>I think the question of how you judge these people is very tricky. People often write in to me and say, "I don't like the way that you do sometimes make judgments about X as a mass murderer, when they're 2000 years in the past. Surely, it's often said, "You should be judging them on their own terms, not on your terms."
> I've got two responses to that. One is, quite often, these people were hostilely judged in antiquity itself, but we rather brush that under the carpet. Julius Caesar, for example, it's reckoned now that he may well have killed about a million Gauls in his campaign against Gaul, and there were people in Rome who said he was committing crimes against humanity. This is not a new invention that Caesar was a war criminal, there were people in Rome who said that. So I think we have to be very careful always to listen out for the discordant voices in antiquity itself. But I think perhaps more important is that the job of the historian, and this kind of explains I think why we sometimes find there's a flip flop here between one sort of judgment of Alexander the Great and another, you know, favorable or not favorable, same with Caesar, whatever, is that the job of the historian I think is to have stereoscopic vision. I think it is important to understand these characters in their own context, and in their own terms, and how people, by the standards of their time, yes, I think you should do that. But I think that the modern historian can't just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door. I do at a certain point have to say I find the conquests of Alexander the Great, very, very uncomfortable, and I think what I particularly dislike in terms of our modern appropriation of them is the way we somehow seem to go along with approving of what they did. I might not want to disapprove of it, I might want to say, in part, that by the standards of their own time was okay, but I do have to say it's not the standards of ours, and we have to realize that there are moral issues and questions about what happened in antiquity that we shouldn't be afraid of bringing to the surface. I'm very happy to do that. I mean, I think it's quite interesting, I've chosen a group of men for my most influential Rome, I think I had no choice but to do that. I can also say, but I think there is something about the misogyny of the Roman Empire that I deplore. And you have to be able to hold those two views at the same time, I think.
That's not sneering, it's just not falling in to the trap that whitewashes the brutality of the past. Should future historians only consider our proclaimed ideals? Our notions of virtue? Will the War on Terror be seen just as a "cool" period, morally-neutral?
> violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
Which is a very anachronistic way of looking at things and very unscholarly, too bad, I really wanted to get into her books. I guess the Protestant moralism and virtue-signalling got to her (there are exceptions to this, especially in the German world, but it is my impression that the Anglos never really fully adopted the Romans and the Roman worldview, and I'm including Gibbon in here).
And you don't think she knows this? She's clearly fascinated with the Romans, despite all she finds unappealing about them. Which can easily be said about a lot (most?) of history. Based on books and TV, WW2 is possibly the historical period that draws the most attention, which doesn't mean the historians (or their readers) "love WW2."
> think their achievements are amazing
> She sees them as patriarchal and violent.
Both of these things can be simultaneously true. They are not inherently contradictions.
I just don't think someone that sees them as patriarchal and violent will ever see their achievements as amazing. They will most likely have the belief that their achievements were due to stealing it from another culture or on the backs of slaves (and the slaves were actually responsible for the amazing achievements).
It's putting a leftists lens on a historical culture. I get bored with these takes pretty quickly because of the obvious bias which leads to complete inaccuracy.
It doesn’t sound like you’re much interested in clearing up any misconceptions you might have, but you could read acoup.blog if you want a different historian’s take on things.
> I just don't think someone that sees them as patriarchal and violent will ever see their achievements as amazing.
I'm not sure why you'd think that. History is filled with shitty people doing amazing things.
> It's putting a leftists lens on a historical culture.
I think you're putting a rightist's lens on academic culture.
> I think you're putting a rightist's lens on academic culture.
billy99k is one of the commenters whose name comes to mind while reading their comments before I even look at the name. They have an annoying habit of making everything political, they seem to like trolling.
I think its interesting to talk about both aspects. The romans wrote the history so we don't think of them as an evil empire - but they were pretty darn evil. Their society was supported entirely by millions of slaves, many of whom had life expectancies of just a few years.
They were also super rad and organized, both are true.
Weird right? My wife studied Nazi Germany, and doesn't really like the Nazis either.
History is messy - we can and should learn from those that came before, both the good and bad. One can both admire the things the Romans accomplished while simultaneously despising the way they went about accomplishing them. It isn't a contradiction.
That’s kind of a weird way of putting it. Why study history if you’re not interested in what actually happened?
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.
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.
The first season was awesome, but IMO second season was already pretty bad.
You really didn't want to see Titus Pullo fighting the Picts??
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)
Possibly the best thing John Milius has done -- I said what I said!
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.
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/
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
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.
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...
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.)
Next they're going to tell me Bewitched didn't accurately portray modern-day witches...
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.
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.
[dead]
I've been enjoying her "Instant Classics" podcast
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.
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.
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.
[flagged]
I agree but the argument is better framed as Mary Beard is a modern scholar with a rigid intersectional world view that is highly moralistic and highly judgmental from the perspective of modern norms around violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
In other words, she doesn't like them--and apparently she is self-righteous about it, too.
I'm not acquainted with her work, but after reading the transcript your comment seems... highly moralistic and highly judgmental?
The whole interview reads as very sober, she mentions elements that are at odds with the pop culture understanding. She very explicitly takes head on this type of criticisms.
>I think the question of how you judge these people is very tricky. People often write in to me and say, "I don't like the way that you do sometimes make judgments about X as a mass murderer, when they're 2000 years in the past. Surely, it's often said, "You should be judging them on their own terms, not on your terms."
> I've got two responses to that. One is, quite often, these people were hostilely judged in antiquity itself, but we rather brush that under the carpet. Julius Caesar, for example, it's reckoned now that he may well have killed about a million Gauls in his campaign against Gaul, and there were people in Rome who said he was committing crimes against humanity. This is not a new invention that Caesar was a war criminal, there were people in Rome who said that. So I think we have to be very careful always to listen out for the discordant voices in antiquity itself. But I think perhaps more important is that the job of the historian, and this kind of explains I think why we sometimes find there's a flip flop here between one sort of judgment of Alexander the Great and another, you know, favorable or not favorable, same with Caesar, whatever, is that the job of the historian I think is to have stereoscopic vision. I think it is important to understand these characters in their own context, and in their own terms, and how people, by the standards of their time, yes, I think you should do that. But I think that the modern historian can't just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door. I do at a certain point have to say I find the conquests of Alexander the Great, very, very uncomfortable, and I think what I particularly dislike in terms of our modern appropriation of them is the way we somehow seem to go along with approving of what they did. I might not want to disapprove of it, I might want to say, in part, that by the standards of their own time was okay, but I do have to say it's not the standards of ours, and we have to realize that there are moral issues and questions about what happened in antiquity that we shouldn't be afraid of bringing to the surface. I'm very happy to do that. I mean, I think it's quite interesting, I've chosen a group of men for my most influential Rome, I think I had no choice but to do that. I can also say, but I think there is something about the misogyny of the Roman Empire that I deplore. And you have to be able to hold those two views at the same time, I think.
That's not sneering, it's just not falling in to the trap that whitewashes the brutality of the past. Should future historians only consider our proclaimed ideals? Our notions of virtue? Will the War on Terror be seen just as a "cool" period, morally-neutral?
> violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
Which is a very anachronistic way of looking at things and very unscholarly, too bad, I really wanted to get into her books. I guess the Protestant moralism and virtue-signalling got to her (there are exceptions to this, especially in the German world, but it is my impression that the Anglos never really fully adopted the Romans and the Roman worldview, and I'm including Gibbon in here).
And you don't think she knows this? She's clearly fascinated with the Romans, despite all she finds unappealing about them. Which can easily be said about a lot (most?) of history. Based on books and TV, WW2 is possibly the historical period that draws the most attention, which doesn't mean the historians (or their readers) "love WW2."
> think their achievements are amazing
> She sees them as patriarchal and violent.
Both of these things can be simultaneously true. They are not inherently contradictions.
I just don't think someone that sees them as patriarchal and violent will ever see their achievements as amazing. They will most likely have the belief that their achievements were due to stealing it from another culture or on the backs of slaves (and the slaves were actually responsible for the amazing achievements).
It's putting a leftists lens on a historical culture. I get bored with these takes pretty quickly because of the obvious bias which leads to complete inaccuracy.
It doesn’t sound like you’re much interested in clearing up any misconceptions you might have, but you could read acoup.blog if you want a different historian’s take on things.
> I just don't think someone that sees them as patriarchal and violent will ever see their achievements as amazing.
I'm not sure why you'd think that. History is filled with shitty people doing amazing things.
> It's putting a leftists lens on a historical culture.
I think you're putting a rightist's lens on academic culture.
> I think you're putting a rightist's lens on academic culture.
billy99k is one of the commenters whose name comes to mind while reading their comments before I even look at the name. They have an annoying habit of making everything political, they seem to like trolling.
I think its interesting to talk about both aspects. The romans wrote the history so we don't think of them as an evil empire - but they were pretty darn evil. Their society was supported entirely by millions of slaves, many of whom had life expectancies of just a few years.
They were also super rad and organized, both are true.
Weird right? My wife studied Nazi Germany, and doesn't really like the Nazis either.
History is messy - we can and should learn from those that came before, both the good and bad. One can both admire the things the Romans accomplished while simultaneously despising the way they went about accomplishing them. It isn't a contradiction.
That’s kind of a weird way of putting it. Why study history if you’re not interested in what actually happened?
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.