Gladiator II: how accurate is it?

Ridley Scott has never been shy about it. He makes films, not history lessons, and Gladiator II is no different. But it is built around real people and a real moment in Roman history, so it’s worth asking: how much of it actually happened?

The short answer is that the names are right and the decade is roughly right. Nearly everything else has been rewritten.

The emperors: real brothers, not twins

Caracalla and Geta were real. They were the sons of the emperor Septimius Severus, and after he died in February AD 211 they ruled Rome together as co-emperors.

The film makes them twins. They weren’t. Caracalla was born in April 188 and Geta in March 189, so they were about a year apart.

The bigger change is how their story ends. The two brothers hated each other, and the joint rule lasted less than a year. In December 211, Caracalla had Geta murdered. The ancient historian Cassius Dio says it happened in front of their mother, Julia Domna. Caracalla then tried to erase his brother from history. You can still see Roman family portraits where Geta’s face has been scraped away.

In the film, it’s Macrinus who brings both brothers down. In real life, Caracalla needed no help getting rid of Geta.

Macrinus: real man, invented life

Denzel Washington’s Macrinus is the most interesting character in the film, and the one that strays furthest from the record.

The real Marcus Opellius Macrinus came from Mauretania in North Africa. He was a lawyer and administrator, not a slave, gladiator owner or arms dealer. He rose to become praetorian prefect, the commander of the emperor’s guard, under Caracalla.

The film does keep one true thread. Macrinus really did turn on Caracalla. In April 217, fearing for his own life, he arranged for Caracalla to be killed by a soldier while the emperor was travelling in the east. Macrinus then became emperor himself, the first emperor who wasn’t from the senatorial class.

He didn’t last. He ruled for about 14 months before he was defeated in 218 and killed. So the real Macrinus did reach the throne, but six years after the film’s setting, and nowhere near the Colosseum.

Numidia was already Roman

The film opens with a Roman fleet invading Numidia, a North African kingdom that Lucius calls home.

That invasion would have been about 250 years too late. Rome had fought its big war against Numidia, the Jugurthine War, back in 112 to 106 BC. After Julius Caesar won the Battle of Thapsus in 46 BC, the region was absorbed into the empire. By the time of Caracalla it had been Roman for centuries, and wealthy Roman families lived there.

North Africa does matter to this story, just not in the way the film shows. Septimius Severus himself was born in Lepcis Magna, in what is now Libya. The emperors on screen came from an African and Syrian family.

Lucius and Lucilla

The real Lucilla, daughter of Marcus Aurelius, didn’t survive her brother Commodus. She was caught up in a plot against him in AD 182, exiled to the island of Capri, and then put to death.

She was married to the co-emperor Lucius Verus, and she did have children. But there’s no record of a son who grew up to fight as a gladiator, and certainly not a son of Maximus, who was invented for the first film.

Sharks, rhinos and sea battles

This is where the film has the most fun, and where it mixes truth and fiction most freely.

Sea battles: partly true. The Romans did stage mock naval battles called naumachiae. Ancient writers describe the arena being flooded for water shows when the Colosseum opened in AD 80. Historians still argue about how often it happened and how it worked. It probably stopped once the underground tunnels, the hypogeum, were built beneath the arena floor, well before 211.

Sharks: no. There’s no evidence for sharks in the Colosseum, and keeping large sharks alive and moving them inland to Rome would have been close to impossible.

Rhinos: half true. Rhinos really were shown in Roman games. The poet Martial describes one in the arena. Riding one into battle like a war horse is pure Hollywood.

Gladiators: mostly fair. Many gladiators were prisoners of war or enslaved people, so Lucius being captured and sold into the arena fits. Fights to the death were less common than the film suggests, though. Trained gladiators were expensive, and owners didn’t want to lose them every match.

The verdict

Gladiator II takes three real people, Caracalla, Geta and Macrinus, and puts them in roughly the right decade. Almost everything they actually do on screen is invented, along with the invasion that starts the story and the most memorable arena scenes.

That doesn’t make it a bad film. It makes it a fantasy set in a real place. If it sends you off to read about the real Severan emperors, the true story is just as dramatic: a brother murdered in front of his mother, an emperor killed on the road, and a lawyer from North Africa who briefly ruled the world.

Accuracy score: 3 out of 10.

Sources

• Cassius Dio, Roman History, Books 77 to 79 (Caracalla, Geta and Macrinus)
• Herodian, History of the Empire, Books 4 and 5
• Martial, On the Spectacles (animals and water shows in the arena)
• Hyperallergic, “The Insidious False History of Gladiator II”
• ANU, “Gladiator II is full of historical inaccuracies, but is that a problem?”
• Northeastern University, “Is Gladiator II historically accurate?”