Fantastic Movie - Historically ACCURATE!!!

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2002)

Just so you know, this is probably the most historically ACCURATE movie of ancient Rome ever. The special effects and plot are amazing, but what really gets my goat is how you so-called "historians" make such a big fuss with "anachronisms" that don't even exist. Sure, some horsemen have stirrups, but just because their is no evidence *today* does not mean that they didn't have something that looked like it. These so-called historians may know about facts, but the people at dreamworks were trying to recreate a civilization that collapsed fifteen-hundred years ago (not including Byzantium, of course). Below are just a few of the arguments that I could come up with, with the "historian's statement followed by my response.
1. "They never threw bread in the collosseum like hot dogs at a baseball game!" Well, just because their is no evidence AT THE MOMENT doesn't mean that there will ever be at all. And besides, they had food stands outside, just like at a baseball game - why not have throwers?
2. "Gladiator's were rarely ever killed, because they were very valuable!" Really (OH MY GOD!) This is probably the lamest argument ever! They never had the electric chair for capital punishment, so they had to find another way to get rid of their "criminals" (P.O.W.'s, Christians...). At that point in history, many Romans were poor and miserable, so the government decided to take their minds off of their lives by watching other people suffer. In fact, during the time of Commodus (the emperor in the movie), thousands of gladiators were killed.
3. "Male gladiators and female gladiator's almost never fought together". Just because there is no immediate evidence does not mean that they never did. And also, maybe Commodus wanted to give the crowd something out of the ordinary.
4. "The Roman Writing is wrong" That is because we are looking through the eyes of a latin-speaking person. Since the Romans could understand their mother tongue as we can, we could assume that reading was just as natural. It is challenging to explain, but let's say that in a movieif our mother-tongue was latin, the writings on buildings in a French movie would be written in latin as well.
5. "The names do not follow the normal Roman pattern (daughter of of Julius is Julia, and how the daughter of Tiberius would be Tiberia)". The Roman empire ruled a very large space, so their are many different ethnicities. Cicero never had a "traditional" Roman name, so why can't Marcus Aurelius' daughter be named Lucia?
6. "In the battle scene, the many siege weapons were not invented yet till centuries later." Oye Vey! The romans were ingenius with the art of siege warfare. In fact, the large catapults and ballista's were in perfect time. They were wrapped in sheets of oil and set alight as well! One ballista (a huge field artillery-like crossbow), known as the Helepolis, was the most sofisticated weapon of the time, because when a crank was pulled, a deadly dart was fired, and another was mechanically set. That is why you see all the flaming arrows in the beginning.
5. "The romans never had an archery unit." They very well did! They were called missile units, and were usually fed from the local auxillaries, such as the ones in Syria. They were the best in the world at that time. And besides, in Persia, the Romans had to fight against Parthians, whose strategy was to fire arrows on horseback. Don't you think that it would be stupid for a heavily clad footman to chase a light-speed horse archer, when that foot soldier belonged to an army that was the best the world has ever seen?
6. "The battle scene was all screwed up" The romans did use scientific warfare, but, as we see in the beginning, the battle in Germania was going on for a long time before we are there, so maybe the romans did not see the german's as much of a threat? And even though the roman's slashed in this movie with their swords instead of the "known" hide-and-stab technique, did it ever occur to you that it might have been part of Maximus's strategy, though how unlikely it seems?
7. "The costumes are wrong." Not every single Roman wore a toga! That is like saying all North American's wear jeans! Only officials down to high middle-class wore them. The poor people probably wore a simple tunic (which they almost all did), but remember that many provincials visited the Eternal City itself (Gauls in trousers, and so on.).
And finally, the stupidest nitpick ever:
"The characters in that story never died like that" True. Aurelius was never murdered by his son, and nor was their a person called Maximus in the first place. But their never was a person called Ben Hur either, so why are you historians ganging up on this innocent sword-and-sandals-soon-to-be-a-classic movie? The movie is historical fiction - FICTION that uses a historical context to play the characters in. There is nothing wrong by bending the facts in an entertainment movie (the best stories are what-if stories, like this, in my opinion). It's not as if this movie is a history lesson on how these people lived.
Thank you for reading my comments. Even though I am not a graduate YET, I have read volumes and volumes of books on ancient Rome from "A History of the Ancient World" by the historian Chester G. Starr to poetry by Ovid. I really hope that you people who think that this movie is full of more anachronisms than "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" have gained a couple nuggets from a budding wisdom.