Did ships really battle in the Colosseum? The bizarre true stories that inspired Gladiator II

Ridley Scott’s epic sequel starring Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington has been widely criticised for its historical inaccuracies. The BBC asks Roman history experts to separate fact from fiction.

You might joke that for his work on Gladiator II, Alexander Mariotti had one of the hardest jobs in cinema. He was the film’s historical script consultant, which meant advising director Sir Ridley Scott when the script strayed from the record.

This article contains spoilers for Gladiator II.

Scott has made it clear that he doesn’t care if his films are historically inaccurate, however, even when they’re based on real people and events. In 2023, after TV historian Dan Snow pointed out several inaccuracies in Scott’s film Napoleon, Scott said Snow should “get a life“. But Mariotti, who also works as a historian and is a leading speaker on gladiators, combat and weaponry, knew what he was letting himself in for. “From the very start I said to them, ‘Look, I know we’re not here to make a documentary.’ I always know that we’re there to make films and entertain,” Mariotti tells the BBC.

This hasn’t stopped the experts from pointing out inaccuracies, however. When the first trailer for Gladiator II was released back in July, historians jumped to explain why the architecture was wrong, that Romans didn’t have newspapers to read, and that they didn’t meet in cafés.

The plot of Gladiator II centres on Lucius (Paul Mescal) – the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and Maximus (Russell Crowe) – who as a child was forced to leave Rome. Twenty years after the death of Lucius’s father, Roman soldiers invade his home city in Numidia, kill his wife, then take him into slavery. After being purchased by Macrinus (Denzel Washington), Lucius is turned into a gladiator. But while Lucius battles to survive, being pitted against animals, ships and other gladiators inside the Colosseum, Macrinus plots to overthrow the young emperors Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn), so he can become the ruler of Rome.

Mariotti points out that if the film was strictly accurate, then the word Colosseum wouldn’t even be uttered. Its original name was the Flavian Amphitheatre, after the dynasty that ruled when the building was constructed. People only started to call it the Colosseum centuries later, around the year 1000 AD. The main reason why Mariotti isn’t overly concerned by these errors is the huge impact that a film like Gladiator II has on viewers and tourism. “There is a great amount of snobbery in the academic world towards film,” says Mariotti. “I’m really baffled by it, because over the last 20 years Gladiator had a huge impact. Before the film, you could get into the Colosseum for free. The following year, people came in droves.”

Although Gladiator II has numerous historical inaccuracies, at least some of it is based in truth. Shortly after being captured, Lucius has to survive a troop of baboons. Then when he arrives in the Colosseum, he and his fellow gladiators face a charging rhinoceros. But while it’s believed that baboons and rhinoceroses were taken to the Colosseum and shown off to Romans, they wouldn’t have gone up against gladiators. Instead, gladiators would have had to fight lions, panthers and elephants. It is believed that a rhino was present at the opening of the Colosseum in 80 AD, where it fought a bull, bear, buffalo, lion and bison. “They would bring in weird animals from all over the empire to fight,” says Paul Belonick, a professor at UC Law SF who also wrote Restraint, Conflict, and the Fall of the Roman Republic. There’s no record of the rhino being mounted by a Roman soldier and ridden like a jockey, however.

When Emperor Titus held 100 days of games in the Colosseum to mark its opening, Belonick estimates that around 10,000 animals were killed in just a few days. “They were killed in all kinds of creative ways, too. People threw spears at them, got them with nets. Archers were very popular. It’s like watching a sharpshooter. They’d have small deer running around. An archer would stand in a specific spot, then take them down, and people would cheer.” Sometimes those in attendance would get upset at the deaths of certain animals. The Roman historian Dio wrote about the crowd becoming very sad as a group of elephants were killed. He noted that the creatures “were pitied by the people when, after being wounded and ceasing to fight, they walked about with their trunks raised toward heaven”. 

Arguably the biggest action sequence in Gladiator II is also its most egregious deviation from history. When Lucius and several other gladiators are forced to take part in a mock naval battle, Scott seemingly revels in making the set-piece as over-the-top as possible.

In reality, if an emperor wanted to outdo his predecessor, he would hold a mock naval battle, known at the time as naumachia. These events would see water put in the amphitheatres, ships brought in, and then the fighters recreate historical events. “They would usually reconstruct naval battles of the Greeks against the Persians,” says David Potter, the Francis W Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History at The University of Michigan. “The crews of the ships would be people who have been condemned to death.”

While Gladiator II makes it seem as though the ships are moving at full speed and the water is deep enough to have sharks in it, Roman amphitheatres were only filled with a small amount of liquid. The ships never picked up enough speed to crash into each other either, as they had flat bottoms so that they could move around easily. Plus, the last naumachia is believed to have taken place at the Colosseum in 89 AD, more than 100 years before the events of the film. The lack of water also means that the Colosseum never had sharks swimming around, waiting for people to fall in. Although some historians believe that crocodiles were part of the animal hunts, they are unsure whether they were included in the nautical fights.

While there are enough records of mock naval battles for historians to believe they took place in Rome, there are still quite a few unknowns regarding how and where they did. Belonick suggests that they most likely took place at the Circus Maximus, which is much lower than the Colosseum and closer to the Tiber river. “It would have been easier to flood. Plus if you look at the shape of it, it’s a bowl. The Colosseum has all these underground tunnels. I don’t know how they’d have plugged it up. Some people just think they flooded the centre section, rather than the whole thing.”

Mariotti suggests that because the Colosseum was built on the site of an artificial lake, that made it possible to flood. “They built an incredible drainage system from the river to bring the water up and then drain it.”

The sequel’s depictions of gladiator fights are mostly incorrect, too. Unfolding in the afternoon after the executions, Potter insists that they weren’t quite as brutal as the Gladiator films and other Roman epics would have you believe. To begin with, they weren’t all slaves or prisoners of war. “Forty per cent of the gladiators were probably free people who became gladiators to make money,” says Potter. Rather than it being a fight to the death, Belonick compares these contests to watching WWE or UFC. “Most of the time it’s to first blood or a moment of surrender. It was once calculated that nine out of 10 times nobody dies.” There was even a referee that stepped in to separate people.

That didn’t stop citizens from betting on the gladiators, with Potter adding that Romans would gamble on anything. When somebody got injured, prestigious doctors would come out to treat them. Galen, the most famous doctor from the ancient world, even started out as a doctor for gladiators. Ultimately, the goal of the gladiator contests was to see different styles of combat pitted against each other. “There’d be a guy with a net and triton against someone with a shield and sword,” says Potter. “Someone lightly armoured against someone in heavy armour”.

Much like its approach to the Colosseum games, several of the characters involved in Gladiator II were based on real people, but what happens to them in the film is fiction. In 211 AD, Caracalla and Geta became the joint rulers of Rome. Caracella is then believed to have had Geta murdered. Geta is even thought to have died in their mother’s arms. Caracalla became a hugely unpopular emperor, with Potter describing him as a “vicious and nasty man”. Caracalla left the city in 216 AD to wage war against the Parthian Empire, only to be murdered by one of his own soldiers in 217 AD.

Macrinus allegedly recruited the soldier to commit the murder. He became the Emperor of Rome on 11 April 217, three days after Caracalla’s death. “He’s the first person to become emperor who’d never been a member of the Roman Senate,” says Potter. Macrinus himself was executed just over a year later, in June 218, after Caracella’s aunt had launched a rebellion to get her grandson, Elagabalus, installed as the new emperor, even though he was just 14. “Being emperor becomes the most dangerous job you could possibly have,” says Potter, and for the next 100 years every person who reigned only did so for a short time.

With work having already started on the script for Gladiator III, viewers can once again expect Scott to use these true stories as inspiration before eschewing historical accuracy in the service of entertainment. Mariotti sees no problem with this, because in his view, it simply reflects what artists have done throughout history. “What Ridley does is no different to Shakespeare or Michelangelo. Even the painting Pollice Verso by Jean-Léon Gérôme, which inspired Ridley to make the first film – it’s all historically inaccurate. But it’s about using history to tell a story and teach us a lesson. That’s why we gravitate to them. They’re basically stories about us.”

More than that, Mariotti believes that films like Gladiator II connect viewers to their ancestors. Especially the scenes in the Colosseum, because Romans were attending those events for the same reasons why people watch films. “That was their cinema. That’s where they escaped from life. Where, for a couple of hours, they transformed into a courageous hunter or gladiator and were shown parts of the world they’d never see. That’s what happens when people watch Gladiator II. They’re doing the exact same thing that the Colosseum was built for.”

Gladiator II is released in US cinemas on 22 November.