Talk:Historical accuracy of Gladiator (2000 film)

Discussion
This is not an article but a list of bullets!--75.30.178.197 (talk) 07:14, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

"In the movie, the Colosseum is referred to by that name", they should say the Flavian Ampitheatre. Well, in the film all of the Roman characters speak English instead of Latin! Hardly any of the words they use would be immediately familiar to people from times of the Roman Empire.

This is a good idea for an article but it's poorly executed.Simon Peter Hughes (talk) 17:35, 22 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, it just so happens that many words that proper nouns usually exist in similar pronunciation regardless of the language used. Flavian Amphitheater would be one of these.--Jorfer (talk) 23:38, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

OK, I will admit that "Flavian Ampitheatre" sounds much more like Ampitheatrum Flavium than "Colosseum" does. The Latin version of the name wasn't included in the article when I commented on it before.--Simon Peter Hughes (talk) 02:23, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

There is at least one example i can think of off the top of my head where a Roman army used ballistae against enemy soldiers..... in a forest.... in Germany. It's at Kalefeld, where a Roman army was ambushed by germans c 200 CE (AD). theres dozens of bolts embedded in the hillside where the German ambushers are assumed to have been attacking from. the smaller scorpions and such were mobile for a reason. onagers not so much, so perhaps that part's correct

also theres several battles attested to by ancient authors where the legions were charged by enemy armies so fast that they didn't have time to throw their pila. so again, that is within the realm of the believable —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.23.53.168 (talk) 00:42, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The bulleted point about gladiatorial combats being rarely fatal is totally at odds with the encyclopedia entry on Gladiators, which indicates the spectacles were very bloody, violent, and death-filled. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.92.79.239 (talk) 21:53, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Early gladiatorial tradition started as a funerary rite and might result in serious injury but the goal was not to kill your opponent, only best him with style and showmanship. By the time of the film however, gladiators were simply entertainment and like rule 34 of the internet, if someone could imagine it, they tried it in the Colosseum. Also, I believe St Sebastion was executed by archer firing squad and Edmund the Martyr was tied to a tree and shot by Vikings (a little anachronistic I know but if the Vikings were doing it in the 8th century then who knows how long it had been going on). It stands to reason that if ancient people had a means of executing someone, and arrows do execute people, then someone in the ancient world would have done it, it seems unacademic to say that it was never a means of execution in antiquity. 123.243.215.92 (talk) 09:15, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

References needed
This article badly needs additional references. As it is, it seems to be mostly made up of original research. Robofish (talk) 15:28, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Commodus and Incest
There was once an entry in this article about how Commodus never committed incest with his sister (as depicted in the film). Isn't there reliable sources on this (that he DIDN'T)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by StrangeApparition2011 (talk • contribs) 03:26, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

You can't prove a negative, particularly from 2000 years in the past. 123.243.215.92 (talk) 05:32, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Religious Beliefs
A section on religious beliefs would be helpful. It seems unlikely that Maximus would have had any thoughts about heaven, and Juba almost certainly wouldn't have buried figurines on the spot where he died. All of this afterlife stuff seems to have been added simply for maudlin effect.

All things considered, it could have been that Maximus was a not-particularly religious Roman who somehow had his own ideas about the afterlife. But the discrepancies with what most people believed needs to be pointed out. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.61.15.34 (talk) 03:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Language
Pointing out a character speaking modern German as anachronistic seems strange when everyone else in the film is speaking... 70.71.186.191 (talk) 01:49, 18 March 2014 (UTC)