Barstool History - Number One - 'Gladiator'
1. WAR!
In the 1960s and 1970s, British children’s television was a drug fueled, stop-frame animation, kaleidoscopic, acid trip wonderland, crammed full of subversive messages designed to turn the nation’s children into shiny-eyed, hollow brained attack drones.
When Khrushchev had finished banging his shoes on the desk long enough to actually invade, those messages would trigger secret impulses in the brains of every child across the land, urging them would drop their wholesome, 1970s toys; clockwork Evil Kneivels, bricks with string on them, cigarettes and porn magazines they had found in a hedge outside the local golf course; and march them towards the Soviet lines to act as machine gun fodder as The Red Menace advanced on Britain’s nuclear arsenal, currently being defended by a camp full of hippy women in South Berkshire.
Nominative determinism was strong in Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley. Windy Miller was the village miller, Fireman Pugh and his twin brother also, handily, named Fireman Pugh were part of the fire brigade and Chippy Minton was the local carpenter.
True, not all of them had names that matched their jobs. There was Mr Craddock who’s job was nominally to be the park keeper, but served as the haunting ghoul of the piece by wandering around in a daze, singing a song that went:
“Silver paper, toffee paper, dirty piece of cardboard”
In what can only be described as a way designed to instill abject terror in anyone within earshot.
The overseer of all this was known simply as The Mayor and his job was to raise taxes on the poor, order the police to pepper spray idealistic youths who wanted to see a better world and blame foreigners for all the ills of the village. He didn’t need another name, if he ever actually had one, because everyone knew who he was and what he did. He wore the badges of office, he looked the part and he sounded like a Mayor.
Similarly in Ridley Scott’s 2000, rain soaked, sandals and brimstone, historical rumpus Gladiator, Russell Crowe’s leading character, who has a name and a very stupid one, could simply have done without it and gone by the name Roman General instead.
Famously, when Sir Michael Caine was offered a role in the disastrous disaster movie that was Jaws 4, he took one look at the script, saw it opened with the line ‘Fade in: The Bahamas’ and said “I’ll do it!”. Likewise, when Crowe was offered the role in Gladiator, it’s hard not to surmise that he took one look at the script, saw ‘Fade in: Roman General’ and also leapt straight in with a gruff mumble of “Sign me up, boys!”
Depictions of Romans in movies and on TV are usually incredibly limited. They come in pretty straightforward character models.
There’s the gruff, surly, soldier type who likes to mumble about things, in the rain, whilst being horrible to people with beards. Then there’s portly, effeminate types popping pickled plovers into their ruddy cheeks and then vomiting on slaves. All the women will be either be scheming bitches or sex crazed maniacs. Black people will only get parts as slaves, because that’s what black people did in the old days, apparently. And everyone else will either just wander about aimlessly in the background, run around screaming or bob up and down when asked to, like the dancers in a Dick van Dyke musical number.
Directors of anything Roman seem blissfully unaware that the majority of Roman people were just like you and me and led complex, interesting, romantic, fun, miserable, lonely, happy, sad lives. Just like humans always have. Humans in the past weren’t a different species.
Gladiator begins with what has been described as one of the most epic opening set pieces in movie history and it is certainly an opening set piece.
The Romans are at war, or, more precisely, ‘WAR!’ with some Germans because they have beards. Only, for some reason, the Romans, who have built themselves defensive positions and are therefore expecting a bit of action, have decided to retreat to the safety of the German’s favorite ambush spot, a big fuck off forest in Germany.
Roman armies famously don’t do very well in forests. Not least when, in 9AD, Publius Quinctilius Varus lost 3 legions to, of all people, the Germans in a forest. In Germany. This defeat was so utterly devastating to the perceived might of Rome that it ran throughout later Roman history as a reminder never to be so stupid as to meet the enemy on their own terms. Roman General seems to have forgotten 9AD.
Roman armies are armies of the plains, where their tactics, discipline, training and stabby things are best employed to withstand overwhelming beard charges and armies made up of angry farmers. If there’s a forest nearby, it’s best to use it as a shield to one flank, stick the cavalry on the other flank and then just grind the locals to mincemeat in the middle.
Roman General has a secret plan though. His cavalry is not going to stick to the wide open areas, where their superior speed and maneuverability can see them sweep behind enemy lines and trample the fuck out of the old people and kids at the back.
No. Roman General’s cavalry, with himself at the vanguard, are going to mount their counter charge through the forest itself, dodging to and fro through the trees at minimum speed like a drunk closing one eye and trying to get his key in the front door without waking the kids.
Anyone who has ever tried to ride a horse through a forest at any speed will tell you that this is not the animal’s best habitat. Not only do you risk clunking yourself on the head with a branch every 4 seconds, but you can’t see where you’re going, your horse is liable to trip over any one of the 8 million obstacles laying on the forest floor and your enemy is able to avoid your otherwise deadly attacks by simply standing behind a tree whilst you hurtle past.
Completely negating every advantage being on horseback confers, Roman General would have been better off simply dismounting his men and running at the enemy instead.
To compound matters, Roman General has decided to make life for his horses and men even more vexing by setting the entire forest alight. Which, considering he has decided to set up camp right in the middle of the fucking thing, doesn’t seem like a particularly brilliant idea.
There is fire everywhere. Lakes of it erupt at his command. Rivers of burning death snake through the trees. Great siege engines with nothing to besiege hurl enormous comets of fire through the air at the enemy ranks. In response, the Germans just stand there, unable to grasp the idea that if they all simply shuffled ten paces to their left, it would take 10 minutes for the Romans to readjust their artillery, at which point they could then simply shuffle ten paces back again and thwart the onslaught. There’s a reason siege engines are designed to fire at walls. Walls don’t shuffle about.
There are ditches with spikes in them, knee deep in burning oil. Quite where the Romans managed to get what appears to be 500,000 liters of oil is never explained. Perhaps they bought it with them? The trees are alight. The Germans are alight. The ground is alight. Into this, Roman General asks his horses to charge. If landmines had been invented, he would have sown the battlefield with them and then ordered everyone to fight in the minefield.
And then, of course, comes the familiar whistle of every historical romp’s most overused battlefield visual.
Fire arrows.
Look, I get it. It’s a movie and arrows are thin and hard to pick up as they zoom across a smoke filled battlefield. So setting one end of them alight makes for a visually dynamic scene. But the overuse of them is a constant theme. Set an arrow alight and the first thing you do is make hitting anything with them completely random. They lose accuracy and distance and stopping power.
If fire arrows were ever used during warfare, it was to either intimidate a besieged enemy or to drain their morale and resources as they were forced to run around putting out scores of tiny fires.
When Olympic archer Antonio Rebollo fired an arrow at the flame to light it for the opening ceremony of the 1992 games in Barcelona, he – an Olympian – famously missed by a country mile and the flame was ignited by a spark as the arrow soared harmlessly past.
Because they don’t work.
Most of them just go out before they get to wherever it is you’re aiming, or don’t get there because you’ve attached a bunch of rags to one end and now it’s nose heavy and so just drop in a puddle, or hit their target, fizzle briefly, and then go out. They’re not designed to be efficient, just annoying.
The person most in danger from a burning arrow is the poor bastard firing it and believe me, I’ve tried them. The most likely thing to get burned by a fire arrow is one of the archer’s hands.
So volleys of burning arrows slam into the German lines who scream briefly, burst into flames like they’re made of kerosene soaked tissue paper, and then just go on standing there, seemingly having forgotten their own military advantages of scurrying about in the woods and launching guerrilla ambushes like they did when they wiped out three entire legions in the time of Augustus.
These same Germans have, for some reason, managed to turn up in battle not in the armor that they would have used in the late 2nd Century, but dressed in animal skins like cavemen.
Rather than being the sophisticated societies that they were, with equipment based on, and taken from their time as auxiliaries in the Roman army itself, they turn up looking like extras from 1 Million Years BC with Raquel Welch.
We are saved the indignity of one of the Germans riding into battle on a burning Stegosaurus but only, one suspects, because nobody suggested it at the time.
Roman General mumbles a bit, in the rain, and orders his men to ‘unleash hell’, a concept not really in existence until early medieval religious leaders needed something to scare the shit out of the laity with, and then dons a helmet so ridiculous that it appears to have been designed by a child who has just watched He-Man on repeat after eating six bags of sherbet.
Instead of making him look like a fearsome warrior, the helmet, which has no basis in reality whatsoever, instead makes him look like a hungover Antipodean Cylon from Battlestar Galactica, circa 1979.
Despite actively putting themselves at every possible disadvantage they can muster, and then setting fire to everything, the Romans naturally win the day and the pesky bearded cavemen are sent back to their caves to hit each other with bones and ooga-booga their wounds.
2. Plot
Marcus Aurelius isn’t dead, so, to rectify this problem, Commodus, his son, kills him. In the same way Roman General need only be known as Roman General to explain his part in the movie, even though he spends most of the move as not a Roman general, Commodus need only be explained by the name Bad Boy.
Bad Boy desperately wants to be emperor, but Marcus Aurelius knows he is a bad boy and so promises that on his death, the throne shall pass to Roman General who is a good boy. Roman General is the only person that Marcus Aurelius can trust with his vision of the future in which none of them is Emperor and the entire circus is returned to a Republic where the wise Senate can run it like a peaceful, hippy commune of woodland elves, skipping through the pinecones and hedgehogs, spreading benevolence and free love everywhere they go.
With Marcus Aurelius dead, Bad Boy declares himself emperor and demands that Roman General bend the knee. When he refuses, Bad Boy has the Praetorian Guard, for some reason now acting as his personal police force, arrest him so that he can escape, rather than just stabbing him in the eye on the spot. Presumably Bad Boy has never watched a James Bond movie.
Roman General escapes, of course, and then runs home to Spain to find his family slain by the Praetorian Police. Roman General faints in order to allow the plot to move along.
Finding a Roman general asleep by the side of the road outside his villa, a bunch of traveling slavers, rather than waking him, or taking him to the nearest legionary base where they would be rewarded richly, either for saving him or for saving him so they can kill him, sling him in the back of a cart and whisk him across the Empire to Africa where they sell him to Oliver Reed who is in the movie playing the part of Oliver Reed.
Half dead Roman generals, presumably, fetch good money out there in the desert.
Oliver Reed (played by Oliver Reed) turns Roman General into a gladiator and, because he’s Roman General, he’s very good at it, despite there being no evidence that Roman generals were actually any good at actual fighting.
Roman General then finds himself in the Colosseum, fighting tigers, where he becomes wildly popular with the crowd. Bad Boy turns up and orders Roman General to reveal who he is. At this point, Roman General swears revenge on Bad Boy and swayed by the opinion of the crowd, Bad Boy spares him.
Bad Boy then decides to not have Roman General strangled and thrown into the Tiber when nobody is looking, thereby solving his problems instantly.
Roman General kisses someone, because he hasn’t done so yet and the plot demands it, and a plan is hatched to escape, reform his loyal legions and then restore the Republic.
At this point, because he’s an idiot, Bad Boy, who appears to have no martial skill whatsoever, challenges Roman General to a duel in the arena which he promptly loses.
With Bad Boy dead, and himself mortally wounded, Roman General makes everyone promise to look into the whole woodelf Communist Worker’s Collective thing. Everyone nods with the enthusiasm of people who are in absolutely no fucking way going to do any of that hippy shit and Roman General wanders around in the Elysian Fields, here cunningly represented by some actual fields, with his dead family and everyone just goes back to being Roman again, grumpily ever after.
3. The Nonsense
Marcus Aurelius was known as a philosopher king even during his lifetime and his reputation for coming up with quotes that people could use for screensavers
preceded him. He also liked to smash Germans over the head with heavy things, just in case.
In any event, he ruled, either alongside his adoptive brother Lucius Verus, or alongside Bad Boy, for a total of nineteen years. Presumably then, during those nineteen years, the film would have us believe that he harbored a secret desire to return the Empire to a republic. Which does then beg the question of why he didn’t, at any point during those nineteen years, just return the Empire to a republic.
There was nothing, legally, that stopped him from doing so. There was no constitutional need for an Emperor at all. Emperors were emperors primarily because they held the ability to have members of the Senate strangled and thrown in the Tiber, not because they held any constitutional or legal power. It was at the behest of the Senate that Emperors were given office, and they almost always did so because it was a better option than being strangled and thrown in the Tiber.
Neither was there any constitutional need or legal requirement for the outgoing Emperor to name an heir, meaning that neither Roman General nor Bad Boy need have been given the nod.
Marcus Aurelius could, at any point, simply have picked up the hem of his toga and sailed off into retirement, leaving the Senate to re-form the Republic, as he seemed to have wanted all along.
The Praetorian Guard aren’t the Emperor’s personal bodyguard. They are his, nominally, personal legion, but their job is to sit next to Rome and ward off any threats to the Senate and the People, and hence the Emperor. Should they also be needed to remind senators of their prowess in strangling and throwing mouth fuckers into the Tiber, that was also a great benefit. But the Emperor normally had his own personal bodyguard made up of people he could trust.
Nero had a unit of Batavians, famed for their brutishness. Some nights, Nero would take to the streets in disguise with the Batavians in tow, flitting among the drunks and the prostitutes, eating street food and drinking cheap wine. Nero would then alight on some poor target and start a fight, which the Batavians would then finish for him.
One evening, Nero bit off more than he could chew and his target fought back, knocking seven kinds of shit out of the young Emperor, who he didn’t recognize, before the Batavians could jump in.
The poor target was summarily executed for striking the Emperor and instantly word got around that Nero was in disguise in the streets, starting fights. Nobody dared fight back when assaulted, lest their assailant be the Emperor in disguise and for a while chaos ensued as gangs of criminals took the opportunity to beat and rob people with impunity.
It took the Praetorians, acting under the Senate’s orders, to restore the peace.
Roman generals, such as Roman General, are in the upper echelon of Rome’s nobility. They are the equivalent of Earls and Dukes. Whilst they may have come from Spain, and have villas and estates there, they lived in Rome when not on campaign, or acting as governor in the provinces, and so did their families.
Rome, and being seen in Rome, was everything to the nobility. Many of them claimed to hate every second of the noise, squalor, crowds, the games and depravity of Rome, and longed for rural idylls, but none of them were stupid enough than to live out of earshot of court. You might as well live on The Moon.
Not being in Rome was so unthinkable that being exiled from it was a punishment reserved for high born criminals found guilty of crimes that would see a lesser born man executed. Literally a fate worse than death.
So the idea of Roman General being frog marched back to Spain where his family would be is weird. Roman General would have lived in Rome.
When Roman General is bought before Bad Boy to swear allegiance, his family would have been bought along too, just for a little extra incentive. Had he refused, he would have been found guilty of something or other, it doesn’t matter what, and the whole lot of them would have been strangled and thrown in the Tiber in about 5 minutes flat.
When the Consul Sejanus fell foul of Tiberius in 31AD, he was executed on the spot and his family killed at the same time. Because tradition forbade the execution of a virgin, his daughter was raped first.
The Romans could find interesting ways of killing you, but they’d do it right there, right then.
Whilst recognizing people in Roman times wasn’t as easy as it is in the information age where everyone knows who Taylor Swift is and what she looks like, even if they couldn’t name a song of hers, a Roman general is still a recognizable figure and a Roman general, is a nobleman. He has the air of a nobleman. He has the haircut of one. He comports himself in certain ways. He might even be recognizable to a large number of people. The thought that you can just pick up, for example, the 3rd Earl of Sussex, laying in a ditch, and nobody thinks to ask who this bloke is or why he has the puffy hands of a nobleman, or talks like a noble, or looks like the 3rd Earl of Sussex is unthinkable.
Gladiators are no higher on the social scale than slaves and even, arguably, below them in the pecking order. Along with other ‘disgusting’ members of society like actors or athletes, they are right at the very bottom of Roman society and generals are right at the pointy end of that particular triangle.
For a general to become a slave is essentially impossible.
All Roman General would have to do is stand up, tell everyone that he is a general and a citizen and there would be a mad scramble to release him, bring him fresh figs and some cooling wine and start begging for forgiveness less the strangling begins with earnest.
If Bad Boy finds out that Oliver Reed (played by Oliver Reed) had been keeping a Roman citizen and a general to boot, in captivity, he would have fed Oliver Reed (played by Oliver Reed) into a mincing machine simply for the affront on Roman decency and then executed Roman General and all his family.
Oliver Reed (played by Oliver Reed) would have screamed in terror on discovering that Roman General was a Roman general and done everything in his power to find a way to make his immediate future as unstrangled as possible.
Furthermore, Roman General could simply have done the wise thing and sworn allegiance to Bad Boy. Sitting around in the background, pretending to like everyone whilst keeping your nose clean was a skill used by the wisest of players in the Roman political game. Vespasian famously sucked up all manner of ridicule and peronal abuse from Nero, to the extent that nobody ever thoguht that he would turn up with a shitload of legions and take over one day. Until he did.
What better way to exact revenge on Bad Boy than to stay close to him, wait until nobody was looking, strangle him and throw him in the Tiber?
Roman General would have been Norman Schwarzkopf level famous and being a gladiator was like being in the WWE. Imagine then a scenario in which General Schawrzkopf, who nobody had seen for a few months and who’s family had mysteriously died, suddenly turns up on cable TV in a lycra mask, as Stormin’ Normin, at Royal Rumble, fighting The Undertaker in a coffin match and nobody, but nobody thinks “wait a minute...isn’t that….?”
All this is compounded by the fact that when Oliver Reed (played by Oliver Reed), finds out that Roman General is a Roman general, he doesn’t then see the cash tills ringing in his mind, or have comedy dollar signs flash into his eyeballs like a slot machine, whisk Roman General off to the nearest bureaucratic outpost and claim a fat sack of coins as a prize. No. This Oliver Reed, whose job is buying and selling people, remember, decides to do nothing but watch his retirement fund get potentially eaten by tigers instead.
It’s about this time that we’re introduced to one of the movies more serious troublesome traits in the presence of the Token Black Person.
Token Black Person One and Token Black Person Two are portrayed by Djimon Hounsou, a Beninese actor who here plays – wait for it – a slave and Omid Djalili, a British born Iranian comedian and actor who plays – wait for it – a slave trader.
It’s long been a latent racist trope in historical movies that black people are slaves or barbarians or tribesmen or something similar because that is all the common narrative has ever believed them to have been. We know that Septimius Severus might have been a black Emperor (he was certainly African) and we know that black and brown people existed in Roman times because vast swathes of the Empire covered North Africa and the Middle East. But we never think of them as anything other than unruly locals, milling around in background shots, waving things in the air as the hero archaeologist charges past on a stolen horse, or as what we commonly believe, doing the job of black people living in what we are sure were white societies – slaves.
But the truth is that we’re not really sure just how many black or brown people there were in Roman society. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any.
They appear in the iconography often enough and sometimes in the archaeology, but the problem with both of these records is that they are comparatively scant. Even for one of the best recorded periods in human history, the actual remains of people from the time aren’t huge in number and any data has to be extrapolated from a limited dataset.
It’s also wrongly believed that because the Romans loved nothing better than keeping records, that the extant record database should be correspondingly huge. It isn’t. If 1% of 1% of all Roman records still survive today, then we’ve probably found 1% of them. The number of records they made was enormous, but the material they made them on was incredibly fragile. The records simply don’t survive 2,000 years in the ground and when they do, their survival is remarkable, not mundane.
The staggering wealth of otherwise mundane information found on the writing tablets preserved in exacting and unique conditions near Hadrian’s Wall at Vindolanda are arguably the greatest treasures in Roman archaeology anywhere in the world. Greater than any gold or pearls, simply because their survival is miraculous.
And in these records, there is almost no mention of black people, or brown people, or, come to that, white people either. There’s almost no mention of skin color at all because, for all it’s other glaring faults, like being fucking horrible to women, and owning slaves, the Roman Empire appeared to be almost entirely free of racism.
Cultural snobbery, maybe. Barbarians were looked down upon, for example, but not because of their skin color. For their language as much as anything else. The word ‘barbarian’, in Ancient Greek, literally means “someone who goes ‘bar bar bar’ when they speak”.
Black people aren’t missing from the records because they weren’t there. They aren’t mentioned in the records because nobody thought it was worthy of mention.
Black people were traders, craftsmen, soldiers, sailors, slaves, prostitutes, senators, lawyers, magistrates, cut-throats and poets. Just like everyone else. But nobody ever recorded them as ‘black lawyer’ or ‘black poet’ because nobody ever saw the point of doing so. They were just people.
At the time of Bad Boy, as much as 30% of the Roman Empire was populated by people who were from North Africa or the Middle East. In Gladiator, there are two of them and they’re both involved in the slave trade.
It’s uncomfortable, at best.
Gladiator saves the craziest plot twist for right at the end.
Bad Boy was known for many things, including ‘fighting’ in the arena, dressed as a ‘secutor’ with a heavy shield an a dagger. To Roman society, this was absolutely disgraceful. Gladiators were scum and although they could become wildly popular and even rich, they had zero social standing and zero honor. He would have had less shame had he run around in the streets naked.
He added to the shame by actually charging the state a million sesterces for each ‘performance’.
Of course, ‘fighting’ is a loose term. Not only were his gladiatorial opponents expected to submit, so that he could spare them, but sometimes they deliberately took wounds to wear as a badge of honor. To bear a scar given to you by the Emperor was a mark of great fortitude. He was known for clubbing criminals to death, but they had to be hobbled and tied together first, and there is some evidence that he would deliberately wound some opponents first to ensure they couldn’t fight back, as he does to Roman General in the film, but mostly he was known for fucking up ostriches by the hundred. He killed lions and elephants and giraffes, all to the disgust of everyone watching.
Imagine King Charles, fresh on the throne, tears still drying on his cheeks as his mourned his mother, leaping into the middle of the arena at the Trooping of the Colour, before the assembled dignitaries of state, invited guests of friendly nations and throngs of beaming tourists, to beat a crate full of wimpering puppies to death with his bare hands.
So it’s not outside the bounds of reality to think that Bad Boy would fight someone in the arena. But what really stretches the imagination is that he would challenge a man he knew to be a trained killer to a fight to the death and that he would, in effect, bet the whole fucking empire on the outcome.
Imagine Bill Clinton, mad at Mike Tyson, agreeing to 12 rounds of heavyweight boxing and the winner would become President of the United Fucking States of America.
And then Bill loses.
And Mike Fucking Tyson becomes President.
And nobody. Not one politician. Not one member of the Secret Service. Nobody. Thinks ‘now hang on a second….’ and tries to stop this happening.
Forget the Constitution. Forget everything about the rule of law, or judicial process, or tradition, or even just how society expects it’s country to operate.
Just let Mike Tyson beat the fuck out of Bill Clinton, shrug and say ‘Welcome President Mike. Here are the nuclear codes.”
If only for the fact that they knew that, in the aftermath of the death of one Emperor, an awful lot of people would have ended up strangled and in the Tiber, the Senate, who probably suspected that ‘an awful lot of people’ included them, would have done something to stop this happening.
Changes in Emperor, especially surprise ones, bring absolute chaos. The immediate aftermath of Roman General stabbing to death Bad Boy would have been riotous as suddenly thousands of people realize that the alleyways of Rome are not going to be the place where one would wish to be caught out in the open for the next two weeks, and they ran, screaming, scrambling over each other in abject terror, into the streets to get away.
The actual Bad Boy didn’t die in the arena, of course. When his mistress, Marcia, discovered a list of people that Commodus had intended to execute, she plotted with others to kill him.
On the last day of the year, 31st December, 192, she slipped poison into his food. He immediately vomited it up and, feeling faint, took to his bath where his wrestling partner, a freedman called Narcissus, strangled him to death.
The Senate damned his memory, toppled his statues and buried him in the Mausoleum of Hadrian. An army officer, Pertinax, was appointed Emperor the next day, but he was gone by March.
And the Empire didn’t turn into a republic.
4. Stop being Grumpy
Ok, ok. I get it. It’s just a movie. Lighten up!
Aside from the troubling, and common, problem with the representation of people of color in ancient epics, I am, of course, being deliberately bitchy about Gladiator for comedic effect.
There are some ‘historical’ movies in which the lack of historical accuracy only really annoys historians like me and there are some in which the distortion of history is actually unpleasant and troubling.
There are scenes in movies like The Patriot which are lifted directly from known Nazi atrocities and to life them out of context and drop them into another for, essentially, entertainment is disrespectful to the people who died at Nazi hands and the memories of people still alive today affected by those horrors.
Gladiator is not in that category. It’s just bonkers. But the odd thing about it is that it has chosen ancient Rome as the canvas on which to paint it’s picture and, in making shit up, it not only runs the risk of making people believe that the events were real, but ignores the fact that, well… it’s fucking Rome!
If you’d ever wanted to make a movie in a time period and an environment in which the spectacular happened and staggering visuals were commonplace, then ancient Rome is that place. You don’t need to make incredible shit up in a place where incredible shit happened all the time.
If you think the things you saw in Gladiator were amazing, bear in mind that once upon a time in the actual Rome, the Emperor Nero, angry at a noble of equestrian rank, made the man ride an elephant into the arena. And the elephant had to walk across a tightrope.