8 ms·

Hollywood's vision of ancient Rome is all wrong, according to Mary Beard

• bell-cot 1y ago
  Hollywood is in the entertainment biz, not education. Is there any subject that they don't lie about? (Not saying they're malicious, usually. Just that looks-cool pretend will almost always rake in more revenue than reality. Without the hassles or expense of researching what the truth actually is, or changing their script/casting/costumes/whatever to bear a passable resemblance to it.)
• JohnFen 1y ago
  Hollywood produces fiction. Nothing presented in movies can be taken as representative of facts or reality. Even (or especially) if the movie is historical or "based on a true story".
  • marginalia_nu 1y ago
    At the same time, narratives (fictional or not) are how we understand the world, its history, its politics, its art, and it's even how we understand our own personal history, and how we reason about events around us, and what might transpire in the future. It's not really possible to remove ourselves from this fact of being human. We can of course create a narrative about removing ourselves from narratives and experiencing the world directly, but that's not it.
    • cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
    • gwbas1c 1y ago
      I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie. How could I expect that when I went into the theater to be entertained for 1-2 hours? I think if someone wants to know more about ancient Rome, it's on them to spend the time learning about it outside of an entertainment venue.
      • bluGill 1y ago
        There are things that I expect the authors to take creative license to further the plot. However there are a lot of background things that don't further the plot and so there is no loss to get them right - I'm disappointed in the latter.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • triceratops 1y ago
        > How could I expect that when I went into the theater to be entertained for 1-2 hours? Well were you?
        • gwbas1c 1y ago
          Well, that was over 20 years ago. I thought the movie was okay, I didn't hate it or didn't love it. I'm surprised people are still talking about it today.
          • triceratops 1y ago
            Sorry I was referencing a line from the movie.
      • scott_w 1y ago
        > I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie. Plenty of people do, though. I recall a friend many years ago who genuinely believed “the people ruled Rome” because he heard it in Gladiator. He was an otherwise intelligent, educated person but there was nothing I could say that would dissuade him.
  • triceratops 1y ago
    To add on: this is how history has mostly always been transmitted to the masses. Plays and ballads and folk tales and other entertainment. History as serious study has normally been an elitist (I mean that descriptively, not pejoratively) pursuit.
    • SoftTalker 1y ago
      And even then, everyone else is pretty much just stuck with wondering who to believe. Nobody has time to do their own research to that depth, and nobody is around to give any first-hand accounts. Everything we know about the past is a story told from a partiular point of view, supported by cherry-picked artifacts, with varying agendas behind it.
      • bluGill 1y ago
        Things are not quite that bad - one of the major reasons we studied history over the centuries is we are looking for a way to ensure we will win the next war before the fighting starts. Thus there are a large group of military minded people (both generals and kings) who have incentive to find real truths not the nice folk fiction. Mostly things are bad, but if you look there are people who did care about the truth - though they only cared about their little niche - everything else they could say whatever was entertaining.
  • potato3732842 1y ago
    Sometimes it produces fiction with really good historical accuracy.
• mapleoin 1y ago
  original link: https://www.openculture.com/2025/11/why-your-vision-of-ancient-rome-is-all-wrong-according-to-historian-mary-beard.html https://www.openculture.com/2025/11/why-your-vision-of-ancie...
  • asymmetric 1y ago
    This is the actual original link: https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/myth-truth-ancient-rome/ https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/myth-truth-ancien...
• uberdru 1y ago
  But I think the HBO series Rome captured exactly this, or at least as much as it could in brief span. The life and struggles of freemen and slaves, not just the emperor. One of the greatest TV series ever, and cut off in its prime after only 2 seasons. Full set of Rome built on Cinecittà studios!
  • mjklin 1y ago
    Indeed. I wish I had been able to see this when I was taking high school Latin in the 90s, at least the school-friendly version (if it exists)
  • languagehacker 1y ago
    Possibly the best thing John Milius has done -- I said what I said!
  • the_biot 1y ago
    They had an outline of the story for several more seasons, and the showrunner has described how it would have gone. I am very, very grateful they decided to stop when they did -- they were about to ruin the show.
    • phantasmish 1y ago
      Unless they moved some things forward because they knew it was ending ending, I agree. As much as part of me wants to see where some of that goes, I know it wouldn’t have been good. Not like the rest of it was. Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.
    • uberdru 1y ago
      You really didn't want to see Titus Pullo fighting the Picts??
    • HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
      The first season was awesome, but IMO second season was already pretty bad.
• ilamont 1y ago
  It's an 80-minute interview. Really wish they would include a full transcript.
  • asymmetric 1y ago
    It’s available here https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/myth-truth-ancient-rome/ https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/myth-truth-ancien...
• anthk 1y ago
  Ah, yes. Ancient Grome, Spéxico, Scotireland... tropes and stereotypes threw together without actually understanding at all the multiple sides of either a culture of a hugely diverse country.
• vessenes 1y ago
  She talks for a while about how the Circus Maximus was really where the fun was (250k spectators, chariot races, betting, mixed seating). That sounds super fun. However, she also pitches that the Coliseum was like going to the opera - formal seating rules, formal dress, segregated seating. On the one hand, okay - it was fancier. However, I do not believe that any public air ceremony with fighting, dying, and live animals in it will be sedate. I’ve been to open air events in many continents, and people just aren’t naturally all quiet like when life and death things are happening. I just cannot imagine this behavior outside of a religious ceremony. Even at the opera or live theater, both of which darken lights, light a stage, architect for acoustic carry, there is often shushing, resettling, multiple cues for the audience to sort of ‘settle down’ and pay attention. The idea that 50k people are going to watch some captured Christians face down a lion and make no noise while they were their Tuxedo equivalents seems to me to be in its own way a weird and just off Anglicism. I guess I might be straw manning her pitch a little, but I think she just over pitches this idea — I truly think a society that did that would be very, very unusual, to the point of being extremely creepy.
  • anthk 1y ago
    Reading up Reissanance everyday-drama novellas from Spain/Italy in the 1600s/1700s but being placed into the Roman Empire would actually yield a similar society and behaviour than anything made from Hollywood. Romance and picaresque dramas weren't that dissimilar to love epics from the Classical times. And ofc treasonry, backstabbings, and the like would be the same today, 300 years ago and millenia ago. The townsfolk shouting and laughing against a poor dude being burned down between logs wouldn't be that different to similar peasants reacting in the same way to slaves fighting at the Circus.
    • Artistry121 1y ago
      Also most people in the 16th century in Russia, Europe and even the Ottoman Empire would have considered themselves Roman of one variety or another.
  • zmgsabst 1y ago
    Opera, symphony, etc weren't the affairs we see today throughout their history: the quiet sterility is a modern behavior — and my understanding that it used to be quite a bit more like, eg, movie premiere crowds that made noise in response to the show. I think the emphasis is on the class structure, formality, etc. rather than saying the Coliseum followed modern theatre etiquette. And the according comparison about status of attendees, etc.
• av3csr 1y ago
  I've been enjoying her "Instant Classics" podcast
• analog8374 1y ago
  The association between story and reality is completely arbitrary. (Science? Science is a craft for creating stories closely coupled to reality. It's a special case and not as popular as you might think.) To get popular a story needs to be simple, satisfying, logically consistent with the other stories... I think that covers it. Reality? LOL. We are bronze-age mud-worshippers.
• IAmBroom 1y ago
  Next they're going to tell me Bewitched didn't accurately portray modern-day witches...
• languagehacker 1y ago
  Mary Beard's SPQR is an amazing book about Rome and I recommend it to any fellow history nerds. If it wasn't for that book, I wouldn't have gotten the "Cataline conspiracy" joke in Mountainhead.
  • prewett 1y ago
    I was pretty unimpressed with _SQPR_. It's a nice survey, but she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts, the domes that people could figure out how to replicate until the 1600s, etc. This was the book where I realized that I am fed up with the modern hermeneutic of skepticism, or put another way, the modern historian's smug sense of superiority. They weren't stupid, and they wrote what they did for a reason (which might not be the reason you wished they had), and in any case they are all the evidence there is.
    • aprilthird2021 1y ago
      > she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts Did she,in the book, give a reason why the list can't possibly be right?
      • onraglanroad 1y ago
        Actually you can just Google that phrase and find out. These lists were compiled later and... well, you can look it up for yourself.
        • aprilthird2021 1y ago
          But I want to know what she might have said in the book, because it was probably close to the paraphrasing. That quote isn't from the book, it's a paraphrasing so looking it up doesn't answer my question, which is why I asked the person who read the book...
• taeric 1y ago
  I mean, you could probably level a very similar critique on how we view pretty much any society? Maybe I'm projecting, but it seems natural to think people assume looking at a society is a blend of looking at a picture and a mirror. You are trying to understand the movements on ways that you can relate to.
• gadders 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • pirate787 1y ago
    I agree but the argument is better framed as Mary Beard is a modern scholar with a rigid intersectional world view that is highly moralistic and highly judgmental from the perspective of modern norms around violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
    • paganel 1y ago
      > violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy. Which is a very anachronistic way of looking at things and very unscholarly, too bad, I really wanted to get into her books. I guess the Protestant moralism and virtue-signalling got to her (there are exceptions to this, especially in the German world, but it is my impression that the Anglos never really fully adopted the Romans and the Roman worldview, and I'm including Gibbon in here).
    • lisdexan 1y ago
      I'm not acquainted with her work, but after reading the transcript your comment seems... highly moralistic and highly judgmental? The whole interview reads as very sober, she mentions elements that are at odds with the pop culture understanding. She very explicitly takes head on this type of criticisms. >I think the question of how you judge these people is very tricky. People often write in to me and say, "I don't like the way that you do sometimes make judgments about X as a mass murderer, when they're 2000 years in the past. Surely, it's often said, "You should be judging them on their own terms, not on your terms." > I've got two responses to that. One is, quite often, these people were hostilely judged in antiquity itself, but we rather brush that under the carpet. Julius Caesar, for example, it's reckoned now that he may well have killed about a million Gauls in his campaign against Gaul, and there were people in Rome who said he was committing crimes against humanity. This is not a new invention that Caesar was a war criminal, there were people in Rome who said that. So I think we have to be very careful always to listen out for the discordant voices in antiquity itself. But I think perhaps more important is that the job of the historian, and this kind of explains I think why we sometimes find there's a flip flop here between one sort of judgment of Alexander the Great and another, you know, favorable or not favorable, same with Caesar, whatever, is that the job of the historian I think is to have stereoscopic vision. I think it is important to understand these characters in their own context, and in their own terms, and how people, by the standards of their time, yes, I think you should do that. But I think that the modern historian can't just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door. I do at a certain point have to say I find the conquests of Alexander the Great, very, very uncomfortable, and I think what I particularly dislike in terms of our modern appropriation of them is the way we somehow seem to go along with approving of what they did. I might not want to disapprove of it, I might want to say, in part, that by the standards of their own time was okay, but I do have to say it's not the standards of ours, and we have to realize that there are moral issues and questions about what happened in antiquity that we shouldn't be afraid of bringing to the surface. I'm very happy to do that. I mean, I think it's quite interesting, I've chosen a group of men for my most influential Rome, I think I had no choice but to do that. I can also say, but I think there is something about the misogyny of the Roman Empire that I deplore. And you have to be able to hold those two views at the same time, I think. That's not sneering, it's just not falling in to the trap that whitewashes the brutality of the past. Should future historians only consider our proclaimed ideals? Our notions of virtue? Will the War on Terror be seen just as a "cool" period, morally-neutral?
• abetusk 1y ago
  I think this is getting traction because of the new Odyssey movie coming out. I find Mary-Beard satisfying to watch. I'm having trouble finding it but she was on a panel and asked about the fall of Rome and her response was something to the effect of "Asking why Rome fell is the wrong question. A better question is why was it so successful in the first place." Her reasons were, if I remember correctly, though Romans were brutal, for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire. From what I gather, Mary-Beard's reasons for why Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people and succumbing to corruption. I remember her saying that Rome was on the knife's edge of collapse many times and that it was more about their successes that pulled them through than about avoiding failure. Just as an aside, I've heard that the concept of cyclops might have been from finding old mammoth skulls. The hole in the middle is for the nose cavity could be mistaken for an eye socket. Many pictures show cyclops as having tusks.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
    > for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire. Sounds quite a lot like Ghengis Khan, who oversaw the largest empire in history until the British one.
    • alecco 1y ago
      I keep reading this online and I find it to be nonsense. Over a thousand years earlier the Romans developed all the conquered lands. They built massive infrastructure projects: roads, ports, aqueducts, buildings. And brought sanitation and education. Ghengis Khan only brought peace and trade networks, something Rome also brought with them. Next up, how Carthaginians were actually the good guys and child sacrifice was not that bad.
• WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
  Ah, coming from the good old british revisionist I got something too, something that nobody wants to depict: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia/miscellanea/geography.html https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia...
  • nonameiguess 1y ago
    Possibly you know this, but there actually was a show about the Roman invasion of Britannia that was on only a couple years ago: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5932548/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5932548/. Not vouching for the quality or anything. I only watched the first couple episodes and they were pretty ridiculous, also explicitly magical, not seeming to be aiming for realism.
• Koshkin 1y ago
  Hollywood "vision" of everything is "wrong." This is because all they want is a story, one that is relatable, to the largest degree possible, to their audience, with all the stereotypes said audience has acquired over generations. Basically, it is nothing but Star Trek, over and over again. (Wanted to add, "... and that's OK" - but I am not sure.)
• helpfulmandrill 1y ago
  Well that's "think about the Roman Empire" ticked off my daily todo list.
• niemandhier 1y ago
  Not only Hollywood has it wrong: A good part of our cultural vision of Rome and Greece was influence by wishfully thinking of renaissance and enlightenment intellectuals that sought legitimacy for their ideas. The rediscovery of Cicero’s letters had huge influence on statecraft in renaissance Italy. It’s telling that in more modern times we project ourselves on Rome in a different way.