Many factors differentiate these two films, and one of the biggest is their authenticity to the history and culture of ancient Rome. But what does authenticity, and more specifically historical authenticity, mean? Merriam-Webster defines authenticity as something “being actually and exactly what is claimed and implies a thing being trustworthy.”[2] Historical authenticity, by extension, implies that while a film adheres to the historical rules of any particular time period, it also does not require the film to be completely accurate in everything it does to tell a story. While historical authenticity does not require absolute historical accuracy, in fact, no film, or any work of art for that matter, could ever be totally historically accurate—not from any fault of the directors or their consultants, but simply because with any historical period we could never be 100 percent certain of every aspect. This is especially true of ancient Rome, with many holes still left in the archeological record, despite hundreds of years of study and archeological excavations.

But with historical authenticity and historical accuracy, research is necessary. Federico Fellini heavily researched ancient Rome and, of course, consulted Petronius’ Satyricon, the literary work this movie draws from, before beginning production. Sadly, the Satyricon survives only in fragments, so to flesh out the story, Fellini chose to incorporate other contemporary literary works into his movie.[3] He strove to mold his own artistic vision for the movie into the world of ancient Rome, and used the scholarly resources available to him in 1969 in Italy to do it. Through this work, he challenged the vision of ancient Rome that had been established by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and the film studios that had worked with his government.

Ridley Scott, on the other hand, does not seem to have done any research for Gladiator II, beyond finding out who the emperors were after Commodus, and possibly a list of Roman names. The very first textual blurb of this movie had major inaccuracies in it. For one thing, the emperors Caracalla and Geta were not twins and in all probability were of mixed ethnic heritage, as their their father Septimus Severus was from the African city of Leptis Magnus and their mother, Julia Domna, was from what is today Syria.[4] Once the movie began, its historical accuracy went downhill from there. Ridley Scott hit the rock bottom of historical authenticity with the sharks in the Colosseum naumachia[5], yet somehow kept digging as the movie progressed. Through a comparison with Fellini Satyricon, a movie that fit the director’s artistic vision into the historic world of Rome, we can see that Scott instead made ancient Rome fit his idea of Rome, no matter how inaccurate, or ludicrous, his vision was.

This comparison, however, isn’t meant to say one movie is better than the other. The cinematography in Gladiator II is excellent and many of the actors in this movie do an amazing job, particularly Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington. The movie performed well at the box office, and proved its overall popularity with general audiences as well. Fellini Satyricon, on the other hand, is a bit more of an acquired taste. If a viewer did not know the context surrounding the movie’s source material, they would consider it a meandering story with no plot that moves through a rather alien landscape. Fellini deliberately wanted to make this movie feel alien to an audience in order to demonstrate how far removed the modern world is from ancient Rome, how it truly is an “alien world” for a modern person. Fellini’s audience of Italians in 1969 who were still in a “post-Fascist” cinematic landscape understood Fellini’s vision and seemingly loved it.[6] Today’s audiences who do not have the necessary context surrounding this movie however, not so much.

What does this comparison tell us about ancient Rome in movies, particularly how American movies and television prefer to use this setting in their stories? More than any other historical time period, American film creators seem to heavily equate ancient Rome with bloody spectacle, and sometimes even sexual spectacle. HBO’s Rome and Starz’s Spartacus television series may have heavily influenced this connection, but Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and Gladiator II certainly didn’t help. Federico Fellini’s depiction of ancient Rome also used sex and violence in its storytelling; however, he used it more to make an audience uncomfortable, than to entice them. While bloody spectacle is not inherently a negative for any artistic media, if it is used too much in any historical adaptations it can skew an audience’s perspective away from the truth.

That is why such inauthentic adaptations can be so dangerous, for lack of a better term—they essentially tell the audience falsehoods about a civilization that actually existed thousands of years ago, and had real people living in it. Ancient Rome was not any more or less violent and sexual than really any other time in history, even our own. I do not have any solutions for this predicament, outside of film creators taking the initiative to create an authentic depiction of ancient Rome. Until that happens, it is important to acknowledge how these artistic creators are okay with depicting ancient Rome not how it really was, but what they want it to be. Many audiences are first introduced to any particular historic period through a film medium—I know I was. It is impossible to truly separate a historic time period from its visual representations in film, but hopefully one day these artists feel compelled to make their art as authentic as possible.