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‘Obscene’: Anger after cost of King Charles’s coronation revealed

 

‘Obscene’: Anger after cost of King Charles’s coronation revealed

 

Official figures put price of event at £72m but anti-monarchy group Republic says real cost is likely much more

 

Donna Ferguson

Thu 21 Nov 2024 21.57 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/21/obscene-anger-after-cost-of-king-charless-coronation-revealed

 

The coronation of King Charles in May 2023 cost taxpayers at least £72m, official figures have revealed.

 

The cost of policing the ceremony was £21.7m, with a further £50.3m in costs racked up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

 

About 20 million people in Britain watched Charles crowned at Westminster Abbey on TV, substantially fewer than the 29 million Britons who had watched the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022.

 

The coronation ceremony was attended by dignitaries from around the world, and a star-studded concert took place at Windsor Castle the following night.

 

The annual report and accounts of DCMS, the lead department in Rishi Sunak’s government that worked with the royal household on the coronation, stated that the department “successfully delivered on the central weekend of His Majesty King Charles III’s coronation, enjoyed by many millions both in the UK and across the globe”.

 

It described the coronation as a “once-in-a-generation moment” that enabled the “entire country to come together in celebration”, as well as offering “a unique opportunity to celebrate and strengthen our national identity and showcase the UK to the world”.

 

Republic, which campaigns to replace the monarchy with an elected head of state and more democratic political system, described the coronation as an “obscene” waste of taxpayers’ money.

 

“I would be very surprised if £72m was the whole cost,” the Republic CEO, Graham Smith, told the Guardian.

 

As well as the Home Office policing and DCMS costs included in the figures, he said the Ministry of Defence, Transport for London, fire brigades and local councils also incurred costs related to the coronation, with other estimates putting the totalspend at between £100m and £250m.

 

“But even that kind of money – £72m – is incredible,” Smith added. “It’s a huge amount of money to spend on one person’s parade when there was no obligation whatsoever in the constitution or in law to have a coronation, and when we were facing cuts to essential services.

 

“It was a parade that Charles insisted on at huge expense to the taxpayer, and this is on top of the huge inheritance tax bill he didn’t [have to] pay, on top of the £500m-a-year cost of the monarchy.”

 

Under a clause agreed in 1993 by the then prime minister, John Major, any inheritance passed “sovereign to sovereign” avoids the 40% levy applied to assets valued at more than £325,000.

 

Smith added: “It was an extravagance we simply didn’t have to have. It was completely unnecessary and a waste of money in the middle of a cost of living crisis in a country that is facing huge amounts of child poverty.

 

“When kids are unable to afford lunches at school, to spend over £70m on this parade is obscene.”

Lord Byron museum to open in Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna

 

Lord Byron museum to open in Italian building where poet had intense affair

 

Visitors will be able to explore Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna, where Byron romanced its aristocrat owner’s wife

 

Angela Giuffrida in Rome

Mon 25 Nov 2024 06.06 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/25/lord-byron-museum-open-italian-building-poet-intense-affair

 

A museum dedicated to the flamboyant British poet and satirist Lord Byron is due to open in the northern Italian city of Ravenna, housed in the same building where he pursued an intense affair with the wife of an aristocrat and completed some of his most famous works.

 

Byron unabashedly moved in 1819 into Palazzo Guiccioli, owned by the husband of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, whom he met at a party in Venice.

 

The sprawling residence in the heart of the city has been restored by the Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna Foundation and from 29 November visitors will be able to wander through the rooms where the romance took place and where he knuckled down to complete masterpieces including Don Juan, Sardanapalus, The Prophecy of Dante and the final canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

 

One of the rooms contains tokens of love kept by the countess, including letters, jewellery, locks of the poet’s curly hair and shards of his sunburned skin.

 

The museum will partly be dedicated to the Risorgimento, the 19th-century Italian movement for unification, owing to Byron’s connections to figures involved with the Carbonari, an informal network of secret revolutionary societies that played a role in the unification process.

 

“The idea is to link three aspects of who Lord Byron was – the poet, the lover, and the person oriented towards freedom,” said Fabio Ricci, a press spokesperson for the museum.

 

Byron died in 1824 in what is now Greece. He had several affairs during his life but the countess was his final great love.

 

“The love for Teresa led Byron to transform himself and, without becoming a saint, he changed his life,” said Antonio Patuelli, the president of the foundation.

 

Visitors to the museum, which the foundation said was the only one in the world specifically dedicated to Byron, will also be able to relive the poet’s experiences in Italy and learn what it was about the country that inspired him, thanks to interactive virtual reality technology.

 

Byron fled England for mainland Europe in 1816, leaving behind a trail of scandalous affairs and debt, never to return. He travelled to Belgium and Switzerland, as well as Venice and Rome, before returning to Venice in 1819, where he met the countess. It was love at first sight, and the pair had contemplated eloping before settling in her marital home. He then followed her to Pisa in 1821.

 

During his time in Ravenna, Byron received visits from his friends, Percy Bysshe Shelley, also considered one of the major English Romantic poets, and the Irish writer and poet Thomas Moore.

 

Byron was described by the writer Caroline Lamb, with whom he also had an affair, as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”. He was known by people in Ravenna as “the crazy Englishman”.

 

In 1823, he left Italy for Greece, where he joined insurgents fighting the war of independence against the Ottoman empire. He died of a fever in Missolonghi in April 1824, aged 36, and is buried at his family vault in Nottinghamshire.

 

Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli

 

Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli (1800–1873) was an Italian noblewoman and the married lover[2] of Lord Byron while he was living in Ravenna and writing the first five cantos of Don Juan.[3] She wrote the biographical account Lord Byron's Life in Italy.

 

On 19 January 1818, Teresa married an elderly diplomat, Count Alessandro Guiccioli, who was 50 years her senior. It was three days later, on 22 January, that she met Lord Byron at the home of Countess Albrizzi. Count Guiccioli was a nobleman who had ingratiated himself with Napoleon during his campaign in Italy in 1796, and during the French rule of Italy during the Napoleonic era, Count Guiccioli held a series of high offices, making him one of the most powerful men in Italy. There is no evidence that Teresa, his third wife, ever felt any affection for him.

 

Byron's relationship with Teresa was a dangerous one as Count Guiccioli was still a powerful man who was widely believed to have been behind the murder in 1816 of another nobleman who was suing him for having seized his lands under Napoleon. In a letter to her sent on 22 April 1819 written in Italian, Byron wrote "you sometimes tell me I have been your first real love-and I assure that you shall be my last Passion". In a letter, Byron wrote that she mailed him some of her pubic hair, which was a traditional Italian gesture that indicated her willingness to begin an affair. The Countess Guiccioli lived with Byron as his common-law wife first in Ravenna and then in Genoa until 1823.

 

Her father, Count Ruggiero Gamba was an Italian nationalist who wanted to unify all of the Italian states into one, a project that would also mean the Austrian Empire, which ruled much of what is now northern Italy would also lose much territory. Under Teresa's influence, Byron joined a secret pseudo-Masonic society dedicated to Italian unity and driving out the Austrians that had already been joined by her father and brother. For plotting against the Austrian Empire, Count Gamba was exiled to the countryside of the Romagna region. In 1823, the Austrian authorities allowed Count Gamba to leave his exile in the Romagna with the condition that the Countess Guiccioli had to end her relationship with Byron and return to her husband. The news that the Countess Guiccioli was leaving him helped precipitate Byron's decision to go fight on the Greek side in the Greek war of independence. When Byron boarded the Hercules, the ship that was to take him from Genoa to Greece, it caused "passionate grief" from Guiccioli who broke down in tears as she said farewell to her lover. Going along with Byron to Greece was her brother, Pietro Gamba, who was to serve as Byron's bumbling right-hand man.

 

Later in life, she married the Marquis de Boissy who, even after their marriage, boasted of her liaison with Byron, introducing her as "Madame la Marquise de Boissy, autrefois la Maitresse de Milord Byron" (the Marquise de Boissy, formerly the mistress of Lord Byron).

 

Alexandre Dumas included her as a minor character in his novel The Count of Monte Cristo using the disguised name "Countess G-".Lord Byron also used this shortened name in his journals.[15] At a party in Paris hosted by Napoleon III in the 1860s, the wife of the American ambassador introduced a wealthy American tourist, Mrs. Mary R. Darby, to the now elderly Contessa Guiccioli, saying she was one of the last people alive who knew Byron personally. Mrs. Darby introduced herself by saying that she had heard Byron was "king of poets", only for Guiccioli, who was still in love with him, to say that Byron was the "king of men". Mrs. Darby befriended Guiccioli who showed her two manuscripts that she had written in French, recalling her youth with Byron. Mrs. Darby, who quickly became Guiccioli's best friend, worked with her on turning the manuscripts into books, only one of which has survived. When the Contessa Guiccioli died in 1873 with no children, her papers were inherited by her grand-nephew, Count Carlo Gamba, who hid them away in his family's archives, believing that his grand-aunt's scandalous relationship with Byron would damage the reputation of the Gamba family. Not until 2005 were one of the books the Contessa Guiccioli wrote about her relationship with Byron published.

Madame de Pompadour’s £1m wall lights discovered in Yorkshire hotel

 

‘It’s been a lot of detective work’: Madame de Pompadour’s £1m wall lights discovered in Yorkshire hotel

 

Four gilt-bronze sconces that lit up home of Louis XV’s mistress are set to go on sale at Sotheby’s in December

 

Kim Willsher in Paris

Sun 24 Nov 2024 07.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/24/its-been-a-lot-of-detective-work-madame-de-pompadours-1m-wall-lights-discovered-in-yorkshire-hotel

 

For almost 140 years, four massive gilt-bronze wall lights have hung in the 18th-century drawing room at Swinton Castle in Yorkshire, now an opulent luxury hotel.

 

Guests will almost certainly have noticed the one metre-high rococo appliques with their entwined branches decorated with leaves, berries and cherubim, and passed them off as impressive reproductions of more valuable original works.

 

“They would have known they were good, but not how good,” said João Magalhães, a French and Italian furniture specialist. Now, auction house Sotheby’s believes it has uncovered missing treasure after tracing the lights’ history from the grand salon of French king Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour, through generations of European aristocracy.

 

Magalhães believes the appliques were created by master sculptor Jacques Caffieri. He linked them to two chandeliers made by the artisan who was attached to the French royal household in the 18th century, bearing the same decoration and acquired by de Pompadour.

 

Although the four wall lights at Swinton are not signed, they bear all the stylistic hallmarks of Caffieri’s work. After nine months scouring French sale receipts and inventory records, Magalhães says he has traced the sconces back to Madame de Pompadour’s homes, first at the Versailles Palace, and then at the Château de Crécy at Dreux, west of Paris, a beautiful estate gifted by the king.

 

“It has been a lot of detective work and a little supposition based on facts. We know they are very similar to the chandeliers and we know the chandeliers were moved back and forth with four wall lights. It is difficult to see how the lights we have are not the same lights in the inventories,” Magalhães told the Observer.

 

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the Marquise of Pompadour – known as Madame de Pompadour – was the official chief mistress of Louis XV as well as his aide and adviser. She was a major political figure in the royal court at Versailles and patron of the decorative arts and architecture, sponsoring many Enlightenment philosophers and writers, including Voltaire. She played a central role in making Paris the European capital of taste and culture, and established the Sèvres porcelain factory, celebrated across the continent.

 

Even after her sexual relationship with the king ended and he took younger mistresses, Louis XV remained devoted to her through the ill health of her later years until her death from tuberculosis aged 42 in 1764.

 

De Pompadour was an enthusiastic proponent of the extremely ornamental and dramatic rococo style, also known as late baroque, that emerged in France in the 1730s, and she filled the 15 residences she owned with such artefacts and furnishings.

 

At the Château de Crécy, she could escape the pressures of the royal court and host long visits from the king as well as intellectuals, writers and artists. Her Grand Salon d’Assemblée was more than 16m long and 8.5m wide, requiring furnishings that measured up to its impressive size.

 

“Madame de Pompadour’s grand salon at Crecy was dedicated to the arts, and we know she decorated the salon in rococo style. Unfortunately, very few pieces from this salon have survived,” Magalhães said.

 

In 1757, de Pompadour sold the Château de Crécy and its contents to the Duc de Penthièvre, the grandson of King Louis XIV known for his vast wealth, philanthropy and involvement in French naval affairs. De Penthiève’s properties and belongings were seized during the 1789 revolution. All trace of the wall lights was lost until they reappeared on the other side of the Channel in 1844 in the South Drawing Room of the 2nd Earl of Lonsdale’s home in London.

 

Lonsdale, a prolific buyer of French furniture and Sèvres porcelain, was a close friend of British king George IV. Around 1887, the lights were sold at auction for £1,280 and relocated to the 200-acre Swinton estate, north of Leeds, where they have remained, one pair placed either side of the drawing room fireplace.

 

The wall lights, estimated at up to £1m, will be sold at Sotheby’s annual Treasures auction in London on 4 December.

 

“Objects like this don’t come around every month. They are very beautiful, absolutely amazing; monumental in terms of their scale, quality and the boldness of design,” Magalhães said.

 

“They scream of a great patron of the arts, and Madame de Pompadour was certainly that.”

 

“We see some extraordinary things in this business, but every now and again there is something that just stops you in your tracks. Seeing these wall lights was one such moment.”

Pair of 1752 gilt-bronze andirons by Caffieri, in the Cleveland Museum of Art

Jacques Caffieri (25 August 1678, Paris – 25 November 1755, Paris) was a French sculptor, working for the most part in bronze.

 

Jacques Caffiéri was the fifth son of Philippe Caffieri (1634-1716), the founder of this family of artists. Jacques was received a maître fondeur-ciseleur by 1715, the date of his first known work, a design for a pall for the Corporation des Fondeurs-Ciseleurs, one of two Parisian guilds that oversaw works cast in metal, from full-scale sculptures to gilt-bronze furniture mounts, wall-lights and candlesticks. As fondeurs-ciseleurs, "casters and finishers", the renown of the Caffieri family has centred on Jacques, though later it is not easy to distinguish between Jacques' work and that of Jacques' son, the younger Philippe (1714–1777).

 

Caffieri was attached as fondeur-ciseleur to the Bâtiments du Roi in 1736. A large proportion of his brilliant achievement as a designer and chaser in bronze and other metals was executed for the crown at Versailles, Fontainebleau, Marly, Compiègne, Choisy and the Château de La Muette, and the crown, ever in his debt, still owed him money at his death. Philippe and his son Jacques undoubtedly worked together in the Appartement du Dauphin at Versailles, and although much of their contribution has disappeared, the gilt-bronze decorations of the marble chimney-piece still remain. They belong to the best of full-blown Rococo style; vigorous and graceful in design, they are executed with splendid skill.

 

After the elder Philippe's death in 1716, Jacques continued to work for the crown, but had many private clients. From the Caffieri workshop in rue des Canettes came an amazing amount of work, chiefly in the shape of those gilt-bronze furniture mounts which adorned furniture by the best ébénistes of Paris. Little of his achievement was ordinary; an astonishingly large proportion of it is famous. In the Wallace Collection, London,[1] is the royal commode delivered by Antoine-Robert Gaudreau, ébéniste du Roi, in 1739 for Louis XV's bedchamber at Versailles: it is richly mounted with an integrated series of corner mounts, chutes and sabots, and the drawer-fronts and a single composition into which the handles are fully integrated. It must have been the result of close cooperation between Caffiéri and Gaudreau, who was responsible for the veneered carcase. In 1747 Caffiéri supplied gilt-bronze mounts for the marble chimneypiece in the Dauphin's bedroom at Versailles. Caffieri also produced gilt-bronze cases for clocks, both mantel clocks and the cartel clocks that combined clock and bracket in one unified design, to be mounted on a wall. A detailed inventory of the Caffieri workshop made in 1747 enables scholars to identify some unsigned clockcases from the workshop: a fully Rococo cartel clock with a movement by Julien Le Roy is at the Getty Museum: it is inscribed fait par Caffiery in a cartouche below the dial.

 

In 1740, Caffieri's wife purchased a royal privilege, which allowed the Caffieri workshop to gild bronze as well as cast it within the same workshop; ordinarily the processes were divided between two Parisian corporations, jealous of their jurisdictions, the fondeurs-ciseleurs and the ciseleurs-doreurs.

 

His signature incised in gilt-bronze kept his name alive in the nineteenth century and gained him an entry in Encyclopædia Britannica 1911, though the extreme Rococo style of which he was a consummate master laid his work open to disapproving commentary. Two monumental gilt-bronze chandeliers in the Wallace Collection, London, bear his signature; one of them was a wedding present from Louis XV to Louise-Elisabeth of France in 1739; the other is signed and dated 1751. The famous astronomical clock made by C.-S. Passement and Dauthiau for Louis XV, 1749–1753, is housed in a Rococo case signed by Caffieri. Another clock, with a movement by Balthasar Martinot in an extreme Rococo style gilt-bronze case, belongs to the Duke of Buccleuch, at Boughton House A pair of fire-dogs signed and dated 1752 is in the Cleveland Museum of Art Two large gilt-bronze mirror-frames by Caffieri, to a design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, were intended as a gift to the Sultan of Turkey; the price was an astonishing 24,982 livres.

 

He made a great cross and six candlesticks for the high altar of Notre-Dame de Paris, which disappeared in the French Revolution, but similar work for Bayeux Cathedral still exists. A wonderful enamelled toilet set which he executed for the Princess of Asturias has also disappeared.

 

In 1737 and 1735 respectively, Jacques Caffieri cast the busts of Jean Victor de Besenval de Brunstatt (1671–1736) and of his late father, Jean Victor Pierre Joseph Besenval (1638–1713). The busts, at least one of which was part of the collection of Pierre Victor, Baron de Besenval de Brunstatt, according to Louis Abel de Bonafous, Abbé de Fontenay (1737–1806), it was the bust that showed the baron's father, Jean Victor de Besenval de Brunstatt, and which the baron kept in his cabinet at the Hôtel de Besenval, were both shown at the exhibition L’Art Français sous Louis XIV et sous Louis XV, which was held in Paris in 1888.

Was Wallis Simpson Really a Sex-Crazed Spy?

New York Times bestselling author Paul French examines a controversial and revealing period in the early life of the legendary Wallis, Duchess of Windsor–her one year in China.

 

Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl “Win” Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China.

 

In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her “Lotus Year,” referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. Though faced with challenges, Wallis came to appreciate traditional Chinese aesthetics. China molded her in terms of her style and provided her with friendships that lasted a lifetime. But that “Lotus Year” would also later be used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment.

 

The British government’s supposed “China Dossier” of Wallis’s rumored amorous and immoral activities in the Far East was a damning concoction, portraying her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king. Instead, French, an award-winning China historian, reveals Wallis Warfield Spencer as a woman of tremendous courage who may have acted as a courier for the US government, undertaking dangerous undercover diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war.

Was Wallis Simpson Really a Sex-Crazed Spy?

 

As Paul French argues in a new biography, the future Duchess of Windsor’s year in China was less lurid — and more interesting — than her critics knew.

 

Thessaly La Force

By Thessaly La Force

Thessaly La Force is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New York Times Styles section.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/books/review/her-lotus-year-paul-french.html?searchResultPosition=3

 

HER LOTUS YEAR: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson, by Paul French

 

Much has been written about Wallis Simpson, the American socialite for whose love King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936. Her eccentric and expensive tastes often demanded attention — who can forget her army of pug pillows or the gold-plated bathtub at their French villa? — but she was also derided as quite ordinary. Cecil Beaton once described her hands as “utilitarian-looking.”

 

The duchess died in 1986, and one could be forgiven for thinking that enough time has passed — and enough royal drama ensued — that our fascination might have waned. But “Her Lotus Year,” by Paul French, refocuses attention on the year she spent living in China. She was 28 years old and married to her first husband, the American Navy officer Win Spencer.

 

Later, after she began her affair with the Prince of Wales, this period would become an endless source of lurid speculation. It was widely believed that British intelligence had compiled a “China Dossier” on Simpson, which alleged that she had had an abortion, posed for pornographic photographs, seduced husbands, conducted an affair with an Italian fascist, smoked opium, gambled and worked for Chinese gangsters.

 

In her 1956 memoir, Simpson wrote that “when I was being good I generally had a bad time and when I was being bad, the opposite was true” — but that still would have been one busy year.

 

One particularly outré rumor — that Simpson learned a trick from sex workers called the “Shanghai grip” — was happily repeated by enough lords and ladies that it has appeared in at least two biographies.

 

None of this is true, maintains French. He not only dismisses the existence of a China Dossier, but credits the rumor to a British intelligence officer named Harry Steptoe, who aimed to scuttle the relationship between Simpson and Edward VIII at a time when the king’s love for an American divorcée was seen as an existential threat to the monarchy. French’s book — beautifully told through meticulous historical research and examination of contemporary literature and film — gives the reader a vivid picture of what China must have been like for an American expat in the 1920s, and in fact tells a more interesting story.

 

In September 1924, Simpson traveled to Hong Kong to reunite with Spencer, an abusive alcoholic she had already threatened to divorce. Wallis had been raised as Southern gentility, but her father had died when she was an infant, leaving her and her mother impoverished. In her family’s eyes, divorce was disgraceful.

 

Spencer promised his wife he had reformed, but within weeks of her arrival, he was back on the sauce. Simpson eventually left him, traveling first to Shanghai (French suggests, convincingly, that Simpson may have served as a courier for American intelligence) and then on to Beijing, where she became reacquainted with an American friend, Kitty Rogers. Kitty and her wealthy husband, Herman, took Simpson into their home. Their sybaritic lifestyle appealed to Simpson; she would later refer to this time as her “Lotus Year,” a reference to both the “Odyssey” and a poem by Tennyson.

 

French, who lives in China and has written extensively on the country, understands how to describe the immense political and cultural change of the 1920s. He captures the romance of Beijing and the tedium of colonial social life, and the contours of Wallis’s quotidian days, in which she would “rise early to find her maid had laid out slippers and a kimono along with a porcelain cup of flower tea.” In the “brisk and invigorating chill of Peking winter mornings, Wallis, Kitty and Herman would ride their ponies along the top of the city wall nearby.”

 

He also clearly points to the Sinophobia and racism underpinning the ugly rumors, a colonial and exoticized idea of China as a place so morally bankrupt that a woman could be corrupted simply by breathing its air.

 

As Caroline Blackwood noted in her biography of Simpson, much of the interminable scrutiny arose because there was no “obvious clue as to why her husband adored her with such a passion.” What powers could a woman possess to make a man renounce his hereditary claim to the world’s largest empire? “No one has accused me of being an intellectual,” wrote Simpson herself.

 

French has an answer. It was in China that Simpson found her footing and her freedom — supporting herself financially for the first time with her skills at poker and honing her keen eye for Chinese curios and antiques. French suggests that Simpson became more worldly and more insouciant among this crowd of Chinese and expatriates, and her seasoned independence may be one of the reasons someone like Edward VIII, too comfortable among London society and burdened by the tedium of royal duties, may have had his head turned by her knowing mien and independent spirit. But do we ever really understand the grand and astonishing sacrifices people make for love?

 

HER LOTUS YEAR: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson | By Paul French | St. Martin’s | 310 pp. | $27

Gladiator II | Official Trailer | Paramount Pictures UK / When historians and directors clash: ‘Ridley Scott was Napoleonic – there was no doubt who was in charge’

When historians and directors clash: ‘Ridley Scott was Napoleonic – there was no doubt who was in charge’

 

Film and TV have a slippery relationship with the truth when it comes to historical epics. So spare a thought for the historical experts whose advice often goes unheeded

 

Simon Usborne

Sat 16 Nov 2024 11.55 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/nov/16/gladiator-bridgerton-history-consultants-napoleon-favourite-ridley-scott

 

If we set aside the more glaring historical inaccuracies in the trailers for the long-awaited Gladiator sequel – the guy riding a rhinoceros for example – there were early signs that its director Ridley Scott remained committed to one of the first film’s more subtle flaws.

 

They are there in the posters, if you know where to look, and they feature throughout the film itself, which hits cinemas this week with Paul Mescal in the leading role. We’re talking about the leather wrist guards.

 

“I’m afraid leather forearm bracers have nothing to do with ancient Rome,” says Alexander Mariotti, a historian and specialist in gladiatorial combat who worked as a researcher and script consultant on the new film. “They don’t appear in any imagery or sources … they just look good on film.”

 

And so, just as Russell Crowe wore some heavy duty wrist-strapping as Maximus Decimus Meridius in the 2000 blockbuster, so does Mescal in his turn as the first gladiator’s even beefier son, Lucius Verus (who, sure enough, is also forced into slavery and becomes a gladiator).

 

Mariotti, who is based in Rome and London, says the arm armour is closer to something that medieval archers might have worn. Yet it has appeared in almost every screen representation of fighty Romans since Ben Hur (the silent 1907 one). He thinks early costume departments may have taken inspiration from neoclassical depictions of Rome.

 

The ubiquity of the accessories reveals much about the way Hollywood flirts with verisimilitude and shapes popular historical understanding, even while consultants are in growing demand. Their role can vary, from early development advice up to script reviews and seats on set.

 

Film-makers say: Is this accurate? And you’ll say: Absolutely not. And then they’ll do it anyway

Alexander Mariotti

 

As well as dutifully pointing out anachronistic wristwear and incongruous rhinos, Mariotti advised Scott on the use of weapons and language. He hasn’t yet seen the film but was heartened to see in the trailer the line “Ubi tu ibi ego” (“Wherever you are I will be”), a Latin marriage vow that he suggested, and which is inscribed in his own wife’s wedding ring.

 

Consultants are called on even when inaccuracy is a feature rather than a bug. Amanda Vickery, a professor of early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London, was a Bridgerton fan before her colleague, Hannah Greig, asked her to take over consulting duties for the third series of the Netflix Regency hit, which has been described by its own makers as “definitely a fantasy”.

 

“The mantra Hannah had, which I agree with, is that producers want to make choices, not mistakes,” says Vickery, who binged the first series of the show with her daughters. “The job of the adviser is to give them that information, but it’s their job to make a hit show.”

 

Vickery became involved at the script stage, filling margins with notes as password-protected drafts arrived from production company Shondaland. In one script a character admired some cerulean blue silk. “And I was able to say, well, cerulean dye wasn’t invented by then, just change it to French navy or azure, and it was changed,” Vickery says. “Little details that might obtrude are very easy to correct because you’re not spoiling the flow.” Vickery also spent time on set, and once prompted the reshoot of a scene in which a male character left a young debutante during a dance without a formal farewell. The historian scoffs when I ask if such insight is well paid. “Are you mad?! I’m not a lawyer, none of this is lucrative,” she says.

 

Ridley Scott is rather Napoleonic himself. There’s no doubt when he comes into a room who’s in charge

Michel Broers

 

Consultants quickly learn to bite their tongues when more significant corrections or queries are left in the margins. Michael Broers, a professor of western European history at the University of Oxford, was about to retire when he was summoned to a meeting with Ridley Scott. The director had read Broers’ books about Napoleon, and wanted to consult him for his biopic, which came out last year with Joaquin Phoenix in the titular role.

 

“He’s rather Napoleonic himself,” Broers tells me of Scott, laughing. “There’s no doubt when he comes into a room who’s in charge, and pretty soon I became fully aware that we were making a movie, not a documentary.”

 

Scott had already filmed a now notorious scene in which Napoleon’s troops blow the tops of the Egyptian pyramids with cannon, in an explosive revision of Napoleon’s very real capture of Cairo. “When he explained that he had done this, I was aghast,” Broers says. “That didn’t happen, I told him, and nothing like it happened. He said: ‘Come on, just sit down and watch it.’”

 

When Broers watched the scene, he burst out laughing. “I said I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. ‘Well, then, it’s staying in, isn’t it?’ [Scott] said. I think if he’d simply invented the Battle of the Pyramids, which did happen, that would have been different.”

 

Broers likens the role of the historical consultant to that of a father confessor: “You’re there to tell him he’s sinned, and he wants to know that he’s sinned, but you know he’s not going to change his ways.” But the historian’s pragmatism wasn’t always shared when an increasingly busy online community of factcheckers scrutinised Napoleon.

 

Most prominently, Dan Snow posted a TikTok breakdown of Scott’s truth-stretching, including the pyramid attack. The director’s response in an interview last November: “Get a life.” But I gather the 86-year-old Scott was privately fuming. An insider on Gladiator II, which had just started filming when Napoleon was released, tells me that, in response, Scott banned historical consultants from the set. (Neither the director’s production company nor Paramount, the studio behind the film, comments on the claim when I put it to them.)

 

 

It’s not Scott’s first clash with historians. Kathleen Coleman, head of classics at Harvard, was so appalled by the first Gladiator movie that she asked for her consultant credit to be removed. She claimed that in one message from the production office she was asked to find evidence to show that female gladiators attached razor blades to their busts. “Scholars are, of course, notorious for being obsessed with detail … but detail is the repository of authenticity,” Coleman later wrote in an essay called The Pedant Goes to Hollywood.

 

Scott revels in disregarding such detail. “This is the first coffee bar in Roman history,” he reportedly boasted after the first film came out, when one pedant pointed out pavement cafes weren’t a thing in ancient Rome. (The new film goes further, featuring a noble reading a newspaper at a cafe, 1,200 years before the invention of the printing press.) But Broers shares Scott’s sentiment, and was amused by the historical inaccuracies in one viral nitpicker’s video (he prefers not to say whose). “It’s a movie! What do you want to sit down and watch here?” he says. The historian recalls moments in script meetings when it was Scott’s turn to be aghast. He’d turn and say to me, ‘What did happen?’ and nine times out of 10 I’d tell him and his jaw would drop,” he says. Truth is stranger than fiction and sometimes it was even too much for him.”

 

More quotidian truths can jar on screen; Mariotti says that the first Gladiator originally had a scene in which Russell Crowe’s character endorses an olive oil brand in the Colosseum. “And they said: ‘No one’s ever going to believe that, it’s stupid,’ and they cut it, but it was historically correct,” he says.

 

Actors often call on consultants to help flesh out their roles. “Alicia Vikander phoned me when she wanted to add her own prayer to the script,” says Peter Wagstaff, a classical musician and amateur historian who started SceneSpan, a consultancy for historical film and TV, when a friend in the industry said there was a shortage of advisers. Vikander was starring as Katherine Parr alongside Jude Law as Henry VIII in Firebrand, which charts the end of the king’s reign, and wanted to check that the prayer rang true (it did). On the same set, Erin Doherty, who plays Anne Askew, the doomed Protestant poet and preacher, wanted to learn more about her character’s religious convictions. “She wanted to get into the mindset of someone who believed so fervently in the Bible in English that she would die for it,” says Wagstaff, whose work has ranged from a Cadbury’s ad with a Victorian setting to the upcoming new series of Wolf Hall, in which he also has a singing role in a choral scene.

 

Mariotti, Vickery and Broers all say that they have come away from brushes with Hollywood feeling enriched rather than abused. Vickery took her experiences to a history master’s course she teaches, part of which considers how society engages with history itself. In Bridgerton, she sees no contradiction in a show that seeks accuracy in shades of blue while at the same time adapting Coldplay’s Yellow as a wedding march.

 

“That’s what’s interesting about what Shonda Rhimes has pulled off,” she says. “She’s finding a new audience for Regency drama while having enough there to hold the old audience for costume drama.”

 

Sometimes a creative licence can serve history, Vickery adds. She admires The Favourite, the 2018 satirical period comedy about the court of Queen Anne. “All the women are soberly dressed and the men are floridly dressed, which wouldn’t have been the case,” she says. “But the costumes are making a point about where power lies, with the men as decorative. The film approaches a historical truth by breaking the rules.”

 

Mariotti has absorbed time on elaborate sets into his lectures. “Suddenly, after spending years studying ruins, I was walking on the cobbled streets of the Via Sacra, looking at the Temple of Jupiter,” he says of his first consulting role, on the 2007 HBO series Rome. “I found that when I was giving lectures, I was able to do it more vividly because I’d seen these images.”

 

The real Colosseum might not have featured rhinos or wrist guards, but Mariotti sees parallels between Hollywood movies and the theatrical staging that was often central to shows in ancient Rome. “When you sat in the Colosseum and you watched trees pop out of the ground as they transformed the arena into a jungle, it wasn’t really what a jungle looked like,” he says. “But it didn’t matter, because it was entertainment.”

 

Gladiator II is in cinemas now.

Dan Snow reacts to 'weird' historical inaccuracies in Gladiator II

Historical accuracy of The Gladiator and the Image of Rome.

This is the first book to analyze Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator from historical, cultural, and cinematic perspectives.


The first systematic analysis of Ridley Scott’s film, Gladiator.
Examines the film’s presentation of Roman history and culture.
Considers its cinematic origins and traditions.
Draws out the film’s modern social and political overtones.
Includes relevant ancient sources in translation.

In Wikipedia:

Historical accuracy of 

 The Gladiator
In making the film Gladiator (2000), director Ridley Scott wanted to portray the Roman culture more accurately than in any previous film and to that end hired several historians as advisors. Nevertheless, some deviations from historical fact were made to increase interest, some to maintain narrative continuity, and some were for practical or safety reasons. The public perception of what ancient Rome was like, due to previous Hollywood movies, made some historical facts, according to Scott, "too unbelievable" to include.


At least one historical advisor resigned due to the changes he made and another advisor Kathleen Coleman asked not to be mentioned in the credits. Historians called the movie both the worst and best of all films: the worst for the historical inaccuracies in a film Scott promoted as historically accurate, and the best for the film's accurate depiction of the people and violence of the late 2nd century AD. Historian Allen Ward of the University of Connecticut noted that historical accuracy would not have made Gladiator less interesting or exciting and stated: "creative artists need to be granted some poetic license, but that should not be a permit for the wholesale disregard of facts in historical fiction."

Political

In the film it is stated that Rome was founded as a Republic. Rome was founded as an elective Monarchy, in the year 753 BC. It became a Republic around the year 509 BC.

In the film it is stated that the Roman Senate was "chosen from among the people to speak for the people." In reality, the Senate was never an elected body, unlike the four People's Assemblies. Its members were appointed by a high magistrate and later by the emperor, and, during the Republic, only after having served the "cursus honorum," a sequence of offices. During the early and mid-Republic, these offices were restricted to the patricians, members of old senatorial families.

Architectural

In the scene with the gladiator caravan coming into Rome, a wall that surrounds the entire city can be seen, which resembles the Aurelian Wall. The Aurelian Wall was not made until 275 A.D.

In the film it is stated that the Colosseum holds 50,000 people. It is now believed to have seated 73,000.

In the movie, the Colosseum is referred to by that name; in truth during the Roman Empire it was known as the Flavian Amphitheatre (Latin: Amphitheatrum Flavium). The name Colosseum, derived from the Latin word colosseus meaning colossal in reference to the broken remains of a giant statue of the Emperor Nero found there, came into common use around the 10th century. After visiting the Colosseum, Ridley Scott thought it was too small so the one in the film is larger than the real Colosseum.

In the film most Roman architecture is portrayed as being white. Historical excavations and archaeologists often say that this is a misconception, as most buildings and structures were somewhat coloured, and that we only believe this because what we find from Roman time (and even Greek) often look white. This is only because the original colour, through the ages, has gradually disappeared and left structures and buildings white. However, some of the older buildings might have already had the time to go through this process in the period of the film.

Linguistic

In the opening battle scene, the leader of the Germanic forces opposing the Roman legionnaires yells out in modern German, calling the Romans 'cursed dogs'. At this time, the German language did not exist, the first recorded use of Old High German (the most archaic form) occurring among the Alemannic tribes of south west Germany during the 6th century, and the Germanic dialects spoken would have been more akin to modern Dutch than German due to the second Germanic consonant shift occurring in the latter.

When Commodus' soldiers arrive at Maximus' home in Spain to kill his family, his son sees their approach and shouts, "Soldati!" This is modern Italian. The Latin word for soldiers is milites.

The Numidians were most likely of Berber origin, instead of Sub-saharan origin.

Maximus affirms to be from Trujillo, which is anachronistic since the proper name of the village in Roman times was Turgalium.

Military

The campaign against Germania wasn't at its end, but instead it was part of a larger campaign to conquer and Romanize the whole region and was interrupted by Marcus Aurelius' death and Commodus' lack of will to proceed with it.

Maximus is shown with S.P.Q.R. tattooed on his shoulder which he removes. The identification tattoos Roman soldiers were required to wear by law were actually on their hands in order to make it difficult to hide if they deserted. By law, gladiators likewise were tattooed, but on the face, legs and arms until emperor Constantine (ca. AD 325) banned tattooing the face.

The execution of several unfaithful soldiers is staged as a modern military execution, with archers instead of guns (the officer even commands anachronistically "Fire!"). No such method of execution existed in antiquity; most commonly the sword would have been used.

The costumes are almost never completely historically correct. The soldiers wear fantasy helmets and bands wrapped around their lower arms which were rarely worn. From early on such bands typically signaled "antiquity" in monumental movies. Keeping in mind that the movie is set in the middle of the 2nd century AD, the body armor worn is Imperial Gallic, which was used by Roman legions from 75 AD and was superseded by a new design in 100 AD. The ancient German uniforms appear to be from the stone-age period.

In the reenactment of the battle of Carthage, Proximo's gladiators are described to be Carthaginians (despite wearing Roman style armor) facing Roman legionaries (who are depicted wearing non-Roman armor and fighting in a non-Roman fashion).

Stirrups can be seen used on some of the Roman cavalry, but while they were invented in Asia during the Roman Empire period, the Romans never adopted them. They are used in the movie for obvious safety reasons, a proper Roman saddle being difficult to ride.

The forest of the opening battle would not have appeared in Roman times as it does on film. The scenes were shot at a managed spruce forest near Farnham in England. Since modern forestry was not applied in Europe before roughly the 16th century, a forest consisting of a single species of tree (a monoculture) would have been an unlikely sight in Germania in AD 180. The location was chosen due to availability, as few forest areas are available to be used for such destructive purposes.

Catapults and ballistae would not have been used in a forest. They were rarely used in open battles and reserved primarily for sieges.

Much of the infantry combat is shown as one-on-one dueling between individuals. The highly organized Romans would not have allowed this to happen, as there was a higher chance of an individual legionary falling in single combat than if he was fighting as part of a unit. In fact, Roman soldiers were not trained in individual combat techniques and would be severely punished if they broke formation to do so. The organized, cohort-based fighting style of the post-Marian army would have been used to outlast the Germans. Both this and the above inaccuracy are due to the relative monotony of actual Roman tactics. In addition, the Barbarians were superb individual warriors, and any army that tried the Roman tactics from the opening battle sequence against them would have been massacred.

The Roman armies used throwing spears called pila in real life. However, in the battles there are no signs of pila-ridden enemy bodies, which does not track with how those conflicts turned out in Rome's favor.

In the movie Maximus' former army is said to be camped in Ostia; even though the officers are said to have been replaced with men loyal to Commodus no army other than the Praetorian Guard would have been camped so close to Rome

Gladiatorial

Scott received considerable criticism for having female gladiators in the film. Nevertheless, according to the ancient sources, they did, in fact, exist.

The emperor indicates the fate of a gladiator by showing thumbs up or thumbs down, which is a common misconception, as there is no historical evidence for this interpretation. Some scholars contend that the actual sign was a thumb to the throat for death (meaning plant the sword in the downed gladiator's neck), and thumb in fist (like a sheathed dagger) or thumbs down (to indicate sticking the swords point in the ground) if the gladiator was to live. The historical record repeatedly turned up the phrase "turning the thumb" without specifying exactly what that meant, which does allow for a great deal of leeway in how this was presented in the film.

Gladiatorial combats were accompanied by musicians who altered their tempo to match that of the combat in the style now familiar with music in action movies[citation needed].

Gladiatorial combatants were not as violent as portrayed, nor did they forcibly fight to the death. Similarly to modern-day professional athletes, gladiators were too profitable of an asset to disregard their lives so callously. In fact, deaths in the arena were relatively rare, and only if the loser were particularly bad would the public ask for his killing.

Maximus only fights gladiators he does not know during the various games. This depiction is unusual, as it was the normal practice outside of rare special events for gladiators to fight only those they trained with from their own school.

Many of the combats in the film are fought between gladiators that are different weights and sizes. However, similar to modern boxing bouts, gladiators were matched against opponents of the same size

Like today's athletes, gladiators did product endorsements. Particularly successful gladiators (such as Maximus) would endorse goods in the arena before commencing a fight and have their names promoting products on the Roman equivalent of billboards. Although originally included in the script, this practice was later rejected as not a fact the audience would believe.

December 9, 2005

Books of The Times
'The Gladiators'

The Pride and Terror of Those Who Fought to the Death / http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/books/09book.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0
By WILLIAM GRIMES

As everyone knows, gladiators entering the arena in ancient Rome faced the emperor and shouted, "We who are about to die salute you." Defeated combatants would have their fate decided by a thumbs up or a thumbs down from the crowd, or by the emperor himself.
Not really, says the Dutch historian Fik Meijer in "The Gladiators." It was not gladiators who uttered the immortal salute, but 9,000 prisoners about to engage in a mock sea battle on Lake Fucino organized by the Emperor Claudius, and described by Suetonius. The sentiment made no sense for gladiators, who expected to vanquish their opponents and live. The pollice verso, or "turned thumbs" signal, remains ambiguous. Historians do not know exactly what the gesture looked like.
Mr. Meijer, a professor of ancient history at the University of Amsterdam and the author of "Emperors Don't Die in Bed," understands exactly what readers want to know about gladiators and anticipates their every question in this admirable little study. He explains who the gladiators were; how they were trained, fed and paid; what weapons they used; and what rules governed combat in the arena. One chapter reconstructs a full day's program at the Roman Colosseum and, as a bonus, Mr. Meijer looks at two films, "Spartacus" and the more recent "Gladiator," to see just how well Hollywood captured the flavor and the period detail of Rome's most popular sport.
The elaborate, theatrically produced entertainments associated with the Colosseum and hundreds of smaller amphitheaters throughout the empire had their heyday in the first and second centuries A.D., but for many centuries before that, gladiators had engaged in hand-to-hand combat during funeral rites for important Romans. In so doing, Mr. Meijer writes, they illustrated "the virtues that had made Rome great, virtues demonstrated by the deceased himself during his lifetime: strength, courage and determination."
Over time, the increasingly elaborate private rites evolved into lavish public spectacles intended to boost the prestige of the emperors. The sport became professionalized, with managers, a fixed schedule and training centers, where gladiators developed expertise in one of the dozen or so weapon specialties on offer. Under Augustus, the games achieved a variety and splendor never before seen. In his political will and testament, he boasted that in the eight gladiatorial contests he had held, 10,000 men had fought to the death.
The gladiator was a contradictory figure. Socially, he was a despised outcast, the lowest of the low, but the warrior code and the unflinching courage displayed by most gladiators made them, in a sense, ideal Romans. Recruits were generally prisoners of war, like Spartacus, or slaves charged with crimes, but former soldiers, lured by the prospect of prize money, or well-born Romans entranced by the allure of the arena, often signed contracts to fight as gladiators. Even emperors occasionally took up sword and shield, descending into the arena for a bit of carefully staged combat. Commodus (played by Joaquin Phoenix in "Gladiator") regularly appeared as a gladiator under the stage name Hercules the Hunter.
Not surprisingly, gladiators captured the public imagination. They were celebrities. Young women left amorous graffiti on the walls of the gladiator schools, or wore hairpins shaped like swords or spears. Even the wives of the emperors, it was rumored, occasionally enjoyed secret liaisons with gladiators. Some women became gladiators themselves, fighting regularly in shows staged by Nero. The emperor Septimius Severus, unamused, banned female combat in A.D. 200 as an affront to military dignity.
Fame came at a heavy price. Mr. Meijer estimated that most gladiators, fighting two or three times a year, probably died between the ages of 20 and 30 with somewhere from 5 to 34 fights to their names. One gladiator, Asteropaeus, notched 107 victories, and exceptional gladiators fought on into their 40's and 50's, sometimes retiring as free men. But these were the exceptions.
The "sport" was appallingly brutal, and many gladiators faced the arena with fear and trembling, especially those who were assigned to square off against wild animals. On one occasion, 20 gladiators committed group suicide, killing one another one by one, rather than enter the arena.
Even successful gladiators lived an exceptionally hard life. Like modern boxers, they were exploited by their managers. Victory usually brought an olive branch or wreath, plus a few small coins. Only a few shows offered the kind of prize money that could guarantee a comfortable life. Lucky gladiators found work as bodyguards for noblemen, but more often, those past fighting age took menial work at the gladiator schools and eventually ended up destitute, begging for alms.
Historians have very little specific information about gladiator fights. There were rules, and a referee, but the rules remain unknown. Some of the gladiatorial specialties remain obscure. The dimachaerus, or "man with two swords," is mentioned in two inscriptions, but there are no pictorial images of him, so it is impossible to know how he fought. Nevertheless, Mr. Meijer, relying on snatches of verse, historical passages, mosaics, sculpture and funeral inscriptions, manages to summon up the savage thrills of the Colosseum.
A few things we do know. Kirk Douglas should not have faced off against a gladiator with trident and net in "Spartacus," since that form of combat would not appear for another 60 years. Russell Crowe, in Roman times, would not have fought a gladiator and a tiger simultaneously as he does in "Gladiator." Even in Rome at its most barbaric, there was a right way and a wrong way to throw a man to the beasts.

Blood and circuses
Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard examine the perfect symbol of Roman imperial power in their history of the Colosseum, says Nigel Spivey

Nigel Spivey

The Guardian, Saturday 12 March 2005 / http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/mar/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview10

The Colosseum

by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard
214 pp
How typical of the Romans. It's not easy making a fire hot enough to reduce solid stone. But they cut down precious forests in their province of Judaea simply to create a conspicuous holocaust of the Great Temple of Jerusalem in AD70. Some massive blocks were left - as if to state what size of edifice had been destroyed. Meanwhile, treasure and other spoils of triumph from the Jewish revolt were directly translated into the monumental embellishment of Rome, the capital of empire. Begun by Vespasian, the commander who had "subdued" the Jews, and completed a decade later by his son Titus, this was the tiered spherical arena we know as the Colosseum: a place of public recreation symbolically erected on land once taken for private parkland by the odious Nero.

To Romans it was the amphitheatre - a model for imitation throughout the provinces. From north Africa to south Wales, essentially similar structures were raised. El Djem, Verona, Nimes, Arles, Caerleon - these are among the hundreds of Colosseum-clones that appeared. Only in the eastern Mediterranean did problems arise. For in these parts, where Greek cultural values still prevailed under Roman rule, most cities already had institutional spaces of public entertainment. Such areas primarily took the form of the stadium, where athletes strove for glory; or the semi-circular theatre. In both locations there was contest, but contest pitched as virtual reality. Wrestling was a sweated mimicry of war, tragedy the shadow-play of mortal disaster. But what was to be done with the spectacle of sheer violence -men and animals fighting to the death? Archaeological evidence shows that some athletic stadia were converted for use as amphitheatres, and a number of Greek theatres were adapted - high nets rigged around the stage, for instance, to prevent big cats leaping into the audience. Yet there are records of strident Greek protests, if only on behalf of those front-row onlookers who did not care to be sprayed with blood. And this categorical distinction between theatre and amphitheatre points us to the principal fascination of approaching the Roman Colosseum as a "wonder of the world": the wonder lies not with the elegance or substance of the building as it survives, but rather with the question of what the Romans thought they were doing.
As Keith Hopkins has pointed out before, Roman enjoyment of spectacular violence is not a matter of "individual sadistic psychopathology", but seems to betray "a deep cultural difference". How much Hopkins contributed to the present book before he died last year is not easy to estimate, because Mary Beard (a Cambridge colleague) has so sympathetically overlaid it with her own voice. But it was characteristic of Hopkins to begin answering the puzzle of a peculiar Roman "taste" for violence by sceptically probing its extent. The inauguration of the Colosseum was allegedly celebrated by hunting shows involving the deaths of 9,000 exotic animals. But how feasible was it to capture elephants and rhinoceroses without sedative darts, transport them long distances, and finally cajole them to ferocity in front of a large crowd? Documentary evidence of the laborious zoological kidnap of a single hippotamus from the Upper Nile to Regent's Park in 1850 suggests that supplying the Colosseum with large quantities of interesting animals was a logistical challenge beyond even the Romans. Further and more complex calculations about gladiatorial death-rates similarly indicate a strong tendency to exaggerate, and not only by ancient writers. Christian martyrologists piously inflated the number of casualties among the faithful. (In an unsually candid reflection, one persecuted Christian witness, Origen, wondered if the total tally of Christian martyrs at Rome actually reached double figures.) There is, in fact, no firm evidence to prove that any Christian was ever torn apart by lions inside the Colosseum.
Was the Colosseum, then, always what it has become - an iconic hulk, picturesquely staffed by burly men with wooden swords, and very occasionally put to some ceremonial use, whether a mock-battle or a Paul McCartney concert? Hopkins and Beard stop short of making such a case. For even when stripped of its mythology, the amphitheatre subsists as an enclosure designed to give a maximum number of onlookers the closest possible view of a kill. Academic demonstrations of human anatomy used to be compassed in such steep-sided, eye-goggling spaces. The old bullring of Mexico City relies, to this day, on the same telescopic principle. We may agree that the daily pabulum of the Roman populace was bread, not circuses. Still the circus existed all the same; and no one went there for some harmless fun. The closest to slapstick at the Colosseum came from the so-called "fatal charades", when some myth was enacted for real: the flight of Icarus, done like a bungee jump without the bungee; or else a wretched criminal dressed up as Orpheus -given a lyre, and pushed out to charm with melodies the animals prowling around the arena. Too bad if the bears were tone deaf.
Quite how this ingenious mode of human sacrifice originated is left implicit by Hopkins and Beard. They dismiss without reason the notion that gladiatorial combat developed out of archaic Etruscan funerary rites, and offer no plausible alternative. So what was the Colosseum all about? The applications of capital punishment within the amphitheatre were conducted at midday, as a lull in proceedings, deemed a diversion only for the chronically bored. So connoisseurs of bloodshed came for more than the sight of exemplary justice. Protagonists of good entertainment were marked not by damnation but chance; made brave or furious by freedom from blame, how much more fiercely they would fight.
Some ancient observers - notably St Augustine - deplored the addictive magnetism of witnessing this sort of death. Others were complacent about its habituating and homeopathic effect: so death was, as it were, domesticated. But in the end it is impossible to explain the Colosseum unless one concedes that its principal sponsors - the emperors of Rome - all of them, even "good" ones such as Trajan, ultimately ruled by terror. This arena by the Palatine, the hill on which Romulus founded his city, was the looming and central emblem of their power to "play God" - to allocate life or death.
• Nigel Spivey's The Ancient Olympics is published by OUP.

    Gladiator & the Portrayal of the Roman Empire in the Cinema.

July 12, 2011 by Professor Rollmops / http://tragicocomedia.com/2011/07/12/gladiator-the-portrayal-of-the-roman-empire-in-the-cinema/

I began writing this article in 2000, whilst still researching my PhD at Cambridge. It was largely finished, but with significant holes which I have finally decided to fill in. I originally intended to research it more intensively and submit it for publication to an academic journal, but ultimately the style seemed more journalistic and its prohibitive length ruled out any hope of publication in a newspaper or magazine. So, after all these years, here it is!

The recent release of Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator has once again sparked interest in a genre that seemed doomed never to be revived. Prohibitive costs and questionable appeal were the enduring memories after the hugely expensive and unsuccessful Cleopatra and the ponderous The Fall of the Roman Empire. After 1964, no one was either rich enough or stupid enough to invest in a project of this scale.
Gladiator, the first Roman epic for almost forty years, whilst receiving mixed reviews for critics, has proven very popular with cinema-goers the world over. The story of Maximus’ fall from the slippery heights of power as a conquering Roman general, to his being sold as a slave and his evolution as a great gladiator, certainly makes for great matinee entertainment. The exotic locations, vast battles, splendid sets, and epic scenes are true to form of the “sword and sandal” epic, and with the assistance of modern technology and greater attention to close detail, Gladiator sets a new benchmark for a raw and “realistic” evocation of the Roman world. Yet what is so frustrating about Gladiator is its lack of contextual historical accuracy.

The genre to which Gladiator belongs has always been a flawed one. Roman epics have attracted criticism for both their historical accuracy and dramatic qualities. Roman epics aren’t so much historical films, as vehicles for other, often anachronistic moral or ideological themes; Italian nationalism and fascism, for example. Otherwise they have tended towards ponderous, opulent romance.
Gladiator is an interesting product in the context of film history, for it picks up almost directly where the Roman epic left off. Gone are the moralising voice-overs which introduce the historical context; gone is the typical demonisation of the Roman Empire; gone is the anachronistic emphasis on modern Christian concepts of ethics and morality. In their place we have a secularised film which does not seem to carry any message whatsoever. This absence of any clear moral purpose behind Gladiator is, in part, what makes it a better Roman epic than many of its predecessors.
Historical films can also have a very powerful effect on an audience, imaginatively and emotionally, but often very particularly on account of national identity. This is especially the case when the film depicts the actions of a national group, and particularly in the context of an international conflict. The film Braveheart, for example, generated very heated debate about its depiction not just of certain historical personalities, but also ofEngland’s relationship toScotland. It was not at all well received by the English.
It seems extraordinary that a cinematic interpretation of events which took place almost seven centuries ago could cause such rancour, yet such they did. Some film-makers might therefore be wary about alienating potential audiences, which raises the question as to whether or not historical accuracy in the cinema depends upon the degree to which there is a risk of upsetting members of any social group which could identify with the characters and events of the film. Inevitably, where national identities are concerned, someone is bound to be upset, and the director or author of the screenplay are likely to find themselves forced to justify the reasons for their portrayal.
The Roman epic, however, occupies a special place in the broad spectrum of historical films. This is because the period it depicts is sufficiently distant in time to avoid arousing the ire of any political or ethnic group by an historically unfair or inaccurate portrayal; thus neutralising any possible social antagonism such as that generated by films such as Braveheart. This might go some way towards explaining the flights of fantasy into which Roman epics are capable of delving. The recent and appalling television production of Cleopatra was a perfect example of the quite extraordinary degree to which history can be manipulated.
Gladiator is another production in which there is very little historical truth. It need only be pointed out that Maximus did not exist, that Commodus was already co-opted as co-emperor in 177, three years before the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, and that he ruled until 193 when he was strangled to death by a professional wrestler as he lay in a drunken sleep, to illustrate the quite ridiculous historical inaccuracy of the film. Can Gladiator therefore rightly be called an historical film?
On some levels, namely those of costuming and interior design, the makers of Gladiator have made an impressive effort to achieve historical accuracy. It is perhaps counter-productive to quibble about the exact appearance of the Roman urban landscape at the time; which facades loomed, which statues stood where, which aqueducts had been completed, and about the decoration of the interior of the senatorial curia. That neo-classical facades were shot, cut and pasted to create the backdrop of the city of Rome should not trouble us too greatly, for the effect is at least successful in conveying an impression of the scale, and, it might be said, the “modernity” of Roman development at the height of the Empire’s power. Perhaps more importantly, the attention to detail in military hardware, costumes, furniture, personal effects, and so on, is a considerable advance on previous cinematic depictions of theRoman Empire.
Another positive of the film is that it attempts to create a less anachronistic intellectual, social and cultural context. Often, due to the need to acquaint the audience with the historical context, period films tend to be packed with informative dialogue and exposition, which at times stumbles uncomfortably from the lips of the protagonists. Gladiator is somewhat more successful in contextualising this background and making it incidental to the film.
Still, it is reasonable to wonder why so much effort has been put into minute detail, when the broader context in which all the detail is conveyed is almost completely fictional?

Director Ridley Scott provides the best answer to this question. When asked what attracted him to the film, he described his first encounter with the producer Walter Parkes, in which Parkes simply threw down a rolled-up print of Jean Leon Gerome’s famous painting of a gladiator in the Colosseum. “That’s what got me,” said Scott, “It was a totally visceral reaction to the painting.”
Gladiator is probably best described as a visceral experience. Rather than being an historical film, Gladiator is a “human” film in a fictive historical context, whose historicity is supported by a careful reconstruction of the appearance of the world being represented. If we were to try to define Gladiator further, then it would be as the story of an individual’s struggle against injustice, and of loyalty to a threatened ideal of enlightened despotism or republican government.
It is tempting, however, to be more cynical and say that considering the lack of regard for the historical narrative, it is essentially a vehicle for great special effects and innovative action sequences. After all, the project began with only the arena in mind. The script, which needed a great deal of work, ran to a mere thirty-five pages and underwent a number of transformations throughout the shoot. Perhaps as a consequence of the simplicity of its original conception, it is difficult to find any serious message in Gladiator. If one were to look for a historical message in it, all one really finds is that Marcus Aurelius was a good man, Commodus was a bad man, life was hard and tenuous, and that Roman Republican government, namely rule by the Senate, was a cherished ideal.
It could also be misconstrued that the principle message of the film is to reveal the horrors of gladiatorial combat, for Gladiator depicts gladiatorial contests with very startling realism, although what we see is as nothing to the vast and elaborate slaughter which often took place in the Colosseum and other arenas around the Empire. The horrors of slavery and the staging of fights to the death, resonates strongly with our modern outrage at such “entertainments.” The assertion of the humanity of the slaves and gladiators is deeply moving to us who so greatly value freedom and human life. Yet this is not really the concern of Gladiator. Indeed, if one looks at the web-site, it becomes quite clear that the film is more concerned with glorifying the arena than anything else.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it is less of an anachronism. Indeed, one of the problems with the film Spartacus is that it makes too much of the slave revolt as a type of ideological movement against an oppressive and evil empire, and establishes Spartacus as a sort of proto-communist revolutionary. We cannot ignore that slavery was something almost irrevocably intrinsic to the ancient world; the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians, all had slave-based economies, and it would be difficult to say that any of these civilisations were more inclusive, more tolerant, or provided a better system of social infrastructure than did Rome. Though we are appalled by slavery, to vilify theRoman Empire for employing it is rather like vilifying a child for adopting the habits of its parents, and of society at large.
Yet whilst Spartacus might be too redolent with Marxist overtones it is one of the few Roman epic films which attempts to remain true to the understood historical narrative of what it depicts, with the exception of its fabricated conclusion. (Spartacus’ body was never recovered from the battlefield.) It is an excellent, humane, and deeply moving film, which has a greater “historicity” than many of its predecessors.

When asked why he thought Roman epics had vanished for forty years, Ridley Scott said that: “They reached a saturation point and then they simply went away because every story seemed to have been exhausted.”
This response might go some way to explaining why Gladiator is essentially fiction. Yet, at the same time, it might be the very thing which will allow the Roman epic to re-emerge as a genre. No one had ever heard of Maximus before, and the vast majority of the audience will never have heard of Commodus either. This has in no way hindered Gladiator’s success. Not many people outside of the United Kingdom, and probably only a limited number within it would have ever heard of William Wallace before the release of Braveheart. Roman history is so rich that countless stories could be artfully extracted without much need to change the context. Rather than turning to fiction, the time is now ripe for screen-writers to plough deeply the very rich and extensive soil of Roman history for future epics. Apart from all the smaller, human stories of individuals caught up in the events of Roman history, there is vast scope for movies on a grander scale. The late Roman empire in particular begs attention. Why is there no epic about Constantine, or of Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410? What of Attila’s failed invasion of the ailing western empire in 451 and, in particular the epic battle of the Catalaunian Plains?

The release of Gladiator is a very exciting and important event in film history. It has the potential to bring about a rebirth of a dead genre and to set a new direction for that genre. For, one of the most promising aspects of Gladiator is that it avoids the polemics against Roman rule which were characteristic of so many of its predecessors. It empathises much more successfully with the period in offering a fairer cross-section of Roman society and ideas. In the opening battle scene, Maximus’ Tribune Quintus says with derision; “People should know when they’re conquered.” To which Maximus replies, “Would you Quintus, would I?” In conversation with Marcus Aurelius, Maximus acknowledges that the world outside of Rome is dark and forbidding; “Rome is the light,” he says sincerely. The means by which the greater complexity of the Roman world is conveyed is more subtle than many other epics of this genre and less dominated by modern political, religious and ideological concerns.
The earliest Roman films were often rooted in a strong ideological agenda. , The 1914 Italian film Cabiria, set during the Second Punic War (218-202 BC), was produced by the ultra nationalist Gabriele d’Annunzio and was released shortly after the Italo-Turkish war, in which Italy conquered the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitana and Cyrenaica in North Africa. Similarly, the 1937 film Scipione l’africano, depicting the life of Scipio Africanus, Rome’s most successful general during the Second Punic War, followed in the wake of Mussolini’s Ethiopian conquest.
The 1964 Hollywoodfilm, The Fall of the Roman Empire, reads like a positivist moral essay; striving to put across a more explicit historical argument. Starring Alec Guiness as Marcus Aurelius, and Christopher Plummer as Commodus, it has many parallels with Gladiator in that it too focuses on the accession and reign of Commodus. It essentially argues that the reign of Commodus and what took place immediately afterwards, namely the auction of the Empire to the highest bidder (it ignores the brief reign of Pertinax) was the beginning of the decline which was to lead to the Empire’s eventual “fall”, though this did not happen in the west for another two hundred and fifty years. This particular interpretation of the narrative of Roman history dates back to Gibbon, who first identified the reign of Commodus as a significant turning point after the more enlightened rule of Marcus Aurelius.
One of the central themes of The Fall of the Roman Empire, namely the social experiment of settling barbarians as farmers in Roman territory, was a massive oversimplification of an issue which, in fact, was dealt with at a painstakingly academic and philosophical level in the late Roman Empire, the consequences of which were central to the gradual devolution of Roman power in the west in the fifth century.
It is inevitable that political and social complexities have to be glossed over in an historical film – no audience is going to sit through a film which depicts with arduous detail the mind-boggling intricacy of Roman bureaucracy – yet such complexity can be hinted at through thought-provoking ambiguity, rather than being arduously explicit. Ideally, the Roman context should be incidental to the film and less explicit, especially where long-established clichés are otherwise the only resort. Typically the Roman Empirehas been portrayed as a vicious, cruel organisation, run by ruthless madmen. Gladiator at least went some way towards suggesting that Commodus was just an example of a very cruel, weak, and over ambitious megalomaniac in a world of otherwise sane human beings with complex identities.
The 1951 MGM film Quo Vadis, however, opens with a startling and lengthy diatribe against the nature of Roman power, based entirely upon modern, Christian concepts of ethics and morality, and which is to put it mildly, anachronistic in the Empire of the 1st Century AD. Such criticisms of Roman power as did exist in the 1st century, rarely focussed on the immorality and inhumanity of gladiatorial contests or slavery, rather upon an antique perception of freedom and self-determination, which, sadly, often translated as the freedom of another aristocracy or religious oligarchy to run its own exclusive autocratic regime.
Indeed, the degree to which the Roman state is vilified in the cinema is probably only paralleled by post-war portrayals of Nazi Germany. Certainly the Roman Empire was a physically coercive entity which encouraged practices we find abhorrent, but considering the context from which it emerged, it was the paragon of ancient civilised states of the Mediterraneanand near Eastern world. The Roman Empire was an inclusive, not an exclusive system which encouraged religious freedom, (with the exception of certain troublesome dissidents who worshiped a dead carpenter), which provided immense and sophisticated public services, sanitation, education and security, which championed free trade, and which, under the pax Romana, also championed peace.

The great eighteenth century historian Edward Gibbon once wrote:
“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. (AD96-180).”
During Gibbon’s lifetime such an observation had much greater currency, especially when we consider that theBritish Empirehad not as yet abolished slavery by the time of his death. Clearly there is no excusing slavery in any context, but this is a modern sensibility. Even the much vaunted Athenian democracy was heavily dependent on slave-labour, and they did not offer to extend their citizenship to outsiders as the Romans did.
It is largely for this reason that Gladiator makes a departure from its predecessors. Rather than critiquing theRoman Empire as an entity, it highlights the folly and wickedness of certain individuals. It marks a turning point in the portrayal of Roman history and offers, without being especially cerebral or historically accurate, a less explicitly moralising theme and context. If its success results in the making of further such historical epics, then there might be something of a rebirth of the genre. Either way, and perhaps most importantly, enrolments in ancient history courses both at high school and university have risen dramatically in its wake. If the cinema can still inspire students to take an interest in the very distant history that underlies the culture, identity and institutions of modern western society, then this is surely a positive.