Movies & TV

There's a bunch. Rome wasn't white marble, they painted the shit out of everything (also dicks graffiti'd everywhere). Over millennia, the paint wore off and people in the Renaissance didn't have the technology to scan the marble, so they thought it was plain white. All the fascination with Greece and Rome during that era resulted in depictions of Rome as a white marble city. The show, Rome, has a more accurate representation of what the city would have looked like.

In the opening scene, the "catapults" are trebuchets, something invented hundreds of years later for destroying castle walls, not launching fireballs. It's like if you had a movie about the American Civil War and the Union calls in a drone strike using flag signals. Also, flaming arrows were never a thing (a lot of movies do this).

The forest isn't right, either. It's a monoculture forest, which wasn't something that existed until early industrialization when Europe had cut down too many trees. To make up for overharvesting, they planted as many trees as they could, using whatever they had available. Germania during the Roman Empire would have forests that were incredibly diverse, even during winter. There would have been dozens of species.

You don't slash/cut with a Gladius. You can because it's still a sharp sword. But the primary method of using it was stabbing. They were meant to expend as little energy as possible while fighting in tight formations. The blade could easily slip between two shields while the shields were held up to block. Opponents with other weapons would have trouble staying in packed formations like the Romans could while wearing themselves out. Gladiator isn't the only movie guilty of this, though.

Those are some of the main ones. It's still one of my favorite movies, but it's about as accurate as Enemy at the Gates.

Ridley Scott is a deeply incurious man who prefers telling a "good story" to any sort of historical accuracy. See also: the whole Napoleon shooting the Sphinx, and this rather interesting video on orientalism in music about using Armenian instruments in scenes depicting Morocco.

Any "historical media" that isn't run by a complete history nerd with absolute control over every decision is going to have tons of shit like this. It's almost all terrible for anyone who has a clue about the time periods being represented.