Rome on Screen: What Hollywood Gets Right and Wrong
Rome has been a film subject since the beginning of cinema, and the relationship between Hollywood’s Rome and the historical record is complicated in ways that go beyond simple error-counting. Some of what cinema gets wrong is deliberate simplification for narrative clarity. Some is period convention — the sandal epics of the 1950s reflected Cold War anxieties as much as ancient history. Some is genuine incomprehension of a world sufficiently distant that even educated filmmakers cannot feel its difference. And occasionally, something unexpected gets it exactly right in ways that the filmmakers may not have consciously intended.
Gladiator, released in 2000, is the most influential Roman film of recent decades and a useful test case. Ridley Scott’s production design is extraordinarily good: the texture of armor, the look of a legionary camp, the visual scale of Rome are rendered with a seriousness that most preceding sword-and-sandal films did not attempt. The Colosseum sequence captures something real about the theatrical staging of Roman spectacle — the trap doors, the dramatic entrances, the crowd dynamics. The relationship between a general and his troops reads credibly.
The historical content is another matter. Maximus is fictional, which is fine. What is less fine is the film’s central historical conceit: that Marcus Aurelius was planning to restore the Republic by transferring power to a general rather than his son Commodus. There is no evidence for this, and considerable evidence against it — Marcus Aurelius spent years ensuring the succession of Commodus. The film’s villain, Commodus, is rendered with some accuracy — he did have himself renamed Hercules, he did fight in the arena, and he was eventually assassinated by a wrestling partner — but the political framework around him is substantially invented. The Republic that Maximus is supposedly fighting to restore was, by 180 AD, nearly two centuries dead and mourned by approximately nobody.
HBO’s Rome, the series that ran from 2005 to 2007, is by some distance the most historically serious attempt to dramatize late Republican Rome for a mass audience, and it holds up remarkably well. The political mechanics — how Caesar’s faction operates, how the Senate functions under pressure, how personal loyalty and political interest interact — are rendered with genuine sophistication. The relationship between soldiers and their commanders, the texture of Roman street life, the mixture of the grand and the squalid that characterized the actual city: all of this is handled with care. The sexual and violent content that generated considerable commentary at the time is actually among the more accurate things about the series — Roman elite culture was not squeamish about either.
Where Rome departs from the record is largely in compression and personalization. Historical events that took years are condensed into weeks. Characters are present at events they historically did not witness. The two central fictional characters — Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo — are borrowed from a passing reference in Caesar’s Gallic Wars (two centurions who quarreled over credit for an action) and given fictional lives that serve as a vehicle for the series. The device works precisely because the writers understood what aspects of Roman experience they were dramatizing rather than simply dressing modern characters in Roman clothes.
The 2023 film Caesar, directed by Ridley Scott, provoked controversy before release over its casting and after release over its historical content. The film’s depiction of Cleopatra’s appearance and ethnicity generated substantial public debate that was, in historical terms, somewhat beside the point: Cleopatra was Macedonian Greek and looked nothing like either the dark-skinned Egyptian queen or the pale European queen that various political arguments required her to resemble. The film’s treatment of the relationship between Caesar and Cleopatra took similar liberties with the record, compressing and dramatizing a relationship that the ancient sources describe with frustrating vagueness.
The internet meme that asked in 2023 how often men think about the Roman Empire generated enough genuine data to be interesting: an unusual number of men reported thinking about Rome regularly, though the meme’s framing made the sample self-selected in ways that complicate interpretation. What the meme revealed was genuine — Rome occupies a particular place in the cultural imagination, particularly among men in Western countries, that is not easily explained by school curricula alone. The empire’s combination of military power, political drama, engineering achievement, and spectacular collapse makes it a persistent reference point for thinking about strength, ambition, and decline in ways that feel contemporary regardless of the century.
Asterix, the French comic series that has been running since 1959, has introduced more children to Roman geography and imperial behavior than any classroom, and its portrait of Roman military bureaucracy, provincial administration, and the gap between official rhetoric and actual practice is sharper than most academic treatments. The joke is always that the Romans are powerful and efficient and humorless and ultimately defeatable by a village of Gauls who refuse to conform to the logic of empire — a joke that functions as political commentary regardless of which empire the reader has in mind.
What film and television get most consistently wrong about Rome is interiority. Roman characters in modern productions feel things in modern ways — they experience individual guilt, romantic love as mutual vulnerability, political disillusionment in psychologically modern terms. The historical Romans whose private correspondence survives — Cicero’s letters, Pliny’s letters — are not incomprehensible, but they are not modern either. Their emotional world was structured by different assumptions about family obligation, honor, religious practice, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. That world is genuinely difficult to render dramatically, which is why filmmakers generally don’t try. The result is Rome with modern minds in ancient costumes, which is entertaining and not quite history. Both things can be true at the same time.