In the main hall of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, beneath the vast iron-and-glass vault of the former railway station, stands a bronze that makes explicit what Gérôme’s paintings kept implicit. A man in contemporary nineteenth-century dress — smock, trousers, the clothes of a working artist — stands beside a Roman gladiator. The gladiator is armored, helmeted, standing over a fallen opponent whose arm is raised in the gesture of submission. The contemporary figure reaches toward the gladiator with a sculptor’s tool. This is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s self-portrait with his own creation: the artist inside the ancient world he spent his career constructing, the boundary between the nineteenth century and the Roman arena dissolved by the act of making.

The Starz series Spartacus arrived in 2010 with a visual style so aggressively stylized — slow-motion combat, digitally saturated color, blood that moves through the air with the deliberate beauty of a special effect — that critics spent their first reviews debating whether it was art or exploitation before most of them had noticed what was actually happening in the story. What was happening was more interesting than the style wars suggested: a show about Roman slavery that took the institution seriously, a gladiatorial drama that understood what the arena was and what it cost, and a protagonist whose journey from Thracian warrior to rebel general was built on genuine dramatic logic rather than franchise mechanics.

The Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which premiered in 2010 and ran for three seasons plus a prequel miniseries, was not trying to be HBO’s Rome. It was trying to be 300 with a continuing narrative, and within those self-defined limits it largely succeeded. The historical record of the Third Servile War provided the scaffolding; everything else was constructed from the materials of a production that prioritized stylized violence, explicit sexuality, and operatic emotion over archaeological fidelity. The question is whether that constitutes a failure, and the answer depends on what you expected the show to be.

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo began publishing Asterix in the French magazine Pilote in 1959, and the series has been introducing children to Roman geography, imperial bureaucracy, and the gap between official rhetoric and actual practice ever since. Over thirty-nine albums, several animated films, and four live-action feature films, Asterix has reached an audience that no academic history of Rome has approached, and it has done so by taking the Roman Empire seriously enough to understand what is actually funny about it.

Ben-Hur won eleven Academy Awards in 1959, a record it shared with Titanic and The Lord of the Return of the King for decades, and it is the film against which all subsequent Roman epics have been measured — usually unfavorably. William Wyler’s production was the most expensive film ever made at the time of its release, employed tens of thousands of extras, built the largest film set in history for the chariot race sequence, and ran for three hours and thirty-two minutes. It was also, by the standards of its genre, serious in ways that the epics of the preceding decade were not.

The 1963 Cleopatra directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz — or rather, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and then by Mankiewicz after Mamoulian was fired, with extensive interference from the studio and the cast throughout — cost approximately forty-four million dollars, which was enough to nearly bankrupt Twentieth Century Fox, take four years to complete, survive the death of one director, the illness and near-death of its star, and the most extensively documented off-set romance in Hollywood history. The resulting film runs for four hours and seventeen minutes in its complete version. It is simultaneously one of the most expensive disasters in studio history and a more interesting film than its reputation suggests.

Ancient Rome has not left contemporary art alone, and contemporary art has not left ancient Rome alone. The relationship between them is different from the academic tradition’s engagement — less archaeologically earnest, more ironic, more interested in the tension between the ruin and its meanings than in the reconstruction of what the ruin was before it ruined. Contemporary artists approaching Rome approach a subject already saturated with prior appropriations: the neoclassical, the Victorian, the fascist, the cinematic. To paint or photograph or install Rome now is to navigate a layered history of representations that is itself part of the subject.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator arrived in 2000 and revived the sword-and-sandal epic as a commercially viable genre after a forty-year hiatus. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It made Russell Crowe a star. It sent tourism to Rome’s Colosseum surging. It also contained enough historical inaccuracy to sustain a small academic industry of correction, none of which has diminished its cultural influence by a measurable degree.

What Scott got right is worth acknowledging first, because the film’s defenders are not entirely wrong. The production design is serious in a way that the 1950s epics it superficially resembles were not. The texture of a Roman legionary camp — the tents, the equipment, the organizational density — reads as the work of people who had looked at the archaeological record. The Colosseum sequences capture something real about the theatrical staging of Roman spectacle: the trap doors, the dramatic entrances, the relationship between the crowd and the performance. The physical scale of the arena, the way it processes tens of thousands of people, the machinery beneath the floor — all of this is handled with a seriousness that rewards attention. And the relationship between Maximus and his soldiers in the opening battle sequence reflects genuine research into how Roman generals cultivated personal loyalty among their troops.

HBO’s Rome ran for two seasons from 2005 to 2007, cost approximately one hundred million dollars to produce, was cancelled before completing its intended narrative arc, and remains the most historically serious attempt to dramatize the late Roman Republic for a mass audience that has yet been made. Its cancellation, attributed to production costs after a fire destroyed the primary sets, was a genuine cultural loss. The show was not perfect. It was better than anything else in its field by a margin that makes comparison almost unfair.

I, Claudius was broadcast by the BBC in 1976, produced on a budget that would not cover the catering costs of a modern prestige television production, shot almost entirely on interior sets that made no pretense of representing ancient Rome, and it is the finest dramatization of Roman history ever made. The production design is limited. The performances are not. Robert Graves’s source novels provided a narrative that understood the Julio-Claudian dynasty as a political tragedy of Shakespearean scope, and the BBC production found the cast to realize it.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted marble better than anyone who has ever lived. The cool translucence of Pentelic and Carrara stone, the way light passes through alabaster, the specific warmth of Cipollino against the blue of the Mediterranean sky — these qualities are rendered in his canvases with a trompe l’oeil precision that makes the painted marble appear to be the thing itself. This is not a small achievement. It is also a precise description of what his paintings of ancient Rome accomplish and where their limitations lie: extraordinary on the surface, and the surface is the point.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is not a film about the eruption of Vesuvius. It is a film about a slave-turned-gladiator and a merchant’s daughter whose love is thwarted by a corrupt Roman senator, and the eruption of Vesuvius happens to provide the third act. The volcano is plot device rather than subject. This is a reasonable choice for a commercial action film built on a historical catastrophe; it is not the choice that a serious engagement with Pompeii’s destruction would have made.

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.

There is a specific category of object that exists in every tourist market in the world: the miniature Eiffel Tower, made in China, sold in Paris, possessing the shape of the original without any of its substance. It is recognizable as the thing it represents. It is not the thing. Spartacus: House of Ashur, which premiered on Starz in December 2025, is that object. It has the visual vocabulary of the original series — the slow-motion combat, the stylized blood, the ludus architecture, the Roman costumes — and it has none of what made the original worth watching. Recognizable. Not the thing.

Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, occupies a different register from the gladiatorial epics and political dramas that constitute most of Hollywood’s Roman output. It is a frontier film, a journey narrative, set in Roman Britain and the territory beyond Hadrian’s Wall, and it is interested in questions that the arena films are not: what does it mean to serve an empire at its geographical and civilizational limits, and what does Rome look like from outside?

Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire was released in 1964, ran for nearly three hours, cost twenty million dollars, and was such a catastrophic commercial failure that it effectively ended the sword-and-sandal epic as a Hollywood genre for a generation. It also happens to be a substantially better film than its reputation suggests, more historically serious than most of its contemporaries, and in certain respects a more honest engagement with the period it depicts than the celebrated Gladiator that covered similar ground thirty-six years later.

Popular history is a machine for producing confident errors, and Rome is one of its most productive subjects. The combination of genuine drama, distant evidence, and centuries of embellishment has generated a set of myths about Rome that persist through repetition long after the historical record has corrected them. Some are harmless. Some distort the actual history in ways that matter.

The vomitorium was not a room for vomiting. It was a technical term for the exit passages of an amphitheater or theater — the tunnels through which large crowds could rapidly exit a stadium after an event. The word derives from the Latin vomere, meaning to spew out, which is an entirely accurate description of crowds disgorging from a building. The association with Roman dining excess came later and has no serious ancient support. Romans did occasionally induce vomiting for medical or digestive reasons, but the image of systematic purging between banquet courses is a fantasy.