The Real History Behind Ridley Scott's 'Gladiator II' and Life as a Fighter in the Ancient Roman Arena

Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

To mark the opening of the Colosseum in 80 C.E., the Roman emperor Titus staged a staggering spectacle, flooding the arena with water and bringing in “horses and bulls and some other domesticated animals that had been taught to behave in the liquid element just as on land,” according to the Roman historian Cassius Dio. “He also brought in people on ships, who engaged in a sea fight there.” The stakes were high: In most naumachiae, as these mock naval battles were called, the participants were prisoners of war or convicted criminals who were expected to fight—perhaps to the death—for the crowd’s amusement.

This potentially fatal predicament takes center stage in Gladiator II, Ridley Scott’s new sequel to his blockbuster 2000 film, Gladiator. In the movie’s trailer, an archer takes aim at an enemy soldier, firing an arrow that sends the man plunging over the side of his ship—and into the waiting jaws of a shark. (Despite Scott’s insistence that the Romans would have had no trouble trapping “a couple of sharks in a net from the sea,” historians have pointed out that no evidence supports the animal’s presence in the ancient amphitheater.)

Aquatic apex predators aren’t the only challenge faced by Gladiator II’s Lucius Verus (played by Paul Mescal). The film, which takes place around 20 years after the events of Gladiator, also pits Lucius against a rhinoceros, a monkey and hordes of fellow gladiators, not to mention an invading army, power-hungry politicians and multiple ghosts from his past. The secret son of Maximus, the eponymous gladiator portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 2000 movie, Lucius must retrace his father’s footsteps, achieving fame as an enslaved fighter driven by his desire for revenge against his family’s killers.

Gladiator II | Official Trailer (2024 Movie) - Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington

Much like its predecessor, Gladiator II takes a relatively loose approach to history, compressing timelines, borrowing real historical figures’ names but little of their stories, and inventing other characters entirely. As historian Allen Ward wrote in 2001, the first Gladiator was both “the best of films” and “the worst of films,” igniting the public’s interest in the ancient world while perpetuating many of the myths surrounding the era. “Certainly 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 and costume dramas,” Ward added. “In most cases, the easily determined factual details would not have made Gladiator less interesting or exciting, and the record of Commodus’ reign contains characters and events that could easily make what is now a good story even better history.”

While University of Chicago historian Shadi Bartsch has criticized Gladiator II as “total Hollywood bullshit,” the director himself is more sanguine, to put it charitably, about historical accuracy in Hollywood. When historians criticized his 2023 film Napoleon for taking artistic liberties with the historical record, Scott told the New Yorker that they needed to “get a life.”

Even if Gladiator II doesn’t present a wholly accurate portrait of the political machinations of the Roman Empire, its depiction of violence as entertainment reflects striking realities of the ancient civilization’s culture, including the social chasm between the free spectators and the enslaved gladiators, and the sheer brutality of everyday life.

“One of the things that’s very hard for us to appreciate [today] is how very fragile life was in antiquity and how common it was to see extreme suffering and very early deaths,” says Kathleen M. Coleman, a classicist at Harvard University. “Because we can keep people alive for so long and through all kinds of childhood illnesses, … life has a premium now in our society that it couldn’t have had in antiquity, and that may affect people’s tolerance of violence.”

Here’s what you need to know about the real history behind Gladiator II, from characters’ historical counterparts to the likelihood of a gladiator dying in the arena, ahead of the film’s arrival in theaters across the United States on November 22.

How Gladiator II is connected to Gladiator

The original Gladiator opens in 180 C.E., with the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius choosing Maximus, then a general, as his successor. Angry at being passed over, Marcus’ son Commodus (played by Joaquin Phoenix) murders his father and seizes power. After Maximus refuses to pledge his loyalty to the new emperor, he is sold into slavery, becoming a gladiator who must fight to secure his freedom.

Maximus makes a name for himself in the amphitheater, reconnecting with his former lover, Commodus’ sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), and forging alliances with the emperor’s enemies along the way. In the film’s climactic final battle, Maximus kills Commodus but is mortally wounded himself. He uses his dying breaths to call for political reform, encouraging onlookers to return to the democratic ideals of the Roman Republic.

Maximus Reveals Himself to Commodus (Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix) | Gladiator (2000)

Lucius, the main character of the sequel, appears in Gladiator as Lucilla’s son. He idolizes Maximus but is unaware that the former general is also his father. After Maximus’ death, Lucilla sends Lucius to Numidia, a territory in northwest Africa, to protect him from imperial intrigue. There, he builds a new life for himself, eventually marrying and starting a family. At the beginning of Gladiator II, he is forced to return to Rome after an army led by the fictional general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) invades Numidia, kills Lucius’ wife and son, and sells him into slavery as a gladiator.

Like Maximus and Lucius, most gladiators were enslaved men, prisoners of war, convicted criminals or individuals otherwise rejected by society. But free Romans could also volunteer to fight in the arena. A new recruit would relinquish “all his rights over his own body and his own life and death,” says Coleman. “He took an oath of allegiance to his owner and trainer, who then had the discretion to decide what would become of him.” Though gladiators had no social standing, the scholar adds, they “could redeem themselves to a certain extent by earning some admiration for expert fighting.”

Looking out at the audience during a match at the Colosseum, Lucius recognizes his mother, Lucilla (Nielsen, reprising her role from Gladiator), who is now married to none other than the general who murdered his family. Commodus may be gone, but in his place are the co-emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), brothers who revel in the “brutality, cruelty and wastefulness” of ancient Rome with no regard for their subjects, as Scott tells Vanity Fair. Denzel Washington rounds out the cast as Macrinus, a charismatic arms dealer who harbors a secret agenda as he guides Lucius to gladiatorial greatness.

“There is an authoritarian power that is parading as if it were still somehow the vestiges of a republican government,” Nielsen says to Vanity Fair.

The real historical figures behind Gladiator II

The Gladiator franchise’s characters are a blend of fact and fiction. The four emperors depicted in the films—Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Caracalla and Geta—are all based on real Roman rulers. Lucilla, the daughter of Marcus and sister of Commodus, did have a son named Lucius Verus, but he died young and couldn’t have been the secret child of a general turned gladiator, as Maximus himself is fictional.

Though Gladiator II suggests that Lucilla was alive and well during the joint reign of Caracalla and Geta in the early 200s, she was actually executed in 182 after conspiring to overthrow Commodus. A bloodthirsty emperor who “devoted most of his life to ease and to horses and to combats of wild beasts and of men” that were often held in the Colosseum, according to Cassius Dio, Commodus was such an unpopular leader that his advisers paid a wrestler to strangle him in his bath in 192.

Commodus’ murder didn’t inspire a return to the ideals of the Roman Republic, as shown in Gladiator. Instead, it sparked a civil war in which five separate men claimed the title of emperor in just one year. Military commander and politician Septimius Severus emerged victorious, defeating his rivals for the throne by 197. With control of his kingdom secure, the emperor turned his attention to military campaigns, first against Parthia (based in modern-day Iran and Iraq) and then the British tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall.

“It’s very interesting to think about Rome as a military power [whose] borders are policed by the armies, and it is around the … limit of the empire that we have military fort after military fort, and we’re starting to realize that so many of these had an amphitheater attached,” says Coleman. Designed to entertain the troops and frighten the enemy, the displays of sheer power that took place in these arenas were “most evident when they were enacted through physical strength, so violence,” Coleman explains. Still, she adds, “the extent to which Rome’s militant ethos required stiffening people’s morale by having them watch these [matches] is not fully understood.”

Severus invested his two sons with imperial authority during his lifetime, naming the elder, Caracalla, co-emperor in 198 but leaving the younger, Geta, to wait for the title until 209. Upon Severus’ death in 211, the brothers gained joint control of the Roman Empire, but they detested each other and found themselves caught in a struggle for power. “Typically, Geta has been presented as the intellectual interested in civil administration, while Caracalla’s wish was for glory in battle,” writes History Extra. After just ten months, Caracalla gained the upper hand by ordering a group of centurions to kill Geta, reportedly while their mother held him in her arms, trying to protect him.

After murdering his brother, Caracalla sought to erase all traces of him, though some likenesses and records of Geta survived. The fratricide overshadowed Caracalla’s achievements, including the passage of an edict granting all free men in the Roman Empire citizenship and the construction of a luxurious public bath complex that bore the emperor’s name.

“Caracalla always justified himself by claiming that his brother had plotted against him,” historian François Chausson tells CNRS News. “Why not believe him? The fact that Geta was killed in this struggle to the death is no token of innocence. The inferiority, dictated by protocol, from which the younger brother suffered could have fueled bitterness for years. The two brothers had not received the same favorable treatment from their father.”

Caracalla’s own downfall arrived in 217, when he was stabbed to death while urinating on the side of the road, supposedly by a legionary acting on the orders of Macrinus, who soon succeeded him as emperor. While Gladiator II depicts Macrinus as a scheming gladiator trainer who was once enslaved by Marcus Aurelius, no evidence supports this characterization. Born in modern-day Algeria as a member of the equestrian social class, which was directly below the senatorial class, Macrinus rose to prominence as a lawyer and bureaucrat before assuming control of the Praetorian Guard, the personal protectors of the emperor. He relied on the support of his soldiers to claim the throne despite his lowly origins, becoming the first Roman emperor who didn’t belong to the senatorial class.

During his 14-month reign, Macrinus settled “disputes on the borders of the empire … through diplomacy rather than through warfare”—a stark departure from Caracalla’s belligerent approach to foreign policy, writes historian Andrew G. Scott. But Macrinus lost the army’s favor by reducing pay for new recruits, and in 218, the legion abandoned him for Elagabalus, a teenager whose mother and grandmother claimed he was the illegitimate son of Caracalla. Roman forces captured and executed both Macrinus and his young son, sending their heads to Elagabalus as trophies.

Life as a gladiator

Hollywood films like Gladiator and Gladiator II tend to present their lead characters as tragic heroes doomed to fight to the death at the whims of an emperor in no-holds-barred battles against men and wild beasts alike. In truth, says Coleman, a strict set of rules enforced by a referee governed gladiatorial bouts, and just 5 percent of gladiators died in violent combat. The majority of matches ended in a draw, with both fighters earning a reprieve at the discretion of the spectators.

“Gladiators were very expensive because they had [to undergo] special training,” Coleman says. “They had to be kept alive and well fed. … They [were] a capital investment, so it wasn’t in their owners’ or trainers’ interests for them to be killed.”

The first recorded gladiatorial games took place in 264 B.C.E., during the funeral of a prominent Roman aristocrat. According to Coleman, historians are unsure whether the Romans borrowed the idea from another culture on the Italian Peninsula, but they do have reliable records of what gladiators’ daily lives looked like. Housed in barracks, these ancient fighters learned how to spar in front of a crowd and use different types of weapons and armor depending on the type of gladiator they were training to be. The murmillo, for instance, wore a Gallic-style helmet adorned with fish imagery and wielded a rectangular shield to protect himself. The scantily clad retiarius sported just an arm and a shoulder guard, but this lightweight armor enabled him to move around easily with his trident, offering an advantage over opponents weighed down by heavy equipment.

Though the Gladiator films depict fighters clashing with both humans and animals, real gladiators who specialized in defeating other men wouldn’t have battled beasts, too. Instead, trained hunters known as venatores faced off with elephants, lions, bears and other wild creatures, whose carcasses were then given away as meat to eager spectators. Animals also fought other animals: In 80 C.E., at the inauguration of the Colosseum, a rhinoceros reportedly sparred with a bull, a bear, a buffalo, a lion and two cattle.

Novelty was key to retaining audience members’ attention, says Coleman. In addition to forcing beasts to battle, organizers recruited a select few female gladiators and staged increasingly ambitious spectacles like the naumachiae. The success of these displays hinged on the dehumanization of the combatants involved, especially those who were enslaved and therefore viewed as property.

When a vast chasm between the free audience members and the enslaved gladiators existed, “you had one person on one side of it and everybody else on the other side of it,” Coleman says. “The objectification of the people in the arena was made possible by [the crowd] detaching themselves from any fellow feeling with [the gladiators]. But at the same time, there is this interest in seeing them fight professionally because they’re highly trained and specially armed, and they had a following.”

As historian Ward put it in 2001, many modern observers find the first Gladiator film “offensively violent, bloody and gory. Unfortunately, life in the ancient world in general was much more violent and gruesomely bloody than life in modern industrial democracies.”