One of the many things Alexander Mariotti wants you to know about Those About to Die, the new Amazon Prime show set in ancient Rome, is that gladiators rarely actually died in colosseum combat. Although the phrase “Kill or be killed” is a powerful marketing tool, real gladiators tended to have long, healthy careers. “But let’s be honest,” says Mariotti, “if you had a show coming out tomorrow called Those Who Rarely Die, you’d say, ‘That’s a crap show. I don’t want to watch that. I want to watch something where someone might die.’”
Set in 79AD, Those About to Die is a sexy swords’n’sandals affair telling interweaving stories about emperors, gladiators and chariot-racers. Not only does Anthony Hopkins pop up, but several episodes were directed by Roland Emmerich, the maker of Independence Day. Mariotti, who visited the sets and met the actors, is listed as its “Colosseum consultant”. For this, and for many other productions, he is recruited to advise on the historical accuracy of the action. Media-savvy and well informed, he is a leading expert on gladiatorial combat.
Fortunately, the 45-year-old from Scotland is not precious about his work. He knows he is not helping to make a documentary. “My role,” he says, “is not to make them historically accurate, because they’re never going to be and they’re not meant to be.” He appreciates that the shows are first and foremost entertainment and often his advice will simply fall on deaf ears. “I’m paid to be ignored!” he says. In the case of Those About to Die, he was even given a small cameo, snarling 100% authentic slurs at Queen Berenice, played by Lara Wolf. They got their money’s worth from him.
One example of an inaccuracy that has simply become established “history” is the very word Colosseum. In ancient Rome, it referred not to the stadium but to the enormous statue of Nero next to it. The Romans called the statue the Colossus and the stadium the Amphitheatrum Flavium. When the statue was destroyed, explains Mariotti, the nickname for the statue moved to the amphitheatre. This has now become a cultural norm, he adds, and going with it simply saves time.
What’s more, says Mariotti, the phrase “Those about to die” was never uttered by gladiators. The famous line – also the title of the book that provided the inspiration for the series, and for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator – comes not from the Colosseum, says the expert, but from criminals who were saying it sarcastically – having been forced by Emperor Claudius to take part in a naval battle in which ships were going to be set on fire.
When Gladiator arrived with a planet-shattering bang in 2000, it had a profound impact on public perceptions of ancient Rome. It was, says Mariotti, the first time audiences had seen the Colosseum “come to life”. Before Gladiator, entrance to the Colosseum was free. After the film’s enormous success, he says, visitors had to pay.
And of course the film was littered with anachronisms of various sizes. Thumb up or down as a verdict on whether a gladiator should live or die? Never happened! Mariotti says that was an invention dating back to the 1920 film Madonnas and Men. Nor did gladiators don the muscled armour Russell Crowe sports as Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius. Unsurprisingly, their armour was much more simple and far less sexy. And although tigers were unleashed in the Colosseum (from beneath the sand, along with trees), they never fought gladiators and they weren’t chained up but were free to prowl around.
Mariotti owns a polaroid of Russell Crowe saluting with his arm straight out, just as the horseback statue of Marcus Aurelius does on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Scott, however, thought that it looked like Crowe was doing a Nazi salute. “And of course it does look like a Nazi salute,” says Mariotti, “because the Nazis copied it from the Italian fascists and the fascists copied it from ancient Roman statues.” So in the film, the salute was changed to a fist on the chest, a gesture that subsequent shows, such as BBC Two’s Rome, would then emulate, or half-emulate, landing on a mixture of the two.
In fact, depictions of ancient Rome seem to be in constant conversation with one another. Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic, looks tame by the standards of modern film, but it was a more accurate depiction. Scott watched Spartacus as a boy and it would have loomed large when he made Gladiator. “Spartacus,” says Mariotti, “was all about being historically accurate, as close to the real thing as possible. Gladiator was all about the baroque – exaggerating, making it wild and bombastic.”
People assume Mariotti must feel permanently frustrated, seeing his advice ignored in favour of historical inaccuracies, but he recognises that TV and film are actually attempting something similar to what the Roman games of the Colosseum were doing: providing astonishing spectacle, even if that means distorting reality. “The games of the gladiators in the Colosseum are the ancestors of Netflix and Amazon Prime and all these shows,” he says. And, like these shows, gladiatorial combat was expensive to produce. It made no financial sense for gladiators to die left, right and centre, given that so much money had been invested in preparing them for combat. Much like wrestlers, Mariotti says, it isn’t in a gladiator’s best interest to fight so furiously that they risk seriously wounding themselves.
Not all historical consultants relish the idea of having their reputation attached to films, though. Kathleen Coleman, who provided scholarly advice for Gladiator, tells me she didn’t mind being in the film’s credits but didn’t want to be listed as a historical consultant. She is simply thanked in the credits instead. Coleman isn’t angry that the film was historically inaccurate – she just didn’t want anyone to be misled. “To label the consultant with the word ‘historical’ might give the impression that the film was trying to be historically accurate, whereas clearly it wasn’t. In the end it was a successful film, whether the Romans would have recognised the world it created or not.”
For the forthcoming Gladiator II, which Scott is also directing, Mariotti is listed as a “historical researcher”. He had nothing to do with the director, however, and wasn’t heavily involved with the film. Scott didn’t want any historians on set, Mariotti says, because he had had a huge falling-out with many of them over his film Napoleon. When they criticised the director for that film’s inaccuracies, Scott said: “Get a life.” Mariotti always knew what he was letting himself in for. “In the interviews,” he says, “they were very clear they didn’t care about history. They didn’t want it to be historical. It was Ridley’s vision. And I was fine with that.”
Interestingly, while semi-fictional stories such as Gladiator can turn out to be even less accurate than expected, some shows based in a world of fantasy contain nuggets of real history. When Mariotti spoke to Iwan Rheon, who stars in Those About to Die and was also in Game of Thrones, he told the actor that the latter’s famous Battle of the Bastards was based on the Battle of Cannae, fought between the Romans and the Hannibal-led Carthaginians in 216BC. “With a lot of these great shows that we love,” he says, “we’re watching history and not even realising it.”
The appeal, he says, is that they take us somewhere we can never otherwise visit: the past. And this can only be a “blessing”, if it helps people become more curious about the ancient world. Like the crowds who flocked to the Colosseum, we want to be entertained, not given a strict history lesson. “I’ll watch Gladiator II,” says Mariotti, “and for two hours, I’ll be in ancient Rome. I’ll be a champion heroic gladiator. Then I’ll go back to being a boring historian.”
• Those About to Die is on Prime Video. Gladiator II will be in cinemas on 15 November
