|
by Ben Potter
May 23, 2025
from
ClassicalWisdom Website
"It
will shock you how much it didn't happen."
That's a line from a famous scene in the TV show Mad
Men, but it was what sprung to mind for me when a friend
asked me my thoughts on Gladiator II last autumn.
No disrespect to director Ridley Scott, whose original
Gladiator film remains a beloved 21st century classic
(although obviously its not without historical accuracy
issues of its own!).
Yet it remains a great irony that so many swords and
sandals films feel the need to take liberty with the
facts, when the real history is so fascinating and
compelling.
But what exactly do we mean by real history, when
dealing with the ancients?
Of course, we all know figures like Athena and Zeus
belong firmly in the mythology camp. Yet history can
become a mythology unto itself, a scaffolding around
true events which obscures our view.
Today's article explores how modern perceptions of real
events have been shaped by everyone from Stanley Kubrick
to William Shakespeare, and how even the ancient sources
themselves have reliability issues of their own…
But I'm sure none are quite as bad as what you'd get
from Hollywood!
Nero fiddling as Rome burns.
The solidarity of dozens of men claiming 'I'm Spartacus'.
Caesar looking into the eyes of his surrogate son as the
blade of betrayal sliced open his mortal flesh while he pathetically
gasps, through a mouthful of blood and spittle, the words:
"et tu Brute"...
The mnemonic power of these images of the Ancient
world are well-known to us all.
We shouldn't, however, thank the likes of
Plutarch or Tacitus for such vivid portrayals, but
Mervyn LeRoy, Stanley Kubrick and William
Shakespeare...
Modern artists like these are not responsible for the
immortalization of well-documented facts, but rather for giving us a
history which is undeniably more effective at infiltrating the
collective-consciousness.
Just to set the record straight: the fiddle hadn't yet been invented
in the 1st century AD, and Tacitus, an eye-witness to the
blaze, reports that Nero made considerable efforts to counter its
deadly effects.
Moreover, we've no idea as to the exact dialogue from the revolting
slaves during the Third Servile War (73-71 BC), and the
famous 'et tu' was considered an anachronism within a century of the
event itself.
So,
What to make of all this?
Is this important?
Do we care?
Does the truth get in the way of a good yarn?
Perhaps talk of this sort is enough to get you a
little hot under the collar.
Well... if so, let's hope that this source-based
approach to the value of authenticity takes some of that heat and
uses it to shed a little light.
The words of the aptly named professor Donald Watt are a good
place to start our investigation:
"The historian's main concern is accuracy;
the producer of film and television is concerned with
entertainment. The unspoken premise of the first proposition is
that to be accurate is to be dull.
The unspoken premise of the opposed
proposition is that to be entertaining it is necessary to
distort or misrepresent".
'Balderdash!' the purist in us screams...
Well... let's compare notes.
Livy and Polybius both wrote of
Hannibal's crossing of the Alps.
However, whilst Polybius was in his late
teens at the time of the Carthaginian general's death, Livy
would not even be a twinkle in his father's eye for another 120
years.
Here's the contemporary account:
"The summits of the Alps, and the parts near
the tops of the passes, are all quite treeless and bare, owing
to the snow lying there continuously both winter and summer.
But parts halfway up both sides are wooded
and generally inhabitable".
And here's Livy, writing 170 years after
the fact:
"There were no tree trunks or roots by which
a man could hoist himself up, only smooth ice and thawing snow,
over which they were always rolling...
Four days were spent at the cliff, and the
animals nearly perished of starvation: for the mountaintops are
all particularly bare and such grasses as do grow are buried
beneath the snow.
Lower down one comes to valleys, and slopes
bathed in sunlight, and streams, and near them are woods, and
places more suitable for human habitation".
To put this plagiarized and embellished passage
into a modern time-frame, it would be like one of us picking up a
pen one lazy afternoon and writing with vivid veracity about the
annexation of Texas in 1845.
And although we often give the ancients a pass when it comes to the
art of historiography, Livy wasn't writing during the pioneering
days of Herodotus.
Indeed, by his time the genre was already
well-established. More to the point, the man he uses as his
'inspiration', Polybius, wrote a largely factual and, often,
disinterested work.
In other words,
Livy couldn't say that he didn't know any
better viz-á-viz the presentation of the cold, hard facts.
That said, facts, no matter what the temperature,
may not have been Livy's raison d'etre:
there's no reason to think he was trying to
pull a fast one.
As a product of the Golden Age of Latin
Literature, and a contemporary of men like Virgil,
Horace and Ovid, he may have been much more concerned
that his prose was purple than precise.
The underlying question that we're left with then is:
'Who is better, Polybius or Livy...?
Despite my own personal love for Polybius, I
cannot find any ammunition with which to argue that he is more
entertaining or accessible than the text of Livy.
Meanwhile it's hard to deny the allure of Livy's
work.
Therefore, we have to ask yet another question:
Do we 'learn' more with an entertaining tale?
Livy
Well... possibly, though possibly not. To be accurate we should say
we learn less, but learn more easily and swiftly.
So,
Where does such thinking lead us?
Shall we watch Braveheart to learn about
British history?
Or read Dan Brown to learn about Da Vinci?
The very notion repulses.
These two examples are perhaps perverse extremes. There are other,
more moderate illustrations such as HBO's Rome. It has all the main
historical events in the right place and looks astonishingly good,
but it too must be taken with a pinch of salt.
It seems that Professor Watt's proclamation about the
incompatibility of truth and entertainment is not without its
supporting evidence...
But, in our humble opinion,
there is still a place for the trustworthy
historian.
It is because we have such confidence in his
or her credibility that we are overawed by the truth they
communicate... and so the long dead world comes alive on the
page.
Take, for instance,
Thucydides' accounts of the
Athenian plague or
Polybius' of the
inadequacy and pomposity of Roman social climbers.
They resound strongly, simply because they are
believed.
So while I would always advocate reading the more accurate source, I
feel it is still better to read something rather than nothing.
People should enjoy history, not neglect it on the bedside cabinet.
Whatever the source and whatever the motivation, it is hard to argue
with the words of a man who knew a thing or two about writing,
William Faulkner:
"Read, read, read.
Read everything - trash, classics, good and
bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as
an apprentice and studies the master.
Read...!"
|
