The first season was awesome, but IMO second season was already pretty bad.

Little Wars TV did a deep dive into the production of Rome and where the five season arc would have gone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cIVJD1cmbk

Unless they moved some things forward because they knew it was ending ending, I agree. As much as part of me wants to see where some of that goes, I know it wouldn’t have been good. Not like the rest of it was.

Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.

You really didn't want to see Titus Pullo fighting the Picts??

> another emperor would usually reunite the empire

Well he did, in the 530-550s to a significant extent. That of course didn’t work out because of the plague, climate change and other factors.

I keep reading this online and I find it to be nonsense. Over a thousand years earlier the Romans developed all the conquered lands. They built massive infrastructure projects: roads, ports, aqueducts, buildings. And brought sanitation and education. Ghengis Khan only brought peace and trade networks, something Rome also brought with them.

Next up, how Carthaginians were actually the good guys and child sacrifice was not that bad.

Hmm. Interesting; that surprises me. Enough that I did some googling: here's a quote from reddit that sounds more like what I'd expect:

  > Japan has by far the best combat sports audience in the world. Most of the time they are so quiet that you can literally hear the corners talking and even the ring shifting as the fighters move around. But then when something cool happens they go crazy.

If the Romans regularly scribbled graffiti about gladiator fights and their outcomes, I would expect them to shout during them as well. It feels to me that such behavior naturally dovetails together: excited, rowdy, norm-breaking.

Check out old Pride events (or any older Japanese MMA.) Everybody is quiet (with a few isolated shouts of encouragement) until someone does something heroic, and then there's a polite and energetic round of applause. The only reason that Zuffa UFC sounds like it does is because they intentionally tried to steal audiences from US professional wrestling. They also spent years standing people up almost immediately when they were jiu-jitsuing each other because the wrestling audience would just start booing aggressively after about a minute, the result being that the UFC were very kickboxer and greco-roman focused and some real killers had all their weapons taken away from them by UFC's application of their "Unified Rules."

Japanese MMA was founded and branded by people who were saying that Japanese professional wrestling was too theatrical, and Zuffa UFC was branded by people who were saying that professional wrestling wasn't violent enough (if anything, they were competing with "backyard" wrestling.) UFC has improved since, but imo that's because it became a monopoly and had to absorb all the other MMA audiences (and fighters), and the wrestling fans who didn't get bored with MMA eventually got less stupid.

> to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.

I also don't think there's any safe assumption of how Colosseum crowds behaved other than how contemporary narratives say they did. I agree that life and death brings an atmosphere of seriousness that wouldn't often exist at the Circus.

Yes, Bernard Shaw used to complain in his reviews that no one listened to the music and constantly talked, as concerts were a social event, and you promenaded around.

SOme history here too https://ledbooks.org/proceedings2019/tag/silence/

So I think this backs my point - when she's referring to Opera, she's referring to a modern conception of opera, not an 18th century concept of opera. I agree that's more normal sounding.

And even then, everyone else is pretty much just stuck with wondering who to believe. Nobody has time to do their own research to that depth, and nobody is around to give any first-hand accounts. Everything we know about the past is a story told from a partiular point of view, supported by cherry-picked artifacts, with varying agendas behind it.

I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie. How could I expect that when I went into the theater to be entertained for 1-2 hours?

I think if someone wants to know more about ancient Rome, it's on them to spend the time learning about it outside of an entertainment venue.

I mean.. we suspect there's a level of fabrication by early Roman historians. In your specific quote - it's more that record keeping (to that detail) happened after-the-fact and based on oral traditions. Just take a look at Suetonius and how he describes his sources of information, things along the lines of "well, this is hearsay but I heard it from my relative who knew XYZ and therefor I think it's credible".

Framing the uncertainty around early record keeping is a good. Similarly, the second Servile war in historic documents matches the first Servile war almost like Star Wars ep7 matches ep4. That _hints_ at fabrication. So if they fabricate data in one place.. :)

> she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts

Did she,in the book, give a reason why the list can't possibly be right?

The same sense of muddled analysis (which I also found to be extremely off-putting) comes through in this interview:

> There's a lot of myths that you need to bust about the gladiatorial games, particularly in the center of Rome in the Colosseum. I think everyone's image of that is in some way based on modern movies on "Gladiator I," "Gladiator II." In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. And I think the thing that, for me, the biggest mistake they made is to imagine how the audience behaved. We do tend to think that somehow the audience must have gone wild, they were there because they wanted blood lust, they were erupting in passion, in anger, saying "Kill him," or "Save him," or whatever. Everything that we can tell about the audience from Roman sources themselves suggests that actually it was much more controlled than anything you see are in the movies. For start, it was completely sex-segregated, the women sat separately from the men. But more than that, everybody came dressed quite posh, you had to wear a toga to go. Now a toga is the official Roman dress for Roman men, but it's worn when you are doing something official, you don't wear it to the local bar in the evening. To go to the gladiatorial games, that was kind of official, and you had to wear your toga. Everybody sat not just segregated by sex, but they sat in rank order. Senators by law, the top rank of Roman society, on the front rows, and then the next rank down just above them, until you got to the very back where you found the slaves and the women. Now I think that we somehow have to just overturn our sense that it was kind of mad, "losing control" going on. I think it was probably more like an evening at the opera than an evening at a football match.

If you're going to make an assertion that seems absurd on its face ("The large crowds of wine-drunk plebs were subdued and mild mannered whilst observing blood sport!"), you should offer up evidence that actually supports your assertion. Her reasoning appears to have been: Men and women sat separately. The rich got preferred seating. You had to dress up (in a toga). QED, the atmosphere was like an evening at the opera. Huh?