Sharks in the arena? Gladiator II's real history and historical accuracy explained

As well as human opponents in the arena, Lucius faces a pack of baboons. Charioteers? They’re replaced by a gladiator astride a rhinoceros.

Not only is there a naval battle reenactment (real) in the Colosseum (questionable), but there are sharks in the water ready to feast on the unfortunates who fall in (definitely not – and we break down the full accuracy of this spectacle below).

It’s treading the line of the fantastic – and yet, there is a lot of real history here, if you know where to look.

Gladiator II plot: what happens in the movie?

Here’s what we know so far: Lucius (Paul Mescal), nephew of Gladiator’s emperor Commodus, has made his home in Numidia in northern Africa, where he lives an idyllic life with his beloved until the Romans attack.

The Numidians lose to Pedro Pascal’s General Acacius, Lucius’s wife is slain (“husband to a murdered wife”: check), and Lucius himself is taken as a prisoner of war, bought by Denzel Washington’s shady businessman Macrinus, and whisked off to gladiator camp in shackles.

From there, it looks very much like a reskin of Gladiator, with Lucius – revealed to be Maximus’s son – seeming to lead a rebellion from within the arena, and Joaquin Phoenix’s deranged emperor Commodus replaced with a tantalisingly terrible two-for-one deal in the form of co-emperors Caracalla and Geta (Fred Hechinger and Joseph Quinn). In a verbatim moment that may yet echo through eternity, Lucius even vows to never be controlled by another, “in this life or the next”.

So far, so Gladiator circa 2000. Huge spoilers for Gladiator II follow below this video with Associate Professor Alison Futrell, a historian of ancient Rome and the gladiatorial games, whom I spoke to for our Gladiator II: historian reaction. You should watch that before you scroll down.

Is Gladiator II a true story?

No, though it is set around a handful of events that really did happen, in different ways and over a much longer timeframe: the murders of Geta, and then Caracalla, and then the surprise accession and subsequent murder of Macrinus.

The rest is fabricated: the real Lucius of the first Gladiator died as a child, and the real Lucilla didn’t even outlive her brother Commodus. Pedro Pascal’s General Acacius? He is a complete fiction, as is his marriage to Lucilla and his rebellion against Caracalla and Geta.

The real power player here is the man who at face value is the gruff-but-benevolent Proximo of the piece – Denzel Washington’s Macrinus. Unlike Acacius, Macrinus was a real Roman, and unlike Proximo, is not benevolent in the slightest.

Gladiator II real history: here’s what should have happened, according to history

There is precisely one year that Gladiator II can conceivably begin, and that is AD 211. We know this because the two emperors depicted in this movie, Caracalla and Geta, only ruled together for a matter of months.

On his deathbed in February AD 211, their father, the emperor Septimus Severus, named Caracalla and Geta as joint co-emperors. The trouble is, they just couldn’t get along.

“From reading the ancient sources, we have the impression that as teenagers Caracalla and Geta are kind of off-the-wall in their behaviour, running amok and indulging their pleasures and their passions in adolescent kinds of ways,” says Futrell.

“There's a lot of tension between the two, and moments where their father has to step in and calm things down.”

Without their father, relations between the two brothers went from bad to worse. At one point, they considered splitting the Roman empire along the Bosporus – and had they done that, it might have saved Geta’s life, because in December AD 211, Caracalla has him murdered.

Why did Caracalla murder Geta?

Gladiator II suggests that Caracalla is convinced to murder Geta by Macrinus, a deed that seems all the more warped as Gladiator II paints Caracalla as the younger and more childlike brother – described by Geta’s actor Joseph Quinn as possessing “cognitive erosion”.

In real history, Caracalla was not just the older sibling, sources have portrayed him as domineering and extremely capable. And when he had Geta murdered, the real Macrinus had nothing to do with it. Worse, the historical Caracalla killed his brother in the presence of their mother, Julia Domna (whose presence is absent from the film).

“Geta is clinging to her skirts screaming for help and calling upon the woman who bore him,” says Futrell.

“She's unable to fend off her older son, and she is wounded in the effort of trying to do so. In the wake of that, she's forced to pretend to be happy. She's not able to grieve her younger son because of the overwhelming authority of Caracalla.”

Why the real Caracalla did this is lost to history, though it’s not out of character: he had a lust for power, and once tried to poison his own father to hasten his accession.

He went on to rule for six years, and for most of this time he was despised by the Senate. Caracalla, perhaps, didn’t care – he was focused on military glory.

“He longed to be the new Alexander the Great,” writes Jonny Wilkes for HistoryExtra. “Obsessed with the Macedonian empire builder, Caracalla tried to mimic him in every way.”

Does Macrinus kill Caracalla?

The real Macrinus certainly thought about it, and he may have even orchestrated Caracalla’s death – but he wasn’t the one holding the knife.

Gladiator II paints Macrinus as a former gladiator with a grudge, owing to his past as a slave to Marcus Aurelius. That’s a fiction, but it is true that Macrinus was a man of humble beginnings, who was elevated to the powerful position of praetorian prefect – a pre-eminent position among the Praetorian Guard, who served as bodyguards to the emperor – during Caracalla’s solo reign.

“Macrinus supposedly doesn't have much of an education in terms of law and policy in Roman tradition,” says Futrell.

“Some of our sources do think of him as someone who is trying his best, someone who is not being presented as utterly evil or unprincipled or immoral through-and-through, as others near the centre of power are.”

Yet by the end, the real Macrinus was among those conspiring to rid the Romans of Caracalla.

“He completely off the wall at this point and ruining the empire”, explains Futrell. Not only that, the real Macrinus may have acted with a sense of divine purpose.

“Supposedly there's this prophecy about him, some sort of horoscope that he's been given, that both he and his son [Diadumenian] will hold imperial power,” says Futrell.

“He's aware of that. And the idea that destiny has been outlined for him by divine forces of the universe may present him with a different kind of motivation.”

This is where Gladiator II and real history align. After Caracalla’s death in AD 217 (in real history, at the hands of a disgruntled soldier while on campaign), Macrinus really does become emperor of Rome.

How does Macrinus die?

It’s not in a river at Lucius’s hands. Instead, the real Macrinus fell foul of a conspiracy mounted by female relatives of Caracalla and Geta. He was emperor of Rome for barely a year – and he never set foot in the Eternal City.

The first threat of conspiracy came from Caracalla’s mother, Julia Domna – whom Macrinus had arrested. She starved herself to death while his prisoner, unable to avenge her son.

The mantle was taken up her sister, Julia Maesa, who spread the clever rumour that her 14-year-old grandson Elagabalus was in fact Caracalla’s illegitimate child. Macrinus was not popular with the army; Caracalla – for all his faults, and notwithstanding the soldier who stabbed him – was well-liked by many in the army , and his successor had won no favour by being implicated in his murder. Elagabalus , a youth allegedly of Caracalla’s blood, was an ideal talisman.

It wasn’t long before soliders of Legio III Gallica proclaimed Elagabalus as emperor. History sometimes remembers him better as Heliogabalus, possibly the first transgender emperor.

In reality, Macrinus fled in AD 218, after his forces were trounced at the battle of Antioch by those backing Elagabalus . He and his son were caught and executed a short while later. Emulating Caracalla’s treatment of Geta, Elagabalus issued a damnatio memoriae on Macrinus, wiping his name from public record.

Who was the real Lucius?

The real Lucius may not have lived to adulthood, nor was his father a gladiator called Maximus, but he was definitely Lucilla’s son. Just not the one you might think.

The historical Lucilla, who was the second daughter of the emperor Marcus Aurelius and sister to emperor Commodus, died around the time of the first film. She married twice; the first time was in AD 163/164 to Lucius Verus, adoptive son of and co-emperor to her father, Marcus Aurelius. They had three children, two daughters and a son, who was also called Lucius Verus. This Lucius, who died in childhood cAD 169, perhaps would have stood to inherit the imperial throne as the Lucius of the original Gladiator might have.

It was also in AD 169 that Lucilla’s first husband died. Not long for widowhood, she was married to the general Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus that same year, and with him she had a son: Lucius Aurelius Commodus Pompeianus.

This Lucius did survive into the year that Gladiator II would appear to be set – AD 211 – at which time he may have been executed by Caracalla. Little is known definitively about his life, and the sources are unclear.

There’s an intriguing final parallel between this second historical Lucius and the Lucius of Gladiator II. The film names Maximus as Lucius’s father. And who is one of the historical figures that serve as inspiration for the ahistoric Maximus? Yes, it’s the real Lucius’s father, Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus.

Did the Romans really stage naval battles in the Colosseum?

Yes and no: re-enactments of naval battles were a part of Roman entertainment, but whether they took place in the Colosseum is a point of debate.

These naval battles had a proper name – naumachia – and were staged as recreations of famous sea battles.

They long predate the era of Gladiator II. Consul-turned-dictator Julius Caesar held one, in a shallow basin that was specially dug and fed from the river Tiber – that’s the first one that we know of. So too did his successor – the first Roman emperor, Augustus – whose naumachia replicated the battle of Salamis, in which the ancient Greeks defied the odds to crush the Persian empire.

Augustus’s naumachia was put on in a basin fed by a specially built aqueduct. In the later emperor Claudius’s reign, he dispensed with any form of arena altogether, choosing to host his 100-ship, 19,000-man naumachia on an existing lake. And so it fell to Nero in AD 57 – according to Roman historian Cassius Dio – to put on the first naumachia inside an amphitheatre.

Where does this leave Gladiator II’s Colosseum naumachia? Potentially high and dry, say Futrell.

“There's some indication that they were doing some kind of water events in the Colosseum, but there are some limitations there. One of which is: how do they do this when they have substantial substructures underneath the arena floor? How do they make it watertight? How do they get the water in there? How do they drain it out?

“Impressive scholars have discovered ways in which it could be done. But the question I've always had about the Colosseum is in terms of size. It's just not that big of a performance space when you're trying to bring in ships that are manned by rowers and so forth.”

If we are to believe the historian Suetonius, emperor Domitian staged a naumachia in the Colosseum around AD 85 – which would have been before the substructures were built.

What about the sharks? The animal inaccuracies of Gladiator II

Adding extra peril to Gladiator II’s naumachia is the presence of sharks in the water, ready to feast on anyone who happens to fall overboard. If you’re thinking that this might seem to be a point at which the film does – to wheel out a trope – jump the shark, you are right.

“Roman scholars knew about terrifying monsters of the deep,” says Futrell, noting that these monsters included whales and sharks, “though I haven't encountered anyone talking about the possibility of corralling these and moving them to Roman performance spaces at all.”

Likewise, the rhinoceros is far-fetched. Animals were part of the games in ancient Rome, and men did fight against them – but only in dedicated wild animal hunts.

The men who took part in these contests did not always do so willingly. Some were either venatores (trained hunters) but others were bestiarii – condemned men, tossed into the arena with little training or armour, whose bouts were little more than a form of glorified execution.

As for gladiators turning those animals into allies – or indeed riding a rhinoceros into battle like a living, breathing (and probably quite irate) chariot – there is no record whatsoever.

Were Caracalla and Geta white?

But perhaps the most historically significant inaccuracy is something less obviously egregious: the racial and ethnic heritage of Caracalla and Geta, at a time – Futrell notes – when there were a lot of Africans and others holding prominent positions of power in Roman empire.

Those included their father, the emperor Septimius Severus, who hailed from north Africa, and their mother Julia Domna, a powerful political player in her own right, who came from Syria.

“The mixed-race aspect of Caracalla is something that's commented about in some of our sources,” says Futrell. “Now, our sources don't like Caracalla, so they say he shows the worst aspects of each of these people that he springs from.”

Even so, Futrell believes that the “visually striking” pallor of Caracalla and Geta as depicted in Gladiator II misses the mark.

“We were kind of disappointed. This is an opportunity to show diversity within the imperial power, and [the filmmakers] don't seem to have chosen that pathway.”

Gladiator II is in cinemas now. For more content like this, check out our best historical movies of all time, the historical TV series and films streaming now, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week.