Tell about Gladiator ?

Some historians think the sign for death may have actually been the thumbs up, while a closed fist with two fingers extended, a thumbs down, or even a waved handkerchief might have signaled mercy

The film has been widely credited for reigniting interest in films about Ancient Greek and Roman Culture. The remake of “Ben-Hur” has been widely credited for doing the exact opposite.

Whatever gesture was used, it was typically accompanied by ear-piercing cries of either “let him go!” or “slay him!” If the crowd willed it, the victorious gladiator would deliver a grisly coup de grace by stabbing his opponent between the shoulder blades or through the neck and into the heart.

It was rumored that Mel Gibson was originally offered the role of Maximus, but he turned it down because he felt he was too old to play the part.

Ridley Scott denies this, insisting that Russell Crowe was his first and only choice for the role.

Ridley Scott was convinced to do the movie after producers showed him a copy of Jean Leon Gerome’s 1872 painting Pollice Verso, which depicted a gladiator awaiting a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down from the coliseum crowd. “That image spoke to me of the Roman Empire in all its glory and wickedness,” said Scott. “I knew right then and there I was hooked.”

Commodus and Lucilla were real people. In 182 AD, Commodus survived an assassination attempt by Lucilla. Those family dinners must have been intense.

In reality, emperor Marcus Aurelius died of the plague and Commodus ascended to the throne.

He was loved by the army and the lower classes until his megalomaniacal behavior forced his advisors to hire a champion wrestler named Narcissus to strangle him to death.

As a matter of fact, in the first draft of the script, dated April 4th, 1998, the protagonist was named Narcissus.

The real Commodus was known as the “Gladiator Emperor” because he would often make appearances in the arena to take down wild animals and other challengers.

he also cruelly brought cripples or amputees into the arena and clubbed them to death, turning the populace against him.

Often viewed as the working class heroes of the Roman society, the gladiators have surely seen their fair share of screen time in our modern-day popular media.

he charged Rome an exorbitant fee for these appearances, which devalued Roman currency and precipitated the fall of Rome.

However, beyond grand spectacles and bloody feats, the very nature of gladiatorial contests alluded to the ‘institutionalization of violence‘ ingrained in the Roman society since its tribal days.

The forest near Farnham, England that doubled as Germania during the battle between the Roman Legions and the German hordes had been scheduled for “deforestation” by the Royal Forestry Commission

So, without further ado, let us take a gander at twelve such incredible things you should know about the Roman gladiators that go beyond the realm of glitzy fiction to account for brutal reality.

As part of the production, they built a 52-foot high portion of the first tier of the Colosseum measuring about one-third the circumference of the original. The rest of the arena was a digital recreation.

1) Munera – the funerary contests that gave way to gladiatorial combats

The wounds on Russell Crowe’s face after the opening battle scene were real. He received them when his horse was startled and backed him into some tree branches.

In what might have been the precursor to latter day gladiatorial combats, a nobleman named Brutus Pera made his death wish in 264 BC that his two sons should pay for combats that were to take place in the marketplace to mark his funeral.

Crowe suffered multiple injuries on set including an aggravated Achilles tendon, a broken foot, a cracked hip bone, popped bicep tendons, and losing all feeling in his right forefinger for two years following a sword fight.

In less than hundred years, such contests became pretty commonplace, and the combatants were generally the slaves of the organizer. In fact, in 174 BC, one of these munera (a ritualistic service dedicated to the dead) involved 74 men pitted against each other in a gruesome event that took place over three days.

Only 32 pages of the script had been completed when shooting began. To be fair, they were 32 awesome pages. Double spaced and everything.

And as time went by, the munera expanded in scopes to include spectacles like the venatio – which entailed the hunting of over hundreds of exotic animals across the Roman lands by the trained venatores.