Roman gladiators were not physically fit but rather were “quite fat”, a historian has said. Gladiators have gained a ...

As much as Hollywood characters love to yearn for the halcyon days of the Roman Republic, everyone in “Gladiator” is, in some way, connected to the Imperial Family of the Roman Empire. At the ...

Ridley Scott will always print the legend. As should be abundantly clear after “Napoleon,” “Robin Hood,” and “Kingdom of Heaven,” Ridley Scott is interested in history as a vehicle for studying ...

Neither Gladiator nor its cinematic sequel is particularly concerned with historical fact. For one thing, the emperor Marcus Aurelius had no intention of restoring the republic. Gladiatorial contests ...

The release of Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II” in 2025 plunged audiences back into the cinematic excitement of the Roman amphitheater so vividly captured in its predecessor, “Gladiator.” As someone who ...

We tend to think about people in the past as more prudish and strict about sex and gender. But really people have been experimenting with sex and gender for as long as humans have existed. In the ...

Dr. Racette-Campbell, a classics professor at the University of Winnipeg, is the author of “The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus.” For a modern audience, it’s tempting to valorize the ...

Is Gladiator 2 historically accurate? It's the question on everyone's lips – not out of genuine academic interest, for the most part, but because it's so easy to anticipate exactly how director Ridley ...

Kelcie Mattson is a Senior Features author at Collider. Based in the Midwest, she also contributes Lists, reviews, and television recaps. A lifelong fan of niche sci-fi, epic fantasy, Final Girl ...