Obvious Historical Errors on Television

Caesar gets stabbed to death by assassins. - APRIL FOOL !!!

 

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What do you think, @furryfrog02 ?

 

I hereby declare myself Empress of Rome

 

"Veni, vidi, vici !", says Crispina Kermit, Glorious Empress of Rome !!!

 

A BIG pet peeve of mine with a lot of films and TV programmes that are set in ancient Rome is the common trope that Christians were a fairly populous trodden down minority in the 1st century. According to the biblical scholar Bart Ehrman by the end of the 1st century there may have been up to three thousand or so Christians empire wide, mostly in Asia Minor, meeting quietly in each other's homes. Christians were far less numerous than the Amish are today in the US, but yet Hollywood would have us believe they were plentiful enough to be a huge problem for the empire early on.


Brian Blessed as a persecuted Christian in the epic 1984 mini series The Last Days of Pompeii. There is no evidence of any Christians having lived in Pompeii.

And who can forget the Christians swarming all over Rome in 1951's Quo Vadis.



It makes for compelling film viewing, but very bad history.

 

I have my doubts about the historical accuracy of this scene.

 

Cast your doubts aside! It is true and quite accurate! This was clearly documented in The Book of Brian, Chapter 82, Verses 16-73.

Best to you,
Brian (great grandson 19th generation)

 

As long as we're talking about Bible movies, one thing that irks me is when Romans are depicted speaking Latin in Greek-speaking countries. Latin was used in Italy, Gaul, Britannia, Hispania, Dacia and Africa. Everywhere else consisted of the former empire of Alexander the Great, the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, and had been Greek-speaking for centuries. Every Christian text was written in Greek.

In this movie, for example, Pilate speaks to Jesus in Latin:



He would have used Greek to communicate with the Greek-speaking locals. After all, what language is on these coins?

 

Question: If the Procurators, Prefects, Proconsuls, etc. were sent as Governors from ROME... would they be more apt to speak Latin as their mother tongue?

I do understand they were probably schooled in local languages, and that the lower echelons probably spoke the local languages. And, yes agreed, no way Jesus probably spoke Latin.

 

Most inhabitants of the Roman Empire were bilingual or multilingual but most inhabitants could NOT speak Latin, which was spoken in the rural, western part of the empire. Romans spoke a mother-tongue (Latin, Aramaic, Phrygean, Coptic, or whatnot) and also Greek, which was truly the lingua franca of the day. It's analogous to the situation we have here at CT. Jochen's mother tongue is German, Q's is French, for others it is Spanish, Arabic or another language, but we all use English here as our lingua franca.

Pilate would have been very skilled at Greek, if not fluent, even though Latin may have been the language he learned as an infant.

 

Most Hollywood movies/ TV series are way off in historical accuracy. There are some exceptions, where a movie had it right. Some examples:
Waterloo : Rod Steiger as Napoleon 1970
Bridge Too Far: Robert Redford/ Maximilian Schell/Hardy Kruger
Hannibal: Victor Mature (only flaw) had lots of War Elephants in Battle scenes) few survived Alpine trek.
Cromwell

Relay bad historically...but highly entertaining movies....
Gladiator
The Patriot
Genghiz Khan (Omar Sharif)
Braveheart

 

I watched the first episode of that Commodus series on Netflix and couldn't get past the hysterical grasping at the most salacious reading from each source and then magnifying them by a hundred. Faustina running off to rut with Cassius, Commodus as a pretty boy in his mid twenties before his father's death, Faustina dramatically drinking poison in camp directly after seeing Marcus after her 'affair'. The whole thing was a mess, comically supported by 'historians' doing their talking head routines .

Gladiator is nonsense, but at least it had some merit in pacing and drama. Even without all the faults, the Commodus program was bad melodrama at best .

 

The professor Alan Millard, a scholar of Near Eastern languages and archaeology, wrote in his book Discoveries from the time of Jesus :
“In the course of their daily duties the Roman governors certainly spoke Greek, and Jesus may have answered Pilate’s questions at his trial in Greek.”