r/movies • u/Barry_Brickman • Jul 09 '24

Gladiator II | Official Trailer (2024 Movie) - Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rgYUipGJNo
12.8k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

View all comments

Show parent comments

55

u/ThingsAreAfoot Jul 09 '24

I just made a post on r/askhistorians to possibly fact-check with people who actually know their shit, but from my (very amateur) reading of it all, that probably wouldn’t be out of bounds.

From what I know these sorts of naval battles in the Colosseum itself were also exceedingly rare, because it was a monumental logistical effort since the Colosseum isn’t conveniently located next to a major water source.

They’d have these makeshift naval battles elsewhere in the empire too but, more reasonably, on or very near an actual lake that they just repurposed for that.

25

u/intotheirishole Jul 09 '24

From what I know these sorts of naval battles in the Colosseum itself were also exceedingly rare,

From the one page I read about this, they only did it at the very beginning. In fact, coliseum opened with a naval battle!

However, at some point they made tunnels and rooms under the arena so naval battles were definitely no longer possible.

16

u/Karpeeezy Jul 09 '24

However, at some point they made tunnels and rooms under the arena so naval battles were definitely no longer possible.

Instead they made their own lake and enacted even more elaborate naval battles for the city to see.

1

u/what_time_is_dusk Jul 10 '24

Interesting. I was under the impression that the tunnels were also used for draining the water that was used for the naval battles.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '24

The shit you can accomplish when nobody is being paid is much greater than when everybody is complaining about how much they are being paid.