Film Ridley Scott is making Gladiator 2

Scarecrow said:
Can you back this up with some source? They cared about ancestry, culture and social status a lot but I don’t think skin color was a big factor. At least I’ve never come across that.
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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Severan_dynasty_-_tondo.png

We have contemporaneous painting of Septimius Severus, you can decide for yourself whether he was black or not.

Sure, it's true that Romans cared most about ancestry, but they were also extremely xenophobic to cultures and races alien to them, first the Gauls and then the Germans/Parthians/Jews, so on and so forth. They did not discriminate strictly based on skin color but sub Saharan black people were so strange to them they might as well be from another planet, let alone becoming an emperor.
 
Frosty said:
Mary Beard is a good source for this.

Race is a social construct. The Roman world had a different conception of race to the modern world, whose ideas of race were created via African slavery.

The North African emperors probably would not be seen as having white European or Black African ethnicity.

The Romans were deeply racist, but in a very different sense to how we understand it today. So were the Greeks with barbarians as well.

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Thanks, will check it out.
 
Getting 4 star reviews from The Guardian and Empire magazine.

Also from another review -
If Scott’s Napoleon was about the impotence of Trump-like despots, Gladiator II is about the very real threat they pose despite their ineptitude.
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:devil:
 
Herman Toothrot said:
Irish people were Gladiators, right?
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This is correct. They were actually excellent fighters and always did the job as promised, but they had a tendency to turn up without their own weapons. They would borrow weapons from other gladiators and then, when the work was done, they would run off without returning them.
 
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