Anyone Romans have been portrayed in recent popular media with a bad i

[Guest SassinidAzatan]

I notice in recent popular media, the Romans have been portrayed very cruelly. From the comic book Asterix the Gaulle to various videogames to the films like Spartacus,Gladiator,and Centurian, Roman civilization has been portrayed as cruel and bloodthirsty colonists who enslaved people they met everywhere they went. In fact some of these various individual titles across the various mediums go as far as to portray the Romans as racist and the most evil people of their time!What do you think?

[Skywatcher]

I think it has to do with how we like to root for the underdog and the fact that the Romans were very rarely the underdog. That and the fact that all good films have good villains.

[GhostOfClayton]

Undoubtably, they were cruel, but they lived in cruel times.

 

I don't think they were particularly racist, but certainly felt superior. Take a couple of the Vindolanda tablets. One refers to the local Brits as 'Britunculi', which is most often translated as 'Wretched little Britons', but is more like a lazy lingusitic slur, a little like "Aussie", but with more derision. Also reported was a trader who complained that the military had beaten him, saying that he "wasn't even a local". The unspoken assumption is that it was both acceptable and not unusual for locals to be beaten by the Roman military.

[Ursus]

50 years ago many of the stories were about heroes, often Judeo-Christian in nature, struggling against "the tyranny of pagan Rome" as stated in the opening prologue of Kubrick's Spartacus. Rome was backwards, savage, godless, and Our Heroes fight for a better future based on Judeo-Christian faith or humanist values.

 

These days it seems like the violence of Ancient Rome is glorified for no other reason than to draw viewers in to special effects and fight scenes, in order to rake in money. However, if there is a message, it seems to be about Rome as a corrupt imperialist power, and parallels are drawn with varying levels of credulity to modern America.

Edited March 9, 2011 by Ursus

[Guest SassinidAzatan]

Undoubtably, they were cruel, but they lived in cruel times.

 

I don't think they were particularly racist, but certainly felt superior. Take a couple of the Vindolanda tablets. One refers to the local Brits as 'Britunculi', which is most often translated as 'Wretched little Britons', but is more like a lazy lingusitic slur, a little like "Aussie", but with more derision. Also reported was a trader who complained that the military had beaten him, saying that he "wasn't even a local". The unspoken assumption is that it was both acceptable and not unusual for locals to be beaten by the Roman military.

Hoever recent popular media portrays this to a very exaggerated level. For example, I seen several titles across various mediums showing the racist genocide o the Jews by the Romans well in fact in reality the Romans were simply trying to put down a resurrection nor did they massacre out racist beliefs.

 

Also the way they show Roman slavery in popular media just implies that the Romans were very racist towards non Roman slaves and mistreated them very badly.

 

And don't get me started on how popular media specifically Gladiator films portray the Roman public as loving blood and gore and death well in reality they were probably no more blood thirsty than modern spectators who was Boxing matches or MMA(seriously there was rarely any killings in Gladiator matches, most matches were point based and at least 80% of the Gladiators came out alive and still in good enough condition for the next fight).

 

I even heard claims that Romans loved seeing Germanic kids being raped by Baboons,dogs, and other wild animals and that bestial rape was a favorite Roman past time-could anyone clarify this?