Regarding blacks and ancient Egypt, I can categorically state (because we have a myriad of evidence about the subject) that ancient Egyptians were not Sub-Saharan blacks, and this is well known to anybody in academia and not a matter of serious controversy. There are no doubts or anything dubious about this, we're talking about one of the few things about antiquity that we know beyond any shadow of a doubt.
I also agree than Denzel Washington is a great pick for that movie, great actor and also not an anachronistic pick because there were black people in ancient Rome, not many but enough so that they weren't an incredible sight.
The Sub-Saharan Czarist general Gannibal, great grandfather of Russia's national poet Pushkin, wound up in St. Petersburg at the court of Peter the Great because he impressed the Russian ambassador to the Sultan's court in Constantinople that he was really something and that the Czar would appreciate him. Presumably, he'd previously impressed other people to get to himself to the imperial court in Constantinople from where ever it was he had started out: Ethiopia? Lake Chad?
He was Ethiopian, trafficked as slave by the Mamaluks.
It was a common trope between XVIII and XIX century: both Piedmont (Michele Amatore, i.e. Michael Amar, ethiopian and trafficked in Sudan) and Prussia had ex slave in their army.
In those days there weren't many actors with Strode's impressive physique. He was a great actor, too. I enjoyed him in the Westerns he did. This was not woke casting, either--if anything, Hollywood has underplayed the presence of blacks in the old west. Something like a quarter of the cowboys in the 1870s-80s were black. It was a low-status occupation
Strode was excellent in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." John Ford was so antagonistic towards John Wayne during the filming that the Duke and Strode almost came to blows. Ford had a mean side to him.
When the elderly John Ford was dying, Strode moved into his house and took care of him for a half year.
Like I said recently, if Quentin Tarantino ever wants to make a true-life biopic about his favorite subject, Hollywood tough guy character actors, Woody Strode would be my nominee.
Strode and Wayne were probably Ford's best friends at the end of his life. Strode was almost a roommate at the end of Ford's life. Wayne still had an active career while Strode was not as busy. Woody Strode was born fifty years too soon or he would have had a more brilliant career.
Ford made Strode a bigger star by insisting that he play the lead in "Sergeant Rutledge." The studios wanted Sidney Portier or Harry Belafonte to play the lead but Ford held firm on Strode. In Strode's words, Ford told the studios that Portier and Belafonte were "not tough enough to do what I want Sergeant Rutledge to be." And another quote of Strode's- "John Ford put classic words in my mouth...You never seen a Negro come off a mountain like John Wayne before."
In the Heston/De Mille Epic *The Ten Commandments* the first half of the film has a scene where Ann Baxter gets jealous over the way a returning Charlton Heston as Moses has the very sub-Saharan Ethiopian allied Queen (who is also very undressed) making eyes at him. Followed by a De Mille special: a spectacular dance sequence by the black African allied tribe for the Egyptian court.
Everybody who's looked into it even a little that Sub-Saharan blacks had nothing to do with Ancient Egypt. Much like everyone knows a tranny is just a sick dude in a dress.
But both are a shibboleth test for commies: are you willing to say the opposite of what you know to be true? In other words, for the Party, are you willing to become a liar?
The people on the inside of the Deep State know how to lie and don't care. It's all so 1984.
> "In opera, for instance, singing ability is far more important than visual authenticity"
This is something of tradition going back to the 1960s starting IIRC with Jessye Norman. She was a pretty good singer, but unfortunately her success set off a hysterical competition among more recent opera producers to cast the The Next Jessye, or The First ______ [Asian or Queer or All-Black Cast or All-Female Production or whatever] Opera, which has led to some absurd and degraded opera, not only because even opera has limits on visual authenticity (there's a reason they spend plenty on set designers), but also because a lot of the people they use to mount these monstrosities don't actually sing that well. Hiring and promoting black singers with powerful pipes but no feeling for nuance is a particular bugbear.
I wrote a review of "Lincoln" asserting that Daniel Day-Lewis was a lock to win his third Best Actor Oscar, which he did. I was confident because I'd seen all the other nominees except Denzel in Flight. Months later I watched Flight and realized I had got lucky.
All I can add is that "Gladiator" is in my top three of all time favorite movies; the first 20 minutes are cinematic perfection. I might glance at the new one when it gets to cable... but I am assuming disappointment.
That said, I think it is progress when non-whites are cast as "bad" guys. It's more of an equalizer than all the other nonsense. It's been happening more and more.
Classical Greeks were familiar with black Africans, and Rome conquered Egypt, which had access to sub-Saharan Africa via the Nile/Red Sea, so I'm sure there were at least a few of them in Rome. Probably not many, but I can imagine they'd be popular attractions so a black gladiator doesn't seem all that implausible.
There were blacks in Al-Andalus under.Muslim rule. They actually stuck around even after the Muslims were defeated and made a living as street performers until Philip II deported them.
There's a line in "The Iliad" in which the absence of the gods in a particular scene was explained by Zeus et al being away having dinner with the king of Ethiopia. I always thought that was bizarre.
Yet, but "Ethiopians" in old documents can refer to beige Nubians from southernmost Egypt, brown Ahmaras from Ethiopia, or pure black sub-Saharans, such as the Dinkas of South Sudans.
The Ancient Greeks, who mostly didn't have maps, tended to be vague. They tended to think of racial differences in terms of direction: You go up the Nile and people get darker. A clinal conception The idea of races living in regions separated by major barriers to gene flow (a continental conception) only started to emerge with the Portuguese getting around the Western Sahara and the Spanish crossing the Atlantic in the 15th Century.
Shakespeare's Othello follows the classical tendency to think of race in terms of direction rather than the modern tendency to think in terms of region. Othello is a Moor, which meant to the Elizabethans "somebody from south of Spain," but it's ambiguous whether in Othello "Moor" means olive skinned Moroccan or black skinned sub-Saharan.
> "one of the more prestigious early converts to Christianity in The Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:26–40) is the 'Ethiopian eunuch,' treasurer to Queen Candace of Kush, whom Philip the Evangelist encounters in his chariot on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. He was probably not from modern Ethiopia, but instead was a brownish Nubian from modern Sudan up the Nile River from Egypt."
Probably. Incidentally, Rembrandt's and Bruegel's depictions of the convert show that those two painters were familiar with sub-Saharan African models but were apparently unfamiliar with eunuchs, who tend to rotund softness.
> "The existence of the Nile made north-south travel in northeast Africa easier than crossing the Sahara in parched northwest Africa. ... (However, the impenetrable Sudd swamp on the upper Nile effectively blocked Mediterraneans from reaching the blackest parts of Africa by river.)"
Also the infamous Six Nile Cataracts meant that it was impractical to transport above Aswan any cargo that couldn't walk under its own power.
> "the Roman Empire controlled the easy sea route to India: sail down the Red Sea"
Well, ya gotta get to the Red Sea first. And without the benefit of the Suez Canal, you have to build your ships to India from scratch somewhere on the sparsely-settled and thinly wooded Suez coast. And then you have drag your cargo back over a hundred miles of Egyptian desert.
Richard Francis Burton has a good account of crossing this troublesome neck of land in his "Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina". Even a millennium and half after the Romans, it was still a depleting undertaking prior to the Canal. One sees why the British prioritized the defense of the Suez Canal second only to the English Channel in the wars that followed.
> "But there was less to trade for in Africa than in India."
Then as now, Africa wasn't a big value-add. Back then though, they just didn't pretend otherwise.
> "Harvard ancient DNA geneticist David Reich estimated in 2017 that among Egyptians around the time of Christ there was 6 to 15 percent sub-Saharan ancestry."
I've always suspected, though I haven't seen enough ancient DNA reports to verify, that most of that sub-Saharan DNA arrived in Egypt in the 25th Dynasty (ca. 700 BC) when Nubian invaders took over the prostrate and exhausted Kingdom, a condition from which it has never really recovered. How did Egypt get that way? Would it surprise you to learn that Egypt had spent the previous centuries doing the old Invade/Invite routine in Nubia and up the Med coast?
In antiquity there was a canal built by the Ptolemy dynasty connecting the Nile with the Bay of Suez so the ships used on in the Red Sea were built somewhere else. The problem was that the winds in the Northern part of the Red Sea always blow from the NW so returning to Suez was very difficult because ships in antiquity couldn't tack which is why they used the port of Bernice far to the south of Suez even if it involved a voyage through the Eastern desert.
Even the Royal Navy had problems sailing in these waters during the campaign against Napoleon and they had long mastered tacking.
It was the steam engine that made navigation upwind practical.
> "there was a canal built by the Ptolemy dynasty connecting the Nile with the Bay of Suez so the ships used on in the Red Sea were built somewhere else."
Yeah, that's true, but AFAIK it seems like it kept silting up until Imperial Rome took over and improved the canal in the second century AD. At some point thereafter it fell into disrepair and disuse again and remained so until the Arabs took over in the seventh century. They got it working for a few years before quitting and then Suez stayed nautically impassable again until the nineteenth century. So while a canal—or an attempt at a canal—has existed for a long time, it only rarely worked.
> "The problem was that the winds in the Northern part of the Red Sea always blow from the NW so returning to Suez was very difficult because ships in antiquity couldn't tack which is why they used the port of Bernice far to the south of Suez even if it involved a voyage through the Eastern desert."
Interesting, thanks. That means that they moved Indian cargo over 150 miles of desert (and mountain) between Bernice and Aswan to get it to/from the Nile.
The Roman infrastructure in the Eastern Desert was highly developed. There were multiple routes terminating in Coptos (the customs depot) on the Nile, coming from Myos Hormos, Berenice, and the great quarries in the mountains, like Mons Porphyrites (the only source of porphyry in the Empire, a stone very prized because it has a purple color). The Romans had large forts, roads, the area was regularly patrolled, and caravans were organized. What made the trade profitable despite the large transport costs was because you could things like silk, other luxury textiles, pepper, other spices, and incense. We have multiple sources attesting to the size of the trade. Strabo says 100 ships sailed to and from India in a given year. We have the Muziris Papyrus, a basically list of products shipped from India on one ship. The calculations of the worth of the products (given in the text itself) show that the products of this single ship (the Hermapolon) would provide enough revenue to buy the largest farming estate in Egypt or even a very large piece of prime real estate in Italy. The extrapolation from this one ship implies that the tax revenues taken at Coptos were astronomical, maybe like 1/3rd of the budget of the Roman army (the main annual budgetary expense of the Roman state). Huge Roman coin hoards have been found on the western coast of India and Pliny the Elder (I think, don't remember which one) complained about the drainage of specie to India in the first cetnury AD. I read this book years ago so it is probably outdated, but it is very good: https://www.amazon.com/Roman-Empire-Indian-Ocean-Dealings/dp/1783463813/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.x2UUAJYvP69IWsyAQaJKL7Kx1Onb_i_WE5MYgDZAjWbAYBgB9sWlwvRSMXTxHE5Y8FAWfP8bgUKKQb8m-Jw75-3eikyyJek5wGk-cEDYhGR0GDqAp9jUWl-1VY3ptY9SFWnz41RfB0aUERAH5xMa37cbM2jxS6yTei9xNru5hRK9rSHHTvUU9Yc2UKqLCRE09STFm-uzSktjj35R-U7hZA.5Yda0ozLXVpRzfrg9K3Gs0RKi5IVbCvaiV6YjEXfGbw&qid=1732168000&sr=1-1
I should add that there have been consistent excavations at Berenice for a few years now so we are learning a lot more about the port, including things like Indian graffiti and Indian Temples being there. One more fun thing, the Peutinger Table has a Temple to the cult of Augustus in India on the west coast.
It was pretty easy to get to India from the Egyptian end of the Red Sea and not so easy to get home, but the round trip was about a year, which was economically feasible.
The 30+ foot, one-piece granite columns of the Pantheon came from the desert well east of the Nile. The immense trouble to bring them to Rome was part of their appeal.
"Is it historically accurate to cast Denzel Washington as the bad guy in "Gladiator II?"
Close enough for Hollywood work. And also because I think Denzel is a terrific actor, as you point out. I thought his supporting part in "Glory", as the bitter, selfish, hateful runaway slave who matures into a team player to fight for his regiment, was excellent. That's when I first became aware of him as an actor.
If Denzel Washington wants to play another villain, I'd suggest being a black Iago. Derek Jacobi could play Othello and Ricky Martin could play Desdemona.
Denzel is starring in "Othello" on Broadway next year with Ethan Hawke. I presume DZ is Othello and EH is Iago, but it would be fun if they would sometimes switch up the roles.
A totally race-swapped Othello cast would be pretty interesting in The Current Year.
P.S. A few months ago I rewatched the Heston classic Ben-Hur. The Welsh actor in blackface playing the Arab horse guy won the Best Supporting Actor with his face covered in cork. How will Hollywood get rid of it in their history?
Something online says "Gladiator II" is set in 211 AD.
So --- what are some good estimates of how many Subsaharans like 'Denzel' were around? The question is not "Black main character, possible: Yes/No?" It should be more like: How relatively plausible?
.
Questions:
- (a.) Slaves: What percent of the slave population were "Blacks"? (the Gladiator II character is billed as an "ex-slave").
- (b.) What % Subsaharan was the all-Empire resident-population? how many "Blacks" could be found wandering around within the Roman Empire's borders, including at its fringes?
- (c.) Serious social leaders: Could any Blacks be found among men of serious social importance who could plausibly emerge as leaders of any sort?
.
AFAIK, the numbers are very low across the board and, I would guess, it drops to effectively zero for category (c.).
A 2019 study, "Ancient Rome: A genetic crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean," published in the journal Science, implies the Subsaharan element was so low it ranks its genetic impact alongside Hindu-India and possibly even further east in Asia. If so, 'Denzel' is about as plausible as a dark-skinned Hindu or a shifty East-Asian "slave revolt leader" character.
Of course, Hollywood would never, never offer up a Brown-Hindu as slave-revolt leader, despite the justification here applying ("not many, but some, enough to justify casting [them].").
(From the 'Science' article: "Rome engaged in long-distance trade with northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and across Asia (1–3, 16). Although these contacts have been well documented, little is known about the genetic impacts.")
Looking at the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, you can find some Colin Kaepernick types. But how many then moved on all the way to ancient Rome? And of course, very, very few ever got to, say, Roman Britain.
In general, it appears that Rome itself had few sub-Saharans, enough to appear in some artworks, but probably not enough to have developed much in the way of popular stereotypes. The unusual Sub-Saharans who got all the way to Rome probably had something on the ball, like Gannibal in St. Petersburg, a black slave who became a Russian general and aristocrat, ancestor of many contemporary English aristocrats.
As you say, there is little interest in South Asians who showed up in Rome, although there were maybe 100 ships per year who went back and forth.
I don't get the impression Scott does much reading of the classics--like a lot Hollywood Brits, his Englishness gives him automatic highbrow cred that he doesn't really deserve--but nevertheless, Denzel's character in this sounds not unlike Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus; both are ruthless schemers who advance from a subservient position by manipulating the Roman elites and (briefly) wind up effectively running the Empire. There's no real historical basis for Aaron, but, unlike Othello, who can plausibly be viewed as either a North Africa or a Sub-Saharan, Aaron is clearly and unequivocally meant to be a definite Sub-Saharan black.
I saw Titus Andronicus performed live and it was so damn good I went back the next day.
And Aaron absolutely steals the show.
Shakespeare was an entertainer, and entertainers have always known the Hollywood motto, "9 parts titillation, one part condemnation".
In modern media that manifests as shows like "Law and Order SVU". In Shakespeare's day people also wanted to feed their fantasies with evils, horrors and malice, but wouldn't like to see themselves portrayed as such, nor would too many such portrayals of Englishmen pass without punishment. Solution? Make the irredeemably evil stand-alone characters foreigners.
Shylock is a main character along these lines (Jews were foreigners to Shakespearean England) but as a main character he needs to be imaginably human so Shakespeare gives him his famous "Hath not a Jew..." speech.
Aaron however, as a minor character, is delightfully evil. The fact that he is so is indicative not of blacks being common in Shakespearean England, but the exact opposite. Because they were so foreign Shakespeare had free reign to give Aaron the personality and lines that he'd have difficulty giving other stand-alone characters (rather than characters who are part of a gaggle, like the various conspirators in Julius Caesar). Witness:
LUCIUS: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?
AARON: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
NOTE: The above was set in a day before "trolling for the lolz" was considered acceptable.
Honestly for anything set pre-WWI I cannot care less about ethnic casting. The further from the present day the more artistic license there is anyway and casting should be done on what fits for the character.
I haven’t seen the movie but Denzel looks like very good casting.
Black Americans do tend to make disproportionately good actors.
The 2000s TV series ‘The Wire’ was a rare show with 50/50 casting. The casting directors managed to find literally dozens of very good black actors from in and around Baltimore for large and small parts over the five seasons.
Agree. IMO, the most unconvincing performer on that show was white, the actor Dominic West who played the main character, Detective Jimmy McNulty. He had to play drunk occasionally and was terrible at it. BTW, when I worked in advertising in the 1990s, it was never hard to find a good black actor for any role.
Black Americans have never made up more than 1% of the world’s population but have made a vastly outsized contribution to global popular culture, specifically sports, music, and TV/movies. This is mainly organic and very little to do with diversity policy.
In his defense, Dominic Gerard Francis Eagleton West is British. Then again, so is Stringer Bell.
I didn't personally have any issue with Dominic's acting but I also thought Season 2 of The Wire was heartbreaking and phenomenal, which isn't a popular opinion. I guess I'm just cool with Whites 😂.
Also, either it's serendipity or men think about TV/Movie gangsters even more than they think about Rome because I literally quoted (and credited) The Wire less than 24 hours ago: https://ydydy.substack.com/p/hasbara-vs-hasbara
Hollywood is a fantasy land and NOTHING they ever put out is historically accurate. The British probably even worse. They both have black actors playing white historical characters. On the other hand, they are also highly political and use movies to advance political philosophies, some of them dangerous to the United States. After all, the HUAC wasn't off base when they went after Communists in the movie industry and media in the 1940s and 50s.
The insanity in British TV is really strong. I saw a show with a black top advisor to William the Conqueror ten years ago. Every time someone complains about it they just go harder.
It might not have been so dramatically satisfying, but I would have enjoyed seeing a historically-accurate scene of Commodus meeting his deserved end -- garrotted in his steam bath by his personal trainer.
After all -- to repurpose Wilde's commentary on the death of of Dickens' Little Nell -- Joaquin Phoenix's lacertillian heavy was sufficiently loathsome that if Sir Ridley had instead decided on a scene featuring a naked, oiled-up Commodus turning bright blue as his eyeballs bulged out of their sockets, one would need to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
Regarding blacks and ancient Egypt, I can categorically state (because we have a myriad of evidence about the subject) that ancient Egyptians were not Sub-Saharan blacks, and this is well known to anybody in academia and not a matter of serious controversy. There are no doubts or anything dubious about this, we're talking about one of the few things about antiquity that we know beyond any shadow of a doubt.
I also agree than Denzel Washington is a great pick for that movie, great actor and also not an anachronistic pick because there were black people in ancient Rome, not many but enough so that they weren't an incredible sight.
True Sub-Saharan blacks were high-end slaves, a true luxury good, so a little tidbit about Macrinus' libertus/freedman status would be gold.
The Sub-Saharan Czarist general Gannibal, great grandfather of Russia's national poet Pushkin, wound up in St. Petersburg at the court of Peter the Great because he impressed the Russian ambassador to the Sultan's court in Constantinople that he was really something and that the Czar would appreciate him. Presumably, he'd previously impressed other people to get to himself to the imperial court in Constantinople from where ever it was he had started out: Ethiopia? Lake Chad?
He was Ethiopian, trafficked as slave by the Mamaluks.
It was a common trope between XVIII and XIX century: both Piedmont (Michele Amatore, i.e. Michael Amar, ethiopian and trafficked in Sudan) and Prussia had ex slave in their army.
Woody Strode played an African gladiator in "Spartacus."
In those days there weren't many actors with Strode's impressive physique. He was a great actor, too. I enjoyed him in the Westerns he did. This was not woke casting, either--if anything, Hollywood has underplayed the presence of blacks in the old west. Something like a quarter of the cowboys in the 1870s-80s were black. It was a low-status occupation
Strode was excellent in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." John Ford was so antagonistic towards John Wayne during the filming that the Duke and Strode almost came to blows. Ford had a mean side to him.
When the elderly John Ford was dying, Strode moved into his house and took care of him for a half year.
Like I said recently, if Quentin Tarantino ever wants to make a true-life biopic about his favorite subject, Hollywood tough guy character actors, Woody Strode would be my nominee.
Strode and Wayne were probably Ford's best friends at the end of his life. Strode was almost a roommate at the end of Ford's life. Wayne still had an active career while Strode was not as busy. Woody Strode was born fifty years too soon or he would have had a more brilliant career.
Black guy named after Woodrow Wilson. His parents were misinformed!
Ford made Strode a bigger star by insisting that he play the lead in "Sergeant Rutledge." The studios wanted Sidney Portier or Harry Belafonte to play the lead but Ford held firm on Strode. In Strode's words, Ford told the studios that Portier and Belafonte were "not tough enough to do what I want Sergeant Rutledge to be." And another quote of Strode's- "John Ford put classic words in my mouth...You never seen a Negro come off a mountain like John Wayne before."
A couple of years after Spartacus, Elizabeth Taylor has very black slave girls in Cleopatra, both from the early 1960s.
In the Heston/De Mille Epic *The Ten Commandments* the first half of the film has a scene where Ann Baxter gets jealous over the way a returning Charlton Heston as Moses has the very sub-Saharan Ethiopian allied Queen (who is also very undressed) making eyes at him. Followed by a De Mille special: a spectacular dance sequence by the black African allied tribe for the Egyptian court.
Everybody who's looked into it even a little that Sub-Saharan blacks had nothing to do with Ancient Egypt. Much like everyone knows a tranny is just a sick dude in a dress.
But both are a shibboleth test for commies: are you willing to say the opposite of what you know to be true? In other words, for the Party, are you willing to become a liar?
The people on the inside of the Deep State know how to lie and don't care. It's all so 1984.
> "In opera, for instance, singing ability is far more important than visual authenticity"
This is something of tradition going back to the 1960s starting IIRC with Jessye Norman. She was a pretty good singer, but unfortunately her success set off a hysterical competition among more recent opera producers to cast the The Next Jessye, or The First ______ [Asian or Queer or All-Black Cast or All-Female Production or whatever] Opera, which has led to some absurd and degraded opera, not only because even opera has limits on visual authenticity (there's a reason they spend plenty on set designers), but also because a lot of the people they use to mount these monstrosities don't actually sing that well. Hiring and promoting black singers with powerful pipes but no feeling for nuance is a particular bugbear.
> "Denzel Washington, one of the great movie stars of his generation. (Check him out in 2012’s Flight for an example.)"
I suppose, but wasn't Flight just an affirmative action vehicle for Denzel, and by extension for blacks generally?
I wrote a review of "Lincoln" asserting that Daniel Day-Lewis was a lock to win his third Best Actor Oscar, which he did. I was confident because I'd seen all the other nominees except Denzel in Flight. Months later I watched Flight and realized I had got lucky.
This was before #OscarsSoWhite ?
All I can add is that "Gladiator" is in my top three of all time favorite movies; the first 20 minutes are cinematic perfection. I might glance at the new one when it gets to cable... but I am assuming disappointment.
That said, I think it is progress when non-whites are cast as "bad" guys. It's more of an equalizer than all the other nonsense. It's been happening more and more.
Blacks as "bad guys" is actually more realistic.
Gladitor 2 is more of a The Rock style movie, forgettable.
Classical Greeks were familiar with black Africans, and Rome conquered Egypt, which had access to sub-Saharan Africa via the Nile/Red Sea, so I'm sure there were at least a few of them in Rome. Probably not many, but I can imagine they'd be popular attractions so a black gladiator doesn't seem all that implausible.
There were blacks in Al-Andalus under.Muslim rule. They actually stuck around even after the Muslims were defeated and made a living as street performers until Philip II deported them.
There's a line in "The Iliad" in which the absence of the gods in a particular scene was explained by Zeus et al being away having dinner with the king of Ethiopia. I always thought that was bizarre.
“Ethiopia” means “burnt face” in Greek.
Does it refer to Africans?
Yet, but "Ethiopians" in old documents can refer to beige Nubians from southernmost Egypt, brown Ahmaras from Ethiopia, or pure black sub-Saharans, such as the Dinkas of South Sudans.
The Ancient Greeks, who mostly didn't have maps, tended to be vague. They tended to think of racial differences in terms of direction: You go up the Nile and people get darker. A clinal conception The idea of races living in regions separated by major barriers to gene flow (a continental conception) only started to emerge with the Portuguese getting around the Western Sahara and the Spanish crossing the Atlantic in the 15th Century.
https://ifunny.co/picture/hakan-rotmwrt-hakonrotmwrt-sahara-was-intentionally-transformed-into-a-desert-tVbdj5JT9
Shakespeare's Othello follows the classical tendency to think of race in terms of direction rather than the modern tendency to think in terms of region. Othello is a Moor, which meant to the Elizabethans "somebody from south of Spain," but it's ambiguous whether in Othello "Moor" means olive skinned Moroccan or black skinned sub-Saharan.
> "one of the more prestigious early converts to Christianity in The Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:26–40) is the 'Ethiopian eunuch,' treasurer to Queen Candace of Kush, whom Philip the Evangelist encounters in his chariot on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. He was probably not from modern Ethiopia, but instead was a brownish Nubian from modern Sudan up the Nile River from Egypt."
Probably. Incidentally, Rembrandt's and Bruegel's depictions of the convert show that those two painters were familiar with sub-Saharan African models but were apparently unfamiliar with eunuchs, who tend to rotund softness.
> "The existence of the Nile made north-south travel in northeast Africa easier than crossing the Sahara in parched northwest Africa. ... (However, the impenetrable Sudd swamp on the upper Nile effectively blocked Mediterraneans from reaching the blackest parts of Africa by river.)"
Also the infamous Six Nile Cataracts meant that it was impractical to transport above Aswan any cargo that couldn't walk under its own power.
> "the Roman Empire controlled the easy sea route to India: sail down the Red Sea"
Well, ya gotta get to the Red Sea first. And without the benefit of the Suez Canal, you have to build your ships to India from scratch somewhere on the sparsely-settled and thinly wooded Suez coast. And then you have drag your cargo back over a hundred miles of Egyptian desert.
Richard Francis Burton has a good account of crossing this troublesome neck of land in his "Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina". Even a millennium and half after the Romans, it was still a depleting undertaking prior to the Canal. One sees why the British prioritized the defense of the Suez Canal second only to the English Channel in the wars that followed.
> "But there was less to trade for in Africa than in India."
Then as now, Africa wasn't a big value-add. Back then though, they just didn't pretend otherwise.
> "Harvard ancient DNA geneticist David Reich estimated in 2017 that among Egyptians around the time of Christ there was 6 to 15 percent sub-Saharan ancestry."
I've always suspected, though I haven't seen enough ancient DNA reports to verify, that most of that sub-Saharan DNA arrived in Egypt in the 25th Dynasty (ca. 700 BC) when Nubian invaders took over the prostrate and exhausted Kingdom, a condition from which it has never really recovered. How did Egypt get that way? Would it surprise you to learn that Egypt had spent the previous centuries doing the old Invade/Invite routine in Nubia and up the Med coast?
In antiquity there was a canal built by the Ptolemy dynasty connecting the Nile with the Bay of Suez so the ships used on in the Red Sea were built somewhere else. The problem was that the winds in the Northern part of the Red Sea always blow from the NW so returning to Suez was very difficult because ships in antiquity couldn't tack which is why they used the port of Bernice far to the south of Suez even if it involved a voyage through the Eastern desert.
Even the Royal Navy had problems sailing in these waters during the campaign against Napoleon and they had long mastered tacking.
It was the steam engine that made navigation upwind practical.
> "there was a canal built by the Ptolemy dynasty connecting the Nile with the Bay of Suez so the ships used on in the Red Sea were built somewhere else."
Yeah, that's true, but AFAIK it seems like it kept silting up until Imperial Rome took over and improved the canal in the second century AD. At some point thereafter it fell into disrepair and disuse again and remained so until the Arabs took over in the seventh century. They got it working for a few years before quitting and then Suez stayed nautically impassable again until the nineteenth century. So while a canal—or an attempt at a canal—has existed for a long time, it only rarely worked.
> "The problem was that the winds in the Northern part of the Red Sea always blow from the NW so returning to Suez was very difficult because ships in antiquity couldn't tack which is why they used the port of Bernice far to the south of Suez even if it involved a voyage through the Eastern desert."
Interesting, thanks. That means that they moved Indian cargo over 150 miles of desert (and mountain) between Bernice and Aswan to get it to/from the Nile.
The Roman infrastructure in the Eastern Desert was highly developed. There were multiple routes terminating in Coptos (the customs depot) on the Nile, coming from Myos Hormos, Berenice, and the great quarries in the mountains, like Mons Porphyrites (the only source of porphyry in the Empire, a stone very prized because it has a purple color). The Romans had large forts, roads, the area was regularly patrolled, and caravans were organized. What made the trade profitable despite the large transport costs was because you could things like silk, other luxury textiles, pepper, other spices, and incense. We have multiple sources attesting to the size of the trade. Strabo says 100 ships sailed to and from India in a given year. We have the Muziris Papyrus, a basically list of products shipped from India on one ship. The calculations of the worth of the products (given in the text itself) show that the products of this single ship (the Hermapolon) would provide enough revenue to buy the largest farming estate in Egypt or even a very large piece of prime real estate in Italy. The extrapolation from this one ship implies that the tax revenues taken at Coptos were astronomical, maybe like 1/3rd of the budget of the Roman army (the main annual budgetary expense of the Roman state). Huge Roman coin hoards have been found on the western coast of India and Pliny the Elder (I think, don't remember which one) complained about the drainage of specie to India in the first cetnury AD. I read this book years ago so it is probably outdated, but it is very good: https://www.amazon.com/Roman-Empire-Indian-Ocean-Dealings/dp/1783463813/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.x2UUAJYvP69IWsyAQaJKL7Kx1Onb_i_WE5MYgDZAjWbAYBgB9sWlwvRSMXTxHE5Y8FAWfP8bgUKKQb8m-Jw75-3eikyyJek5wGk-cEDYhGR0GDqAp9jUWl-1VY3ptY9SFWnz41RfB0aUERAH5xMa37cbM2jxS6yTei9xNru5hRK9rSHHTvUU9Yc2UKqLCRE09STFm-uzSktjj35R-U7hZA.5Yda0ozLXVpRzfrg9K3Gs0RKi5IVbCvaiV6YjEXfGbw&qid=1732168000&sr=1-1
This book is even older and probably fairly outdated but it is a really fun look about the borders of Roman Egypt and the infrastructure in the Eastern Desert but also the southern and western frontiers: https://www.amazon.com/At-Empires-Edge-Exploring-Egyptian/dp/0300088566/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2AGCZLP7F46RU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.WDuJm_zh6qPWmNeKp6FmqJbParXvijGncKG7lanWUnQ5ez7ucfM8pVoZFZ8RPpZavHFaldzDcsWnYNTK26gjeVOaWcandIenjnfgFtu8gffV9-zgBQnbZLxaM70awNOTRvO8vSIjm0VWT6IdgWJvi8S_7ymEmniHAoaY6ccF-Z4fCj_T_tqAyyE42dqKTMbvLvcbGW2vSTQ3V1RMvUQVqtoj5jRtQ8b8sCVCQi-kRTk.NrxJd1cnPaiUMrsQLkn7h-sAhgYeXTFNoC06wbaNSHg&dib_tag=se&keywords=roman+egypt+borders&qid=1732168123&s=books&sprefix=roman+egypt+borders%2Cstripbooks%2C108&sr=1-4
I should add that there have been consistent excavations at Berenice for a few years now so we are learning a lot more about the port, including things like Indian graffiti and Indian Temples being there. One more fun thing, the Peutinger Table has a Temple to the cult of Augustus in India on the west coast.
It was pretty easy to get to India from the Egyptian end of the Red Sea and not so easy to get home, but the round trip was about a year, which was economically feasible.
The 30+ foot, one-piece granite columns of the Pantheon came from the desert well east of the Nile. The immense trouble to bring them to Rome was part of their appeal.
"Is it historically accurate to cast Denzel Washington as the bad guy in "Gladiator II?"
Close enough for Hollywood work. And also because I think Denzel is a terrific actor, as you point out. I thought his supporting part in "Glory", as the bitter, selfish, hateful runaway slave who matures into a team player to fight for his regiment, was excellent. That's when I first became aware of him as an actor.
If Denzel Washington wants to play another villain, I'd suggest being a black Iago. Derek Jacobi could play Othello and Ricky Martin could play Desdemona.
Denzel is starring in "Othello" on Broadway next year with Ethan Hawke. I presume DZ is Othello and EH is Iago, but it would be fun if they would sometimes switch up the roles.
A totally race-swapped Othello cast would be pretty interesting in The Current Year.
P.S. A few months ago I rewatched the Heston classic Ben-Hur. The Welsh actor in blackface playing the Arab horse guy won the Best Supporting Actor with his face covered in cork. How will Hollywood get rid of it in their history?
Something online says "Gladiator II" is set in 211 AD.
So --- what are some good estimates of how many Subsaharans like 'Denzel' were around? The question is not "Black main character, possible: Yes/No?" It should be more like: How relatively plausible?
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Questions:
- (a.) Slaves: What percent of the slave population were "Blacks"? (the Gladiator II character is billed as an "ex-slave").
- (b.) What % Subsaharan was the all-Empire resident-population? how many "Blacks" could be found wandering around within the Roman Empire's borders, including at its fringes?
- (c.) Serious social leaders: Could any Blacks be found among men of serious social importance who could plausibly emerge as leaders of any sort?
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AFAIK, the numbers are very low across the board and, I would guess, it drops to effectively zero for category (c.).
A 2019 study, "Ancient Rome: A genetic crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean," published in the journal Science, implies the Subsaharan element was so low it ranks its genetic impact alongside Hindu-India and possibly even further east in Asia. If so, 'Denzel' is about as plausible as a dark-skinned Hindu or a shifty East-Asian "slave revolt leader" character.
Of course, Hollywood would never, never offer up a Brown-Hindu as slave-revolt leader, despite the justification here applying ("not many, but some, enough to justify casting [them].").
(From the 'Science' article: "Rome engaged in long-distance trade with northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and across Asia (1–3, 16). Although these contacts have been well documented, little is known about the genetic impacts.")
Looking at the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, you can find some Colin Kaepernick types. But how many then moved on all the way to ancient Rome? And of course, very, very few ever got to, say, Roman Britain.
In general, it appears that Rome itself had few sub-Saharans, enough to appear in some artworks, but probably not enough to have developed much in the way of popular stereotypes. The unusual Sub-Saharans who got all the way to Rome probably had something on the ball, like Gannibal in St. Petersburg, a black slave who became a Russian general and aristocrat, ancestor of many contemporary English aristocrats.
As you say, there is little interest in South Asians who showed up in Rome, although there were maybe 100 ships per year who went back and forth.
I don't get the impression Scott does much reading of the classics--like a lot Hollywood Brits, his Englishness gives him automatic highbrow cred that he doesn't really deserve--but nevertheless, Denzel's character in this sounds not unlike Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus; both are ruthless schemers who advance from a subservient position by manipulating the Roman elites and (briefly) wind up effectively running the Empire. There's no real historical basis for Aaron, but, unlike Othello, who can plausibly be viewed as either a North Africa or a Sub-Saharan, Aaron is clearly and unequivocally meant to be a definite Sub-Saharan black.
I saw Titus Andronicus performed live and it was so damn good I went back the next day.
And Aaron absolutely steals the show.
Shakespeare was an entertainer, and entertainers have always known the Hollywood motto, "9 parts titillation, one part condemnation".
In modern media that manifests as shows like "Law and Order SVU". In Shakespeare's day people also wanted to feed their fantasies with evils, horrors and malice, but wouldn't like to see themselves portrayed as such, nor would too many such portrayals of Englishmen pass without punishment. Solution? Make the irredeemably evil stand-alone characters foreigners.
Shylock is a main character along these lines (Jews were foreigners to Shakespearean England) but as a main character he needs to be imaginably human so Shakespeare gives him his famous "Hath not a Jew..." speech.
Aaron however, as a minor character, is delightfully evil. The fact that he is so is indicative not of blacks being common in Shakespearean England, but the exact opposite. Because they were so foreign Shakespeare had free reign to give Aaron the personality and lines that he'd have difficulty giving other stand-alone characters (rather than characters who are part of a gaggle, like the various conspirators in Julius Caesar). Witness:
LUCIUS: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?
AARON: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
NOTE: The above was set in a day before "trolling for the lolz" was considered acceptable.
Good point.
The false insertion of blacks into history by moderns is odd. Do they think that this will make blacks more intelligent, better behaved?
The "false insertion of Blacks into history" is more targeted at Whites than Blacks.
Honestly for anything set pre-WWI I cannot care less about ethnic casting. The further from the present day the more artistic license there is anyway and casting should be done on what fits for the character.
I haven’t seen the movie but Denzel looks like very good casting.
Black Americans do tend to make disproportionately good actors.
The 2000s TV series ‘The Wire’ was a rare show with 50/50 casting. The casting directors managed to find literally dozens of very good black actors from in and around Baltimore for large and small parts over the five seasons.
Agree. IMO, the most unconvincing performer on that show was white, the actor Dominic West who played the main character, Detective Jimmy McNulty. He had to play drunk occasionally and was terrible at it. BTW, when I worked in advertising in the 1990s, it was never hard to find a good black actor for any role.
Irishman Aidan Gillen ran a close second for hammy performances.
Black Americans have never made up more than 1% of the world’s population but have made a vastly outsized contribution to global popular culture, specifically sports, music, and TV/movies. This is mainly organic and very little to do with diversity policy.
In his defense, Dominic Gerard Francis Eagleton West is British. Then again, so is Stringer Bell.
I didn't personally have any issue with Dominic's acting but I also thought Season 2 of The Wire was heartbreaking and phenomenal, which isn't a popular opinion. I guess I'm just cool with Whites 😂.
Also, either it's serendipity or men think about TV/Movie gangsters even more than they think about Rome because I literally quoted (and credited) The Wire less than 24 hours ago: https://ydydy.substack.com/p/hasbara-vs-hasbara
Hollywood is a fantasy land and NOTHING they ever put out is historically accurate. The British probably even worse. They both have black actors playing white historical characters. On the other hand, they are also highly political and use movies to advance political philosophies, some of them dangerous to the United States. After all, the HUAC wasn't off base when they went after Communists in the movie industry and media in the 1940s and 50s.
The insanity in British TV is really strong. I saw a show with a black top advisor to William the Conqueror ten years ago. Every time someone complains about it they just go harder.
Well, he *was* French...
Don't the British have black actors play the Black Prince? If not, why?
It might not have been so dramatically satisfying, but I would have enjoyed seeing a historically-accurate scene of Commodus meeting his deserved end -- garrotted in his steam bath by his personal trainer.
After all -- to repurpose Wilde's commentary on the death of of Dickens' Little Nell -- Joaquin Phoenix's lacertillian heavy was sufficiently loathsome that if Sir Ridley had instead decided on a scene featuring a naked, oiled-up Commodus turning bright blue as his eyeballs bulged out of their sockets, one would need to have a heart of stone not to laugh.