Most Historically Accurate Films/Documentaries/Video

[TancredTheNorman]

I don't know, I would gladly watch mass murderers and pedophiles fight to death against eachother.

That was an excuse Romans used, and an excuse for public executions in more recent times, it just doesn't work, and the theoretical justification wasn't always acceptable, and even in Roman times there were critics (i.e. Marcus Aurelius). Even so do you really think people attended public executions for the sake of justice? The Games really are the worst aspect of the Romans, although they did build some magnificent things because of them.

That's really interesting. Thanks!

Your welcome, and technically speaking the official date of that law was 97 BC, although Human Sacrifice was extremely rare before that, and limited to mob responses to disasters like Arusio and Cannae. The Romans could understand the presence of Human Sacrifice, they could not understand it being done by the state with the force of law behind it and without an unwashed masses element.

Did Jones mention Carthaginian child sacrifice in his documentary? He did not in the accompanying booklet. AFAIK the facts of the matter are this: no one disputes that the earlier Phoenician city states practised live child sacrifice. However, the only evidence for this practice during Roman times is a mention in a much later source and the presence of apparently healthy children in a special section of a Carthaginian graveyard. So the conclusion is that the Carthaginians probably did sacrifice children, but the evidence is not watertight.

And, as others have mentioned, live human sacrifice in one form or another was still a feature of most if not all Iron Age cultures. The Romans themselves sacrificed two couples after the disastrous defeats at Cannae and Aurausio. Gladiatorial fights also had a religious origin, although they ended up being entertainment (then again, from a modern perspective killing people for entertainment is as revolting, if not more, as killing them to appease the gods). I also suppose that the ritual strangulation of Vercingetorix after Caesar's triumph was a religious sacrifice. Was this a common feature of the triumphal processions?

The evidence seems pretty solid to me, there is more then one later source testifying about it, and those later sources are almost completely trusted on things they are farther away from, and there is archaeological evidence. Terry Jones doesn't explicitly say the Human Sacrifices was a lie, but he very highly implies it by stating that education is biased in favor of Rome, and warning the audience not to confuse Rome's propaganda and lies for history, and he does use that moralizing line on every enemy of Rome he goes over. The Roman Triumph didn't always involve killing the enemy leader, but it did involve showing that he was dead, Mithradates was beheaded despite his death and his body being far away from Rome. It didn't actually matter if an enemy leader was around at the Triumph unless he was a capable and dangerous man who the Romans wanted dead anyway. Tha Gladiator Games are simply revolting though, and the worst thing about the Romans.