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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> Most of the public will not be aware of what parts are true, and what parts are fiction.

I doubt anyone alive now is aware of the whole truth given that it takes place 200 years ago in a politically turbulent part/era of the world.

We see errors/lies in articles about current verifiable topics all the time, surely history from hundreds of years ago had even less fidelity.

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I doubt the OP refers to who decided what and when. That part does get rewritten by the winners.

It's more about historical inaccuracy overall. I think Napoleon in particular has an analysis on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry [1].

[1] It's not a proper analysis like he's done for other movies, but here it is: https://acoup.blog/2023/11/17/fireside-friday-november-17-20...

I agree there is a difference in misrepresenting events that have lots of evidence to support them and things that would likely have poor record keeping. I had assumed a movie called Napoleon might be about the personal motivations/interactions rather than more verifiable events.

argh, this is such a bad faith argument. The enemy of better is best.

We can't know the whole truth but we have enough quality data about ancient rome from multiple angles to know "gladiator" probably shouldn't be our first lead on the matter.

Yes, I acknowledged that in a reply to a sibling comment, however, I would take any movie/tv show dialogue that suggests motivations to be speculation unless provided with heavy evidence. A lot of times, this type of stuff can paint someone as good/bad, and it is either completely made up or misrepresented for the purposes of drama and selling the media.

It would behoove everyone to never take movie representations of history as fact, even if the broad strokes are supported by evidence.

I do get the somewhat discomfort with novels and movies dealing with historical events and people. While often enjoying his work, I definitely had this feeling with much of James Michener's work. You're reading this massive tome and it's often unclear (though he did sometimes provide some notes) what is actual historical fact, what is speculative, and what is made up out of whole cloth.

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