Hello and welcome to another ancient warfare magazine podcast.

This is another one of those in-between episodes.

We're sandwiching between issues five and six of the magazine.

The consensus after our chat about Ben Hur was to look at Gladiator.

I thought we should keep our powder dry, but I was overruled.

So we're looking at Gladiator.

So as not to be here all night, we've settled to look at just the opening battle scene.

If you sent us a question via Facebook or Patreon, that's patreon.com slash ancient warfare podcast if you want to find us there.

Thank you for sending the question.

We have never had so many questions posted. I will endeavour

to get them all answered and I apologise if we miss any. So let's get started. Joining me are

Murray Darm, Mark McCaffrey, Mark DeSantis and David Ranky. Chaps, shall we start by looking at the

film? It's a reboot of the traditional Sword and Sand Rankie. Chaps, shall we start by looking at the film? It's a reboot of the traditional

sword and sandals epic and the first big one for 40 years. David, do you want to kick us off?

What can you tell us about the film? This film came about as part of a three-picture deal

that David Franzoni,

the screenwriter had with Spielberg.

He had written a film for Spielberg called Amistad

about slave ship.

And that had done very well.

And he came up with this idea for writing a film

about gladiators.

...