When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***The recent release of “Gladiator II” was accompanied by a deluge of articles finding fault with its historical accuracy. As a number of historians noted, there really were naval battles in the Colosseum, but there is no evidence of sharks. Likewise, rhinoceroses made regular appearances, but gladiators did not in fact ride them into battle. At a certain point, you start to suspect that these articles were all planted as part of a deliberate marketing campaign. If so, it worked. Two and a half hours later, I still have no idea about the real role of monkeys in ancient Rome, but I can confirm there were a lot of them in the movie.Ridley Scott, for his part, has defended his artistic license. When historians criticized “Napoleon,” the director responded: “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.” If anything, all the criticism seems to have infused “Gladiator II” with a spirit of gleeful anachronism. At one point, a senator is sitting in a café reading a printed newspaper titled something like the Roman Daily News. What’s more, all the inscriptions in the Colosseum are carved in English — which somehow feels off, in a way that everyone speaking English does not. Amidst all this, there were only two errors that stood out as really serious. The first concerns the film’s name. It should be “Gladiator 2,” which is clearly how you’d write “Gladiator II” in Latin. The second involves a scene with several characters plotting around a large map, the