Can I make up History?

[gagged_Louise]

I don't have any trouble with attributing motives, friendships, connections or even illegitimate children to somebody whom you surmise must have been around (or should have been around, for your story to work). The trouble for me starts when somebody is messing around with known facts, changing them around, and hardline pretending this is how it really was, this is historical truth, period - a story in a historical setting doesn't so definitely do that.

Like, the film Gladiator is mostly fiction-based and Maximus and his family are invented characters, but it starts out from a point of issues and events that really happened. Marcus Aurelius did wage war in present-day Czechia and Bavaria, and it's true he died at the Roman camp of Vindobona (Vienna) in 180 AD. It's also true his son Commodus was a remarkable piece of scum, a sadistic scoundrel and a gladiatorial games aficionado - there is one historian that lived in Commodus' own time who says that His Highness planned to address the Senate at its annual opening of session dressed in gladiator costume instead of a purple toga, which is pretty much as if the US President delivered the State of the Union tv speech dressed in a swim suit! - but almost certainly he didn't kill his father. So the film uses this to frame its own story - like The Three Musketeers did - and, at the same time, to do some discussion of show and politics. That's a brilliant idea.