Editor’s Note: This is the second post in The Metropole’s theme for February 2025 “Celluloid City” which explores the role of and interplay between cities and film. You can see all posts from the theme here.
By Grace Gillies
The Rome in both Gladiator films is a landscape of monumental architecture subtly but pervasively inflected by fascist styles. The city is meant to represent Rome’s greatness, the glory its heroes are entitled to, and the prize they must protect from potential rot and decay. As such, it is in keeping with the fascist and white supremacist subtext in both films.
Gladiator II (2024) tells the story of how, after years of living under a false name in Numidia, the imperial prince Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal) is forced to return to Rome as an enslaved gladiator. As he and his fellow gladiators are shipped into the city, desperate, visibly ill beggars throng their caravan, but the script is careful to specify that only Lucius takes in the gravity of the situation:
Most of the gladiators have never seen Rome — their heads are on swivels, awed by all they see. They talk amongst themselves, taking in the magnificent architecture. Lucius looks out and we watch with his eyes. He can only see the poverty. The pain.
Lucius can’t understand how this beautiful city has been corrupted. We stay on his face.
It’s a plague tent. Full of disease and malnutrition. This is Rome left to rot… The buildings remain papal and magnificent. But the people – the people – the ill, the sick and the starving.
As the caravan moves along, the script adds: “We pass a temple with graffiti. Much of the marble at ground level is marred by obscene graffiti, and has been left to decay.” Both the temple, “left to decay” and the people, “left to rot,” have become deformed. The problem is one of leadership: the city has been left without proper care, the kind only Lucius Verus seems to notice is necessary. His body, despite the hardships of war and slavery, is pristine.
Ridley Scott, the director of both films, also used the metaphor of illness to describe what he saw as the problem with Rome during this period:
[This period was] the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire, which was reflected in what went on in the arenas. There you saw the sickness of Rome, how Rome had become corpulent, how Rome had stopped looking at the far reaches of the Empire.[1]
For Scott, the cause of this “sickness” is Rome’s refusal to continue expanding. This illness suggests that the cure is a leader that can restore Rome back to its former military might, something only the films’ warrior heroes can provide.
Power Embodied
Lucius inherits the task of restoring Rome to its former glory from his father Maximus (Russell Crowe), the hero of Gladiator (2000). Both men are humble farmers, willing to do the bloody work of protecting the homeland but disdainful of power, who reluctantly kill their way to absolute control of Rome in the name of restoring the will of the people. The narrative is a fascist one, as Jennifer Barker argued in the wake of the first film. Despite a superficial resemblance to the revolutionary messages of Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Gladiator “has more in common with the peplum films in terms of outwardly indicting fascism while consistently indulging in heroic hyper-masculinity, nostalgia for the simplicity of violence, and the spectacular display of this violence as a substitute for political action.”[2]
The peplum films, an Italian cycle from 1957-1965 that told stories of antiquity and starred American bodybuilders, have been recognized for their attempt to negotiate a place for fascist values in the wake of World War II. Richard Dyer, in his seminal work on whiteness in Western visual culture, argued for the role whiteness plays in this negotiation: these heroic white male bodies, vested with the authority of the classical world, functioned as “a balm to a damaged male class identity while also dissociating themselves from a discredited politics of whiteness.”[3] Meanwhile, this version of antiquity became ever more firmly constructed as a white legacy, a vehicle for and proof of white greatness.
Gladiator II continues in this tradition. Here, the heroic white male body is that of Lucius Verus, who initially avoids the problem of Rome’s corruption by hiding in Numidia, under the name “Hanno.” He must shed his African identity in order to take his place as Rome’s true ruler, a transformation that coincides with the death of Jugurtha (Peter Mensah, onscreen with Pascal here), a Numidian leader who commits suicide rather than face the challenge of Rome. Only Lucius Verus will rise to the occasion. As his father did in the first film, his job is to take absolute control of Rome in order to restore democracy, a message that recalls the fascist concept of democracy expressed through the will of the one.[4] Both characters are humiliated by slavery along the way, but it only proves their dignity, as when Lucius Verus quotes Virgil’s Aeneid after being forced to fight for the emperors’ entertainment. Their superiority is obvious to the other enslaved gladiators, and proven in ever more spectacular arenas until their final climactic victories over Rome’s entire social structure. Like the peplum heroes, “they are both of humanity and above it—the white man’s favorite position.”[5]
The racial dimension of this message is exacerbated by the film’s insistence on whiteness as the color of power. Sarah Bond has discussed the racist subtext of whitewashing the Afro-Syrian Severan emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger), and changing Macrinus (Denzel Washington, whose casting was met with backlash) from an elite equestrian into an interloper who was formerly enslaved. All three emperors also degrade their masculinity with makeup, decadent clothing, queer desires, and effeminate jewelry. By contrast, Lucius’s superior white masculinity is clad in humble cloth and his father’s armor. His only pieces of jewelry are his wedding ring and the imperial signet that proves his birthright.
The city of Rome is essential to this white supremacist framework. It represents the subtly fascist glory Lucius is entitled to and the greatness the nation could achieve with his leadership. Like Lucius himself, it is a white ideal, threatened by degradation and effeminate decadence, and defined in opposition to the Other.
Opposing Rome
Both films begin at the edge of the empire before journeying to Rome, and both use the spaces of North Africa to delineate Rome by representing its opposite. In the first film, North Africa is barbaric: Maximus’s enslavement begins when he is taken from his home in rural Spain to Zucchabar (in modern Algeria), represented by the fortified village of Aït Benhaddou (in Morocco). In depicting Zucchabar, at the most basic level, historical accuracy seems to have been less important than a sense of otherness. The enslavers who take him there anachronistically speak Arabic. The seventeenth century structures, in a site that dates back to the medieval period, were slotted into the late second century, a choice justified by Arthur Max, the production designer for both films: “In some ways, Morocco designed itself. You come up over a hill and you’re in another time.”[6] What time you are in seems to have been unimportant; the site collapses into a timeless Other. Diana Landau, in her book on the making of Gladiator, added blithely that the local citizens were employed as extras to add a similarly timeless mystique: “As befit the setting, the weathered faces of the Moroccans gave no hint that they would return to the 20th century when Ridley Scott called ‘cut.’”[7]
In Gladiator II, North Africa is similarly exoticized, but now figured as the brave but ineffectual opposition to Rome’s cruelty. Lucius Verus shelters in a Numidian city for years, taking pride in the fact that it, like he, has resisted Rome. Despite the city’s seeming importance, however, it never receives a name. After being introduced as “an ancient city” in the script, it is only invoked with periphrasis. Lucius encourages its citizens to protect it against Roman invasion by reminding them that it is “the last free city in Africa Nova.” After its fall, the general Acacius (Pedro Pascal) proclaims, “I claim this city for Rome.” When Lucius is brought to the arena in Rome, the master of ceremonies introduces him as “from the vanquished city of Numidia.” The deliberate flimsiness of this unnamed city reveals how its only role is to shed a spotlight on Rome.
In addition, the real city used to represent it—Ouarzazate, near Aït Benhaddou—was also used to represent the film’s other significant site outside of Rome: Antium, a Roman town less than fifty miles from Rome itself. The effect is a collapse of time and space: all cities besides Rome are an interchangeable Other, divorced from any context except Rome itself, signifying nothing except Rome’s exceptionalism.
The Golden City
For Rome, both films turned to Fort Ricasoli, in Malta. Director Ridley Scott wanted viewers to “experience the beauty and light of the golden city,” which he thought the barracks of the fort seemed poised to deliver:
Essentially, it was an English barracks from 1803—they had built an extensive complex out of beautiful yellow limestone in the Romanesque style. Giant vaulted walls, hollow inside, with gun emplacements for huge cannons. You’re talking about big architecture, which the prevailing wind in Malta and the blowing sand had nicely aged. So it looked like ancient Rome.[8]
For Scott, Rome could be represented by an English legacy in the Mediterranean, divorced from its original use and context, and its essence was unpainted “big architecture.” Both films lovingly underline “big;” in his review of the first, Elvis Mitchell quipped that the Flavian amphitheater is depicted as “roughly the size of the Death Star,” and that scale is reprised in the second. Rome’s grandeur is expressed through the size of its monuments, which are devoid of color. The films signal Rome’s corruption through the use of colorful marble and the vibrant Colosseum, but praise the city’s potential for greatness with pale limestone. This message is displayed unsubtly in an arch at the center of Rome’s set. Rather than the name of the person it is meant to glorify, as would be traditional, its inscription declares: HAEC EST GLORIA ROMAE IN MUNDO (“this is the glory of Rome in the world”). The arch has only the barest nods to ornamentation; Rome’s glory seems to be the limestone arch in its distilled form, unsullied by decoration or detail or even context.
Overall, these structures bear little resemblance to Roman monuments, which were decorated extensively and colorfully, each out of a specific context and with a specific intended meaning. The Arch of Constantine, for example, which stands next to the real Flavian amphitheater, was created not for the glory of Rome but for the emperor, and in the context of the civil war he had won. Its visual program is extensive, detailed, and in conversation with other monuments: the arch was created using sculpture and relief from structures originally built to glorify Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. The intended meaning also depended on people’s interaction. The arch was meant to be an expression of control over whoever moved through it, and its message created by viewers who mentally connected the juxtaposed emperors.
Any film version of something like an arch will necessarily be simplified from its original, and the films’ creators might also have been in part playing to audience expectations of colorless monuments, whose decorative programs do not have specific meaning to them. That said, the choice to divorce the arch from any specific context is deliberate: the filmmakers made a monument dedicated not to any of the film’s emperors, but to the idea of a monument itself.
The city was also, of course, not only a collection of monuments. The films’ Rome is stripped of the diversity of its structures and even its building materials, and what remains seems to disdain interaction. The city’s people, clad in colorful clothing and moving in organic disarray, are visually divorced from the built environment, which seemingly offers no engagement besides respectful maintenance or, if they are “left to decay,” disrespectful graffiti. At its core, thefilms seem to idealize the city as a series of glorious but vaguely defined monuments, to be cared for from a distance, and for which defacement with graffiti is the worst fate. In the real Rome, by contrast, graffiti was part of a complex culture of public writing. Not only was it not necessarily seen as defacement, but there is evidence of it as a form of participation in Rome’s literary culture, including through quotations of the Aeneid.[9]
The relationship between people and space seen in the films bears a much closer resemblance to the way that the ancient city is currently displayed in Rome, particularly to tourists. At the heart of Rome, visitors can walk from the Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, which is flanked by the remains of several imperial fora. These sites were once colorful and polyvalent spaces, but what remains are static monuments that have lost much of their original detail. They are meant to be admired from a respectful distance. Graffiti is discouraged.
This experience of the ancient city is the legacy of Benito Mussolini. In an effort to reframe Rome’s ancient greatness as the context for his own, the city was aggressively reshaped. Large-scale demolition, partisan archaeology, and authoritarian construction created spaces like the Via dei Fori Imperiali (then the Via dell’Impero), which Mussolini inaugurated with a military parade in 1932.
Fascist architecture also worked to capitalize on Roman greatness. Monumental structures created during this period recalled ancient Rome through classicizing elements, but stretched them to futuristic extremes. In the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, for instance, the arch is distilled into its most basic geometric form, a monument of and to unsullied limestone.
This imposing neoclassical element was also utilized in Nazi Germany by architects like Albert Speer, whose work was named as an inspiration for the architectural style of Gladiator’s Rome.[10] The filmmakers deliberately invoked Nazi architecture in order to depict Rome’s greatness, the golden city that Maximus and Lucius Verus must save from rot and decay.
Elsewhere in the films, they allude to Nazi pageantry in order to indict Rome’s tyrants, from whom the city’s democratic traditions and grand landscape must be rescued.[11] Despite this outwardly anti-authoritarian message, however, the grand landscape of both films is shaped by a fascist subtext that is only strengthened by the narratives of the white male heroes. Inasmuch as Maximus and Lucius Verus’s job is to save Rome from rot, the city becomes both the stakes of their struggle and the glory they are entitled to, a glory represented by an amalgam of Roman, fascist, and Nazi architecture, all of which is mapped onto a conception of Rome as a white legacy.
The meaning of Roman architecture remains a potent one. New depictions of ancient Rome join not only a fraught history of Rome onscreen but an ongoing debate about what the past should represent. As we enter the second Trump administration, the stakes are higher than ever. One of the final executive orders of the first Trump administration was to promote “beautiful federal civic architecture,” i.e. buildings “modeled on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome.” The order, condemned as an authoritarian proposal made by a president “beloved by white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” suggests that neoclassical architecture is still a preferred metonym for white supremacy.
Grace Gillies is an Adjunct Lecturer, CUNY Queens College. Grace’s research focuses on the culture of the city in urban literature, as well as Roman representations of gender and sexuality.
[1] Diana Landau, ed., Gladiator: the Making of the Ridley Scott Epic (New York: Newmarket Press, 2000), 7-8.
[2] Jennifer Barker, “‘A Hero Will Rise:’ The Myth of the Fascist Man in ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Gladiator,’” Literature/Film Quarterly 36:3 (2008): 173-174.
[3] Richard Dyer, White, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 165.
[4] Benito Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, trans. Jane Soames(London: Hogarth, 1933), 15-16; see Barker, “A Hero Will Rise,” 176.
[5] Dyer, White, 168.
[6] Landau, Gladiator, 73.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid, 77.
[9] On graffiti’s place in Rome’s literary culture, see Kristina Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 233-262.
[10] Landau, Gladiator, 77-78.
[11] Ibid, 11 quotes Walter Parkes, executive producer, on the “fascist-overtoned armor of the Praetorian guard,” which the second movie returned to. In his 2000 review, Elvis Mitchell notes that their formations recall Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-Era Triumph of the Will.
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