Last week, we started our nitpicking of Gladiator II (2024) by looking at the problems with the films chronology and its portrayal of the Roman army of the early third century, both in its equipment and in its battle tactics. This week, we’re going to move forward to the main action of the film, set in Rome and look at how the film portrays the city of Rome itself, the role of gladiators in the Colosseum and finally its depiction of the Severan dynasty (and how the film’s mangling of the Severans fundamentally undermines its own themes).
As a reminder from last time, while we are engaging in a bit of fun historical critique, I did not go into Gladiator II expecting a rigorously historically accurate film; I have seen a Ridley Scott film before. But Ridley Scott’s films frequently have interesting historical themes – Kingdom of Heaven (the director’s cut) is really interesting in this regard, for instance. Alas, in this case, that did not happen: Scott mangles not only the historical details of this period, but also the historical themes of that period and (much like the disappointment that was Napoleon) one can hardly say he did so in pursuit of a good or artistically interesting film.
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Third Century Rome
After the initial battle is over and our hero Lucius/Hanno (henceforth ‘Lucius’) is captured and his wife is, as has apparently become obligatory in these films, promptly shoved into a refrigerator, we set off to Rome. And I have to admit, I found the travel montage a bit baffling. First, a point is made of showing the regular Romans being hostile to the war prisoners being brought to Rome as slaves, presumably intended as a commentary on contemporary immigration debates which is both odd for Rome in this context, because while there was certainly snobbish bigotry against non-Romans at Rome, these men are being brought to Rome as war captives, which is a thing the Romans generally thought was good, as it demonstrated Roman power and success. But more broadly looking back, it feels a bit odd in the context of the rest of the film’s messaging, which drops the faint utopian republicanism of the first film for a far more authoritarian framing – we’ll come back to this when we get to the Severans – that is usually itself pretty hostile to immigrants and immigration. This is a film, it turns out, that loves strongmen (both literally and figuratively).
But also the landscape we see was, to me at least, pretty odd – and here you must pardon me that I am forced to rely on my memory and notes on the scene, so may get some details a little wrong (but hopefully not very wrong). We move from the port of Ostia (which is fairly grand), down a series of relatively basic dirt roads, through some small villages that are mostly dusty and dingy and quite dry (these scenes were shot, as I understand it, on Malta, which is rather drier than Latium where Rome is), until we reach Rome. We see Rome a few times from the film and the framing is often of Rome viewed from a road as buildings framed by two large hills with the Colosseum looming up in the center of those hills.
And there are a few problems with that presentation. This trip would have actually followed the Via Ostiensis, the road between Ostia (Rome’s primary port) and the city of Rome itself. The road itself is just short of 20 miles long, so this isn’t exactly a long journey – even on foot it’d be a day or two. That means we start in Ostia, which is no small port: late second or early third century Ostia probably had a population approaching 100,000. This is already by ancient standards a very big city and it’s just the port. Then we’re moving up the aforementioned via Ostiensis; this is no dirt road, but a well-paved Roman road and one of the most important transit routes in Italy. Indeed, it was so well paved that you can walk the Roman road today.
The Romans had a term for this region outside of the formal boundaries of Roman: they called it the suburbium (from whence we get our modern term ‘suburbs) and while it would have been somewhat rural, it would hardly have been undeveloped countryside. After all, as we’ve discussed, land this close to the city center was really valuable; the suburbium is where the rich had their large pleasure villas, but it also would have been a region of very intensive agriculture and especially horticulture and thus, by rural standards, quite densely peopled, albeit nowhere near as built up as the urban core. Land right up against the via Ostiensis, one of the busiest and most important roads in all of Italy, would have been very valuable and thus quite developed.
And then we reach Rome itself. And I rather expected, given how far special effects and CGI was and that we’re about to see Rome in the early third century, one of the grandest, largest and wealthiest cities anywhere at any time in antiquity, that the movie would show off its grandeur. Alas no. As noted, we get quite a few shots of the city from the outside, with the Colosseum dominating the skyline, but there are all sorts of problems with this. By the third century (indeed, by the first century) Rome had spilled out well beyond its tradition walls (the Servian Walls). Indeed, Rome had expanded so much that in 271 the emperor Aurelian is going to give Rome a new set of walls covering a much larger area because the built up area of the city was so large.
If you haven’t been to Rome, here’s a Google street view of the sight from the Porta San Paolo (the site of the Porta Ostiensis, the gate in Aurelian’s 271 wall which faced Ostia), about where travelers coming into early Third Century Rome are likely to hit the built up part of the city. I’ve taken the screenshot facing North-North East towards the Colosseum and you can see the Porta San Paolo itself on the left:
Can you see the Colosseum? Of course you can’t, it’s a mile away behind three hills in a depression between the Caelian, Paletine and Esquiline hills. As an aside, one of the motifs Scott returns to several times in the film is the idea of the Colosseum as ‘Rome’s greatest temple,’ which I thought was a bit ironic, because moving up the Via Ostiensis to the Colosseum, you would have had to move past ancient Rome’s other, much larger sporting venue, the Circus Maximums, where Rome’s other more popular ‘sporting’ event, chariot races, happened. But we’ll come back to that in a moment.
As an aside, I think that’s part of the underlying fundamental problem with this film: it needs Rome to be about gladiators and thus for the Colosseum to be the symbol of Rome and the utmost expression of the Roman state and culture. It needs that not because that was true about Rome (it wasn’t, really; the Romans loved gladiatorial games, don’t get me wrong, but they loved a lot of other things too) but because this film exists to invent a lucrative franchise called Gladiator, rather than merely a singular one-off movie. And turning Gladiator (2000) into a franchise requires making gladiators the center of the Roman world (which they weren’t). But we’ll come back to that.
But the result of these visual choices is that the movie really undersells the visual splendor of Rome, its main subject. The city has to be small in order for it to dominated by the bulk of the Colosseum (rather than the Colosseum mostly sinking into the background of a city that is so much bigger than it is). Rome in the early third century probably had a population a bit under a million; Rome in the first century had reached about a million, but the Antonine Plague (165-180) had probably brought the population of the city down a bit. Nevertheless, Rome under Caracalla was hardly a decaying city either: Caracalla himself would build a massive complex of baths that would be the largest in the city until topped by Diocletian. The famous Gismodi model of Rome (though modeling the Rome of c. 300 rather than c. 200) gives a sense of how the Colosseum actually fit into the urban landscape of Rome.
The Colosseum – known at the time as the Flavian Amphitheater (Amphitheatrum Flavium) – is obviously prominent, but not even really primus inter pares among the other major state buildings. Above it and to the left, that massive compound up on the hill (the Esquiline, in the event) are the Baths of Titus (built in the 70s and renovated by Hadrian (r. 117-138)). In front of the Colosseum to the right, the cluster of buildings on that hill are the great houses on the Palatine, including, at this point, a couple of imperial palaces; just out of view beyond this is the Circus Maximus, even larger in footprint than the Colosseum. On the bottom left, also higher up than the Colosseum, are the temples of the Capitoline Hill, the largest of which is, of course, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. And at very bottom left, up against the Tiber River, is the Theater of Marcellus (built 13 BC), itself about half the size of the Colosseum.
So Gladiator II‘s Rome is missing both the size of the city (making it seem quite a bit smaller than it was), but also isn’t playing the Colosseum into its relative proportion with the rest of the city.
Finally, Gladiator II‘s Rome is drab. When the the first film came out in 2000, it was pretty normal to still show Roman buildings and statues as lots of white marble and limestone, unpainted, although scholars had, by that point, known for some time that it wasn’t so. But since then, we’ve had a number of depictions of Rome in the popular culture, perhaps most notably HBO’s Rome, which have been willing to show Rome with the painted buildings and statues it would have had. It is ironic, given that Gladiator II, like its predecessor, is thematically interested in decadence and decline, that it doesn’t indulge in the full opulence of the Roman cityscape.
Overall, Gladiator II‘s Rome ends up, to me at least, feeling small, a bit dingy and a bit shabby, dominated by the Colosseum, its one interesting building. That is a really interesting thematic expression of the narrative bankruptcy of this film series, unable to look beyond the feats of the first film in the Colosseum to tell new or more interesting stories in the setting. But it is a poor representation of early third century Rome, which was a city still very much operating at its architectural height, crowded with hundreds of thousands of residents and preposterous amounts of wealth. We don’t get that sense from Gladiator II and I find that, in an age of ubiquitous CGI, baffling.
Gladiators in Gladiator
Once in Rome, we move into the main action of the film. To briefly summarize, celebratory gladiatorial games are put on to commemorate Acacius’ successful siege of ‘Numidia,’ after which, he is supposed to go to war with ‘India and Persia.’ So while Lucius fights as a gladiator in those games, two plots begin unrolling in parallel: Acacius and Lucilla plot with senators to overthrow Geta and Caracalla, while Macrinus plots to take the throne himself. Naturally all of this revolves around a sequence of set-piece action scenes in the arena itself.
Now I want to keep this section short, as I am not a scholar of gladiators and the arena – a topic that very much has its own specialists. If you are curious to read the reactions of such a specialist, Alexandra Sills does specialize in gladiators and arenas and had a range of thoughts over on her blog you can read. Still, since we’re nitpicking this film, there are a few fairly basic ‘gladiator facts’ that it is getting quite wrong that are worth nothing.
(For those looking for a sort of general, evidence-oriented primer on this sort of thing, A. Futrell, The Roman Games: Historical Sources in Translation (2006) is both a source-book and basic primer.)
There were three kinds of attractions held in Roman amphitheaters (of which the Colosseum, properly known as the Flavian Amphitheater, was one) and Gladiator II tends – either out of ignorance or for the sake of spectacle – to blur these together. But in practice, while all three events might happen over the course of a single set of ‘games’ (ludi, a term we’ll return to in a moment), they were distinct and involved distinct people. The three things were (in escalating order of prestige and excitement): executions, hunts (venationes) and gladiatorial fights.
Gladiator II lumps these together (as did the first film): our titular gladiators sometimes fight animals (often under-armed and always untrained for the task), sometimes engage in large group melees with high casualties, occasionally play a role in what are effectively theatrical executions and only rarely do the thing actual gladiators did which were small scale or one-on-one fights. These different events would have been done by different people.
Venationes, beast hunts, were performed by hunters (venatores) who were specialists in the slaying of wild animals. While venatores were in real peril, these are for the most part trained professional specialists with appropriate equipment being paid and brought in to slay animals where the appeal was in the exotic, foreign nature of the animal and the skill of the venatores in bringing it down. I don’t doubt people came to watch for the same reason some folks watch NASCAR and other races – to see a crash – but my sense is that venationes was more like Deadliest Catch than the slaughter we see in the film. These seem generally to have been the first events.
Then there were executions of varying degrees of theatricality. A lot of what people – including, clearly Ridley Scott – think about when they think ‘gladiator’ are actually these events. Condemned criminals might be forced to face wild animals unarmed or even bound, or else to engage untrained in mass melees where the high casualties were, in effect, the form of execution. For instance, the famous saying morituri te salutant (‘those about to die, salute you’) was uttered (but once; this was not a common thing) at a naumachia – a staged naval battle – put on by the emperor Claudius on Lake Fucinus. The men who were morituri were condemned prisoners who uttered the cry in the hopes of a last minute pardon (which they did not get). But by and large the executions, however theatrical, were the least interesting part of the event; they generally happened at midday (the ludi meridiani) and Seneca notes the arena might well be practically empty of spectators, presumably as everyone went to grab lunch during the interlude (Sen. Epist. 7.3-5).
Instead, the big show everyone was waiting for were the gladiators. Gladiators were almost always enslaved, but in contrast to the condemned above, they were highly trained slaves who thus carried considerable value. The fellow putting on the spectacle – called a munerator or editor (as gladiatorial spectacles were known as munera) – essentially rented trained gladiators from the owners of gladiatorial schools (called ludi; that word can mean both ‘game’ and ‘school’) to put on their spectacle, paying a rental fee to the gladiator’s owner. Gladiators were trained by specialist trainers (who were not the owners) called lanistae and operated in troops or teams which were rented as groups. However, gladiators functioned on a you break it, you buy it system: if a gladiator died, the munerator had to repay the owner a substantial fee, probably reflective of the ‘market value’ of the enslaved fighter.
A gladiator in a fight could, by a gesture (raising a finger) admit defeat, at which point the choice about his survival fell to the munerator or editor. The crowd would try to influence this decision: fan favorites or gladiators who fought well, they might call to spare and vice versa. However, the final decision fell with the munerator/editor who was financially on the hook for dead gladiators. So on the one hand, the entire point of holding gladiatorial spectacles was to gain the favor of the crowds, but on the other hand losing gladiators was expensive; consequently it seems fairly clear that at least by the imperial period if not earlier, the grant of a reprieve to a proper gladiator was typical and we see gladiators with multiple draws and defeats suggesting as much.
That isn’t to say gladiators never died in the arena, for they surely did. Another thing that Scott gets routinely wrong in Gladiator II (and the first film) is the equipment of gladiators. Gladiators were not general-purpose warriors, but highly specialized performers, typically fighting in one of several well-defined, visibly distinct stylized combat roles. So for instance the retiarius (‘net-man’) was lightly armored, fast and fought with a net and a long trident (evoking a fisherman), typically against a secutor (‘follower, chaser’), a heavily armored fighter with a large shield, helmet and arm protections, but with only a sword. So the retiarius is less heavily armored, but faster with a longer reach weapon, while the secutor had the clear advantage in a close-in fight. Gladiators would train on a specific type and often be paired against opposing types. So the secutor and retiarius were a matched pair, but equally murmillones (heavily armored sword-and-shield fighters) were often employed against either the thraex or hoplomachus type.
One thing about nearly all gladiator equipment, however is that the chest is unarmored. Heavier gladiators generally had shields, heavy, well-enclosed helmets and metal arm-guards (called manica); sometimes they also had greaves, but the chest was left unarmored. That, of course, was part of the spectacle: baring the chest in combat was extremely foolish but the entire point of the fight was peril and a weapon-strike to the chest could easily be lethal, though of course the gladiators knew that and likely fought in ways to limit the danger to their unarmored chest. Scott, by contrast, almost never puts his gladiators in these specialized equipment sets and frequently has them wearing only chest armor, since the audience needs to see their faces, I suppose.
Finally, Gladiator II makes a theme out of the centrality of the Colosseum and its gladiatorial spectacles to Roman culture, with Macrinus at one point commenting that the Colosseum was ‘Rome’s greatest temple.’ And as a thematic element to the film, there’s something in the notion that the real Roman religion was violence, a message which might resonate if Ridley Scott didn’t adore soldiers and gladiators quite so much. As we’ll see in a moment, its hard to argue that the problem with Rome is violence when your solution is, “power should be put in the hands of military men of violence.”
But it is also the case that the public fascination with gladiators is a bit out of proportion to their role in Roman society. Both Gladiator films, understandably, represent gladiators as the entertainment in Rome, but gladiatorial spectacles weren’t even the most popular entertainment for most of Roman history, much less the only one. Characters use ‘games’ to clearly mean just gladiatorial games in the Colosseum in the film, but ludi (‘games’) could stand for quite a few different public festivals: ludi scaenici were theater performances and then, of course, there are the ludi circenses.
It is something of an irony that the Roman satirist Juvenal’s line about panem et circenses (‘bread and circuses,’ Juv. 10.81) has become synonymous in popular culture with specifically gladiatorial entertainments, because circenses (‘of the circus‘) weren’t gladiatorial games – they were races (horse or chariot races) held in the circus (‘circle’). In Rome, that was the Circus Maximus, though races were so popular there was more than one race track in Rome – the smaller, less cool ones were the Circus Flaminius at the edge of the Campus Martius, the Circus of Nero and/or Caligula on the west bank of the Tiber (to the early second century), the Circus Varianus built under the Severans and the later Circus of Maxentius built in the early fourth century.
But the Circus Maximus was the big deal (the name literally means ‘the biggest circus’) and it was primarily for chariot racing. As a sport, chariot racing was generally more popular than gladiatorial games and you can tell: the Circus Maximus was substantially larger and also much older than the Colosseum. Whereas the Colosseum is built under the Flavian emperors (in the 70s AD) the Circus Maximus was supposedly built – according to Livy (1.35.8) – by the fifth king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus (r. 616-578 BC), a figure so deep in Roman history it is not entirely clear if he was a real person. The site of the Circus Maximus was upgraded over time, with wooden stands replaced by stone and masonry. Whereas the Colosseum is 189m by 156m, the Circus Maximus is substantially bigger: 621m by 118m. It also housed more spectators, roughly 150,000, anywhere from two to three times as many as the Colosseum. It was central enough that when Domitian (r. 81-96) built a new imperial palace on the Palatine, he also renovated the Circus Maximus and seems to have connected the two.
But of course a film named Gladiator II needs Rome to revolve around gladiators! That made some sense for the first film, as its villain was Commodus, an emperor famously obsessed with gladiators, but in turning a standalone movie into a franchise, suddenly all of Rome must revolve around the Colosseum, to the point that Macrinus can call it ‘Rome’s greatest temple.’ But in practice, the Colosseum, far from being the core of Roman identity was, at best, its second most popular sporting venue. But while Ridley Scott could have made an actually interesting film about the Severans – it could have even referenced the fictional characters of the original Gladiator – such a film could hardly have been Gladiator II. So instead, we get Gladiator II, because the rule of the day is that movies must come with an escalating series of numbers on them.
All of that said, we’re getting close to the film’s core themes and for that we need to discuss…
The Severans
Gladiator II is explicitly set during the joint reign of Geta and Caracalla, two emperors of the Severan dynasty, but the film’s depictions of the two emperors is unrecognizable, both literally and figuratively. Now the first Gladiator film, set during the reign of Commodus, the last of the Nervan-Antonine emperors, also played fast and loose with its source material, but there was some thematic grounding in the actual figure of Commodus. Commodus was, famously, a bad emperor who developed an obsession with gladiators and the arena and even fought as both a gladiator and a venator. So having a story about Commodus and gladiators makes sense and the thematic juxtaposition between a real warrior (Maximus) and a fake warrior (Commodus) is thematically powerful. And finally, while it is, as we’ll see, far too early for much Rome decline, the idea of Commodus as a lesser emperor to his father, Marcus Aurelius, holds up: Commodus shunned the difficult and uncomfortable life Marcus Aurelius had lived – mostly out on campaign on the frontiers – for a more comfortable, public life in Rome.
So while the events of the first Gladiator are very much made up, you can kind of see where the film is at least channeling the vague, broad outlines of Commodus’ reputation and the themes of the end of the Nervan-Antonine dynasty.
By contrast, Gladiator II so utterly misses the nature of the Severans, in so many ways, as to be profoundly baffling. The villains on screen have no thematic or factual relationship with their real world counterparts beyond their names and the names (but nothing else) of their murderers. More to the point, the thematic connections are opposed: the actual Severans would be a shattering rebuttal of the film’s themes. Let’s start with some real historical background.
Following the death of Commodus in 192 (assassinated by his wrestling partner, Narcissus, in turn supported in that by key members of his own administration), a power struggle broke out in Rome in what we call the Year of the Five Emperors (193). Two senators in Rome (Pertinax and Didius Julianus) tried to seize the throne and three field commanders (Pescennius Niger, Clodius Albinus and Septimius Severus) – legati Augusti pro praetore – also moved to seize power. Septimius Severus ends up the victor taking power in Rome by the end of 193 and successfully crushing the other to claimants by 197 and starting the Severan dynasty.
Now, Septimius Severus has two sons, Geta and Caracalla, by his wife Julia Domna (who will be important here). But I want to give a sense of the kind of ruler Septimius was, which we can do just with a brief timeline of his rule: he marches on Rome in 193, fights Pescinnius Niger in Anatolia in 194, spent 195 in Northern Mesopotamia mopping up, then spent 196 and 197 clearing out Pescinnius Niger, transiting through Rome relatively briefly. He then returns to Rome in 197, but leaves before the year is out to campaign against the Parthians, leaving most of the day-to-day of his administration to his wife Julia Domna (once she outmaneuvers and removes his praetorian prefect). Septimius is campaigning – well inland – on Rome’s North African frontier against the Garamantes in 202 and 203. In 208 he heads north to Britain and is campaigning there straight through to 211 when he dies.
What I want to note is that whereas many earlier emperors in the principate ruled from Rome and dispatched generals to handle their wars, Septimius Severus apparently greatly preferred to lead his armies in person on the frontiers and did so, to the annoyance of the Senate. That wasn’t quite new in terms of rulership – the Nervan-Antonines swing between more civilian-oriented and military-oriented emperors – but we generally view Septimius as a prelude to the ‘soldier’ or ‘barracks’ emperors of the mid- and late-third century, when the emperor was a soldier first and an emperor second.
Caracalla was, by all indications, a chip off the old block. Geta presumably was too, but here we run into the first problem in the way the film represents the Severans: while the film presents the ‘twin’ emperors (they were brothers, but not twins; Caracalla was a year older) as ruling together for quite some time, their actual joint rule lasted less than a year. Septimius died on campaign in Britain in February 211 with both Geta and Caracalla with him. The two sons feuded on their way back to Rome, while their mother, Julia Domna, tried to reconcile them. Finally, in December, Caracalla had Geta murdered in their mother’s arms. So we don’t know very much about how Geta would have ruled, because Caracalla murdered him very quickly (he also then murdered all of Geta’s supporters).
So given that background, how does the film opt to portray Caracalla? Well, both of the emperors were cast as pale white young men with red hair; makeup is used to give their faces a sickly sort of color, with deep bags under their eyes. They’re presented in the film as chaotic, with Caracalla in particular being an effectively insane syphilitic (treating his pet monkey as a senator), and also queer-coded, shown with a decadent entourage of both men and women, wearing lots of jewelry (something only women and villains do in this film) and generally being fairly ‘camp.’ Indeed, Scott leans really hard on the bad-old-trope of using queer-coding to signal villains or ‘decadence’ in this film: not just the emperors, but also Macrinus (explicitly bisexual in the film) and the effeminate Senator Thraex – in contrast to the heroes Acacius and Lucius who are both explicitly straight and married to women. Indeed, even Lucius’ closest ally in the gladiator school, the former gladiator Ravi, stops to make sure we’re aware that he’s married to a woman.
I don’t want to dwell on this point too much because we want to be focused on the history, but it is in fact worth noting this is a film in which all of the villains are queer-coded or gender-non-comforming, whereas all of the heroes are very straight and in explicitly straight marriages. To be clear, not some, not most; all. I have no idea if Ridley Scott intended to make a bigoted anti-LGBTQ film, but he did.
Instead, I want to focus on how absurdly off-base this characterization of Caracalla is. We can start with his appearance, because that’s relatively easy. Caracalla’s father was Septimius Severus, a man of North African extraction who claimed both Libyan and Punic ancestors. Caracalla’s mother, Julia Domna, was a Syrian woman, from an Arab family born in what today would be Homs, Syria (then Emesa). All of which is to say, Caracalla was not a pale redhead, but rather a man – by 211 he is 23 years old – of mixed Arab, North African and Levantine ancestry. We actually have a color portrait of the Severan family on the famed Severan Tondo, though because the Roman habit in portraiture was to represent women and children as having very pale skin, it can be a bit misleading. Nevertheless, not a red lock of hair in sight.
Moreover, in the film, both Geta and Caracalla are the sort of emperors who send their generals – the fictional Marcus Acacius played by Pedro Pascal – to fight their ways, while they remain at Rome in luxury, far form any sort of violence. Indeed, this is an essential thematic contrast in the film: Rome’s failure and decadence are represented by the queer-coded, effiminate ‘soft’ men of the city and politics – Geta, Caracalla, Macrinus, Senator Thraex – while its vitality is represented by the hard men of violence – Acacius and Lucius.
As we’ll get to in a moment, the message of this film is direct and unsubtle, that for Rome to be saved, it must be delivered into the hands of muscular, burly violent men and out of the hands of men like Caracalla.
Except the real Caracalla was exactly the sort of Roman that Ridley Scott pines for and he was a terrible emperor as a result. Caracalla – the real Caracalla – leaves Rome in 213, never to return. Instead, he campaigns in Raetia on the Danube in 213 and 214, before heading East to prepare a war against the Parthians who controlled Iran and most of Mesopotamia. He launched that war in 216, but was assassinated before its conclusion in 217 by Macrinus. The real Macrinus, by the by, was not the freedman-turned-businessman-turned-schemer of the film, but a Roman elite (an eques) from a distinguished family and a career civil servant and legal expert.
The real Caracalla cared little for either the pomp of Rome – which he left quickly and never returned – or the great luxuries of wealth or the task of administration. The last of these was, in his reign, largely turned over to his mother, Julia Domna. Indeed, the Severan Dynasty was famous for the tremendous power wielded by key women in it: Julia Domna, her sister Julia Maesa and Maesa’s two daughters, Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea. From about 205, one of these women was basically running the administration of the empire almost continuously until the end of the dynasty in 235. Julia Domna headed up affairs for her husband Septimius and her son Caracalla – she seems to have managed to get over Geta’s death tolerably well, these women are pretty hard-edged, as we’ll see – to 217 when he was murdered; she commited suicide upon hearing about it. But her sister, Julia Maesa was able to out maneuver Macrinus and have him killed and put her grandson Elagabalus (r. 218-222) on the throne. When it became clear that Elagabalus’ idiosyncrasies (for another time!) were imperiling the dynasty, Julia Maesa had both Elagabalus and his mother (her own daughter!) killed and replaced with her other daughter, Julia Mamaea and her son, Severus Alexander (r. 222-235). Julia Mamaea, effectively ran a good portion of Severus Alexander’s administration. These women wielded tremendous power in this family and so of course are entirely absent from this film.
Which is wild to me, because the intrigues those women got up to would have been way more interesting than anything else in the movie, but then I guess we wouldn’t have space for our story about how what Rome really needed was a bunch of big, burly soldier men.
But also Caracalla was a big, burly soldier man! He grew up in the military camps of his father, who was a Roman general before he was emperor and clearly preferred that environment to the comforts of Rome or any other large city. One anecdote we have about him, from Herodian, was that Caracalla preferred soldier’s bread, hand-ground and baked in campfires (Hdn. 4.7.4-6; note also Dio. 78.3) – the modern equivalent of a man who, taken to the finest restaurants in Paris, would prefer to order the Chili and Macaroni MRE rations. He was also, to judge by his imperial sculpture, not a slight man; rather he’s shown with a scowling expression, a thick muscular neck, a soldier’s haircut and a generally threatening demeanor.
Far from being decadent, Caracalla was active, energetic and physical. Herodian has him as eager to engage in physical labor when with the soldiers, frugal in what he ate and scorning luxuries (Hdn. 4.7.4-6). He even preferred, supposedly, to march on foot rather than use a chariot and was evidently quite physically strong (Hdn. 4.7.6-7). He liked to wear military dress, including a cavalry cloak – called a Caracalla – after which he took his nickname (Hdn. 4.7.3; Dio 78.4).
Caracalla was also very violent. Dio – admittedly a hostile source, to say the least – reports that after Caracalla had his own brother murdered in their mother’s arms, he followed up by murdering some twenty thousand of Geta’s supporters (Dio 78.4-6). Like most would-be ‘great’ Roman generals, he tried to pattern himself off of Alexander (Dio 78.7-9; Hdn. 4.8). At Alexandria, reportedly when he was lightly mocked by the citizens there, he responded by having his army sack the city and butcher much of the populace in reply (Dio 78.22-23; Hdn. 4.9.4-8). And he sure liked some war, moving from one campaign to the next, paying his soldiers lavishly while at the same time clearly troubling the treasury: we can see the purity of the denarius decline over his reign and he introduced a new silver coin, the antoninianus a double-denarius that contained only about 1.5x the silver; debasement is a pretty clear sign of financial trouble. Meanwhile, as noted, Caracalla largely ignored the day-to-day administration of the empire, leaving the task to his mother, Julia Domna.
Far from being a luxuriant, decadent, effeminate and insane figure – as Scott has him – the real Caracalla was perfectly sane. Paranoid, vengeful and violent, but absolutely in touch with reality. He is exactly the sort of man of violence these films glorify.
And as a result he was a bad emperor! Caracalla’s lavish payments to the soldiers (he raised their pay substantially) and frequent campaigns (also expensive) drained the Roman treasury, while his reign reinforced the damaging precedent that the emperor was, for the most part, simply a soldier and a general. The problem with that is that if the emperor is just a general, then any general could be emperor and starting in 235, a non-trivial portion of Roman generals would try it, causing the Crisis of the Third Century. Which isn’t to say everything Caracalla did was bad: he ordered major public works in Rome, notably a large new set of baths, the famed Baths of Caracalla, and he also issued the Constitutio Antoniniana, a decree extending Roman citizenship to all free persons in the Empire.
But overall, Caracalla was a violent and ineffective emperor, a model for the ‘Barracks’ or ‘Soldier’ Emperors of the Crisis of the Third Century whose interminable civil wars will badly weaken the empire. All of which is a touch ironic because…
Caracalla is the Emperor Ridley Scott Thinks Would Save Rome
And this is, I think, the greatest weakness of this film and the one I am probably going to spend the next decade attempting to ‘unteach’ to my students.
Because the film presents a very clear and entirely wrong understanding of the problem eating away at the Roman Empire. In the film, the problem in Rome is all of the decadent queer-coded characters, immersed in their luxury or fecklessly performing their politics. At the film’s opening, we’re informed that Rome’s endless conquests and expansion are ruining the empire and we quickly see that the general doing the fighting, manly-man Marcus Acacius, wants it to stop, but it is the decadent Geta and Caracalla who demand – from their luxury in Rome – that it continue. Meanwhile the extravagantly dressed, robed-and-jewelry wearing bisexual Macrinus schemes to become emperor and is openly contemptuous of Marcus Aurelius (treated reverently by the film’s ‘good guys’), understandably bitter at having been enslaved by Marcus. Macrinus’ schemes can succeed – and the effort by Lucilla (who should, at this point, have been dead for at least thirty years), Acacius and the one good Senator Gracchus to save Rome and maybe ‘restore the republic’ (a silly notion in 211AD) fails – due to the corruption of the effeminate, make-up and jewelry wearing Senator Thraex.
The sartorial contrast is actually very marked. Bad guys (Caracalla, Geta, Macrinus, Thraex) wear gold jewelry and frequently dress in long tunics or flowing robes (so, gender-non-conforming attire) and are either camp or openly LGBTQ while good guys (Acacius, Lucius, Ravi, Gracchus) do not wear jewelry and dress either in simple tunics or else in armor and explicitly note their heterosexual marriages. It is once again a visual motif delivered with such consistency that it rises to be part of the film’s themes.
But also it’s just part of the text of the film. Acacius, the battle-hardened general who is aiming to save Rome declares early on to a crowd that “I am not an orator or a politician; I am a soldier” – he is betrayed to his doom by the aforementioned weak, effeminate and decadence Thraex. His speech is echoed by Lucius later, who rallies his gladiators to their insurrection by telling them, “I am not a general, but we are all soldiers.” And at the end of the film, when he’s triumphed over all of the villains, Lucius – standing between two Roman armies with not a civilian in sight – gives his big speech on how to save Rome, declaring the need to “give Rome back to them” and pointing at the assembled soldiers. Lucius, our hero revealed to be Maximus’ long lost son, at the film’s end, contemplating what sort of Rome he wants to have – now that he appears to have made himself emperor – closes the film with the final line, “Speak to me, father.”
In short, in Ridley Scott’s take, what Rome needs in order to survive is for power to be violently removed from the decadent, queer-coded men who have it and delivered to the burly, masculine, straight-coded men of violence who do all of their killing up close, man to man. Women, in this world, of course cannot and do not wield power: they exist to die at appropriate moments to motive the burly men of violence, just as Maximus’ wife is killed in the first film and both Lucius’ wife and mother take arrows to the chest in this film at appropriately motivational moments. Doubtless there are already folks lining up to say, “but that’s how it was in Rome!” who need to scroll up a few paragraphs to note that that was very much not how it was under the Severans, where tremendous power was wielded by the women of the imperial family. Of course all of those actual Severan women are not in this film.
Naturally, this is somewhat troubling framing for the contemporary moment, given that, “what we need are very straight, burly men of violence” is not just quasi-fascist framing, but in fact Ur-Fascist framing. I can’t imagine Ridley Scott intended to make a fascist movie, just as I don’t imagine he intended to make a bigoted, anti-gay movie, but he did both. That sort of thing can happen when you are careless with your themes and characterization.
But as a take on Roman history the film is also nonsense of the sort I will be unteaching for years not because it gets this helmet or that toga wrong, but because it reinforces a popular notion about the ‘decline and fall of Rome’ that is not remotely tenable with the evidence as we have it.
For one, the film’s juxtaposition between the burly men of violence like Acacius and the weak, decadent senators is silly on its face. Indeed, Scott relies in both Gladiator films on a contrast between the career military men (Maximus, Acacius) and the political, senatorial elite. In Rome, these were the same men. To be a legatus Augusti pro praetore and to have a provincial command and a large army, one had to be a senator who had at least reached the praetorship. Not every senator was a general but every Roman general was a senator. Acacius’ claim in Gladiator II to not be “an orator or a politician” but merely a soldier and a general is a nonsense claim: at Rome, one could not be a general without being an orator and a politician.
And while the film errs in suggesting that Roman collapse is just around the corner in 211 – when in fact we are close to the height of the empire and serious fragmentation is two centuries away – the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284) is coming. But the Crisis of the Third Century isn’t caused by a shortage of burly men in armor doing violence, but a surplus of them. It is a consequence of one Roman general on the frontier after another realizing they can march on Rome to make themselves emperor – and then the winners immediately march on the Sassanids (who have, by that point, replaced the Parthians) to attempt (and fail) at glorious wars of conquest rather than staying at the political center to stabilize Rome. One of the great weaknesses of the political order that emerges out of that crisis is that no emperor could trust anyone else with the field army anymore, so emperors remain front-line field commanders, a perilous and destabilizing way to run a large empire.
In short, Scott says, “if only the Romans trusted a good, violent general like Maximus or Lucius or Acacius with power, everything would be well” and as a historian I cannot help but scream they tried that! They tried that and it nearly destroyed the empire! It was arguably the most foolish thing they ever did. The consequences of that style of rule were a state overburdened by military expenses, fragmented by repeated instability and civil war, with an economy slowly crumbling under the weight of endless armies.
Not only did the Romans try “what if we let big burly generals run the show?” Caracalla himself is that figure. Accepting the ‘lore’ of the Gladiator films, Septimius Severus – a frontier general who seized power after the death of Commodus – basically is ‘what would happen if Maximus became emperor’ and the answer was that, in the long run, it turns out poorly! The real Caracalla, the soldier-son of a frontier-general-turned-emperor effectively is what the film presents Lucius (revealed to be the son of Maximus, because of course he is) to be. And Caracalla’s reign was a failure.
None of this distortion of history is, of course, in support of artistic merit, because there frankly isn’t much here. The actors give the best performances they can, but this is – along with Napoleon – probably Ridley Scott’s worst film. As a piece of entertainment, wholly divorced from the actual past, Gladiator II falls into the trap of worshiping the first film (literally there is an altar to Maximus in the movie), trying to replay and one-up its high notes; vapid but entertaining catch-phrases in the first film are treated as invocations in the second, inscribed above altars and whispered by characters in reverent tones. The reuse of the original musical motifs at moments of high emotion is interminable. The whole thing is terminally ill with sequelitis and indeed a third film is apparently already on the way, because every pop culture product these days needs to be an extended universe franchise endlessly rehashing the same tired stories.
And I assume that’s why no effort at all was made to actually capture anything about the Severan period or Caracalla. After all, a story about an emperor who effectively answers the question of “what if Maximus had lived and become emperor in the first film?” with “he would have made a bad emperor because being a good warrior doesn’t make you a good ruler” would, on the one hand, be a really interesting story but on the other hand wouldn’t give everyone an opportunity to cash in on the nostalgia-dollars.
Instead, to get those nostalgia-dollars, we need to reenact all of the things people think they know but get wrong about Rome: we need some queer-coded decadence, some ‘insane’ emperors, some gladiators, and a vague notion that Rome ‘fell’ due to something called ‘decadence’ a few centuries earlier than it actually did fragment in the West.
In order to tell that very marketable story, one that could serve as the foundation for a franchise, because everything today must be a franchise, the film had to not merely mistake history, but twist it back on itself, turning a brute, tyrannical emperor into a sickly, insane weakling and blue-blooded career bureaucrat into a self-made freed slave so that Ridley Scott could have the themes he wanted, the themes someone thought the ‘franchise’ needed to keep printing money, rather than the themes the history of the period actually offered.
The irony is that unlike the Gladiator II we got, a film that embraced more of the actual history of the period might have been more interesting. Presenting Caracalla as, effectively, a dark mirror of Maximus would have been interesting! Bringing in the historical Severan women – as opposed to pulling Lucilla back into the story to tap into some cheap nostalgia – would have been interesting! Questioning the efficacy of yet more violence in a Rome already soaked through with violence (and with the explosion of violence in the Crisis coming around the corner) would have been interesting!
Instead, what we got was a retread of the original film, faded with time. Much like Napoleon, it is astounding how able Ridley Scott has become to take a deeply interesting period of history and make a deeply uninteresting movie out of it.
I was not entertained.
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