Gladiator: Hey, Gang! Let’s Revive the Republic!

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Ancient Rome, Commodus, Derek Jacobi, Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius, Richard Harris, Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe

Early on in Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott), Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) tells Maximus (Russell Crowe) that he wants to “return Rome to the people” and re-establish the Roman Republic. He feels that Maximus has the moral qualities that will enable him to accomplish this feat, while Commodus lacks those virtues, and thus Marcus makes the choice to declare Maximus his successor, although Commodus murders him before he can announce the decision. Thus the film’s plot is driven by Marcus’ idea of restoring the Republic.

Nor is Marcus alone in this goal. Senator Gracchus (Derek Jacobi) and Senator Gaius (John Shrapnel) both want to see Rome returned to a Republic as well. They plot with Maximus and with Commodus’ sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) to foment a rebellion that will overthrow Commodus and put Maximus in control, so that he can empower the Senate to rule Rome again. So while the memorable part of the film is the conflict between Commodus and Maximus, the actual plot of the film is an attempt to end the entire system of the Principate (as modern scholars term the rule of the emperors in this period) and re-establish the system of the Republic.

So Is the Film’s Plot Plausible?

In a word, no. The Roman Republic, which was founded around the year 510 BC (at least according to Roman tradition), entered its decline in the late 2^nd century BC. This period, termed the Late Republic, is generally taken to have begun with the disputed election of 133 BC, during which the supporters of the populist tribune Tiberius Gracchus (note his cognomen) forced through his illegal re-election so that he could enact a law aimed at helping the poor. The Senate, lead by the pontifex maximus (high priest), rioted and massacred Tiberius and around 300 of his supporters in the street.

This combination of political violence and disregard for the electoral processes became one of the chief characteristics of the Late Republic, as politics increasingly became a matter of force. By the time Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, the Roman political system was in a state of near-total collapse, and it fell to Caesar’s adopted son Octavian (more commonly known as Augustus) to create a new system on the ruins of the old one, as I discussed in a previous post.

Augustus, Rome’s first emperor

In Augustus’ day, there were still many people who longed for a revival of the traditional Republican system, and for that reason, Augustus had to be careful to cover his absolute rule with a fig-leaf of Republicanism. In 41 AD, when a conspiracy by Cassius Chaera led to the assassination of Gaius Caligula, there were calls for the re-establishment of the Republic. But this doesn’t seem to have been the main motive for the assassination; rather, Chaerea seems to have been primarily motivated by Caligula’s constant ridicule of him. The Senate briefly supported the cause of a revived Republic, but their support evaporated when the Praetorian Guard declared Caligula’s uncle Claudius the new emperor.

Perhaps, had events played out differently, it might have been possible to revive the Republic in 41 AD, but it’s doubtful. By 41 AD, there was no one alive who had any experience with the genuine Republican system; a few ancient men and women might have remembered the Republic’s final collapse under Caesar and Octavian, but even that is unlikely.

Furthermore, the collapse of the Republic was due in considerable measure to forces unleashed by the expansion of the Roman state outside the Italian peninsula. The Republic was essentially a system set up to run a single city; the Senate was in many ways like a large city council. The entire slate of elected officials only numbered in the low dozens, and there was no bureaucracy to assist these elected officials. As the Roman state conquered new territory, instead of revising the system to keep up with new demands of running a large state (for example by adding more levels of elected officials), the conservative Romans just kept jury-rigging this city government. For example, they decided that conquered provinces would be administered by former consuls appointed by the Senate. So in other words, imagine the city council of Chicago trying to run the entire United States government, and constantly appointing former mayors to help do so. It’s not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.

The whole system became riddled with political corruption, profiteering, overweening political ambition, and civil war. Eventually, by the time Julius Caesar came along, the whole system was simply stretched past its breaking point, and Caesar was the guy who finally snapped it. By the end of Augustus’ reign, Rome ruled the entire Mediterranean basic and a good deal more beyond that. There was simply no way that Rome could go back to a system that had collapsed in some part because it was no long adequate to manage its needs. So the idea that the Republic could be restored in 41 AD was little more than a transient fantasy.

If the Republic was moldering in its grave by 41 AD, the corpse had long since been reduced to nothing by 180 AD. While Marcus Aurelius could have been an idealistic dreamer who fantasized about restoring the Republic (although there’s little evidence of that), there is no way it could possibly have accomplished, any more than Barack Obama could plausibly expect the United States to revert to the Articles of Confederation.

So the idea that a serious conspiracy could be hatched to accomplish this pipe dream is pretty silly. It becomes slightly more plausible if we assume that Gracchus or Gaius is hoping to make himself emperor by using Maximus to depose Commodus and then get rid of Maximus, but there’s no evidence that that’s what they’re up to.

Additionally, the film makes the assumption that the Roman Republic was somehow ruled by the ‘people’ in the sense of modern American democracy. It’s true that the Roman officials were elected, so there is a faint resemblance to modern democracy, but the Roman system had almost nothing in common with the American system beyond having elected officials. The Roman electoral system was designed to heavily privilege the Roman aristocracy; they voted first, they controlled the votes of a large number of people below them, and voting stopped the moment the winner was clear, so that many poor people never voted at all. Rather than being a Republic in the modern sense, modern scholars tend to see the Roman Republic as a type of oligarchy, in which the same two dozen or so aristocratic families were perpetually in control through the election of different family members. And the Senate, which in this film is supposedly the representatives of the Roman people, was the least democratic element of the system, since it was comprised of all former office-holders, who served more or less as lifetime senators after having held almost any elected office.

Again, I suppose we could make more sense of the plot by saying that after 200 years, no one understood that the Republic was actually an oligarchy, and instead that they somehow actually want modern democracy, but that’s pretty dubious.

The biggest problem with the film’s plot is that it can’t make up its mind who actually represents ‘the people’. Gracchus and Gaius are disgusted by Commodus’ gladiatorial spectacles, precisely because they see how easily Commodus will sway the Roman people to support him. As Gracchus says, “He will bring them death, and they will love him for it.” But somehow, at the same time, Gracchus is convinced that the Senate is the body that represents the people. He claims that “The senate is the people, sire. Chosen from among the people to speak for the people.” His claim is totally false; at no point was the Senate the voice of the people. Even at the height of the Republic, it was the tribunes who represented the lower classes, not the Senate (which is part of the reason the Senate was afraid of Tiberius Gracchus). Again, this will make a little more sense if we assume that Gracchus is either deluded or simply looking to justify his jealousy of Commodus’ power.

Derek Jacobi as Senator Gracchus

So the whole plot of the film is problematic. It claims to be a plot by various people to overthrow the emperor and restore the Republic, but this is so unrealistic as to be implausible. The only way we can really make this story make sense is to assume that Gracchus’ true aim is to make himself emperor. If that’s the case, Maximus is simply a puppet in a failed political coup. That means that this film isn’t actually based on how Commodus died (since he died in 192, not 180); it’s really the story of Senator Quadratus’ failed attempt to assassinate Commodus in 182, with Maximus playing the role of Quintianus. Ridley Scott got the names wrong, and he shows the conspiracy succeeding when it actually failed, but this still makes more sense then the film’s putative plot.

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Gladiator: What Every Film about Gladiators Gets Wrong

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Ancient Rome, Gladiator, Gladiatorial Combat, Oliver Reed, Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe

Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott) falls into a long line of films featuring gladiatorial combat. From older films like Spartacus to more recent works like Pompeii and the Spartacus tv series, Western audiences are quite familiar with the idea of gladiators. But every cinematic depiction of gladiators I’ve ever seen has gotten some key facts about gladiators and gladiatorial combat wrong.

First, most films about gladiators fail to realize that the term ‘gladiator’ covered a wide range of fighters, each with specifically-defined equipment. For example the thraex (“Thracian”) wore a high-crested helmet, greaves (shin guards), and a manica (arm guard) for his sword arm and shoulder, and he carried a small shield and a short, curved knife. The murmillo wore a helmet with a fish crest, a manica, and short greaves, and carried a gladius (a short sword, hence the term gladiator) and a tall, oblong shield. The retarius (“net fighter”) wore a manica that covered part of his chest but no other actual armor, and carried a trident and a net. The secutor was much like a murmillo, but wore a different style of helmet that was smooth, so that a net could not catch on it. A hoplomachus (“hoplite warrior”) wore quilted trousers, greaves, and a manica, and used a gladius, a small shield, and a javelin. There were a number of other, less common styles, and some of the styles evolved over time. None wore any chest armor other than the retarius’ large manica.

A thraex fighting a murmillo. Note that both are wearing a manica on their right arms.

But if you look at the most familiar shot of Maximus (Russell Crowe), he doesn’t fit any of those weapon sets. He’s wearing a breastplate with a leather skirt covering his groin, a sort of manica that covers one shoulder but not the arm, hand-wraps, and, early in his career as a gladiator, a face mask. He carries a round shield and uses a gladius. The use of a breastplate and lack of a real manica right away sets him off from all the styles I’ve mentioned. No gladiator that I know of would have worn a real breastplate, and most styles wore a manica. Most, though not all, wore a helmet of some type. So he’s not any type of standard gladiator.

Maximus in his third fight

There were rules about which types of gladiators fought which types. The thraex usually fought the murmillo or the hiplomachus, while the retarius was normally pitted against a murmillo or a secutor. Romans debated which type of fighter was best against particular types, the way that modern sports fans debate the nuances of football and baseball, and while a clever host might occasionally do something unusual in the way he paired off gladiators, too much deviation from the traditional rules and weapon sets would probably have upset the audience.

So when Maximus walks out wearing a breastplate and without a helmet, imagine the response modern American football fans would have to seeing a quarterback walk out without his helmet and wearing hockey gear. Maximus’ breastplate is essentially cheating, because it provides him way more protection than he’s supposed to have. I suppose we could say that Proximo has balanced out the breastplate by taking away the manica and helmet, but it would basically have been breaking the rules.

From a film-making standpoint, the lack of a helmet is clearly about helping the audience keep track of Maximus and allowing them to see his emotions during the fight, but there’s really no good reason for getting the rest of the gear wrong, especially since Scott made a point of claiming that the film was historically accurate.

The Bigger Mistake

More importantly, however, Gladiator, like other similar films, misunderstands what happened in the gladiatorial arena in a fairly fundamental way. Not all games had a full program of events, but those that did had three major sections that happened in a fairly rigid order. By the end of the Republic, the morning of a game was given over to the venationes, the animal hunts. Animals would be made to fight each other, or animals fought a specific type of fighter called a bestiarius, who was specifically not a gladiator. A more sophisticated type of animal fighter was the venator, who “hunted” animals in the arena (not always dangerous animals, but also creatures like deer, camels, and rabbits), and who sometimes performed tricks comparable to those done by modern lion-tamers and similar circus performers. The descriptions of these hunts make clear that in the largest games, thousands of animals might be slaughtered. The purpose of such hunts was to demonstrate Roman superiority over the natural world and over non-Romans, who could be viewed as ‘savage beasts’ metaphorically.

Around lunch-time, there was a break, and many spectators left the arena to escape the heat and the spectacle of the next element, namely the executions. Romans conducted many forms of public executions, including crucifixion, burning at the stake, and damnatio ad bestiae (being ‘thrown’ to the animals). Crucifixion took too long to conduct this way, but many of the faster methods were performed in the arena. Lower class Romans (never Roman elites) might be condemned to being exposed to hungry animals, or tied to a wild horse or bull and dragged around the arena or trampled. Some were tortured in various ways before being killed, for example by being castrated. Execution was meant to be humiliating, so it sometimes involved theatrical scenarios in which the condemned was dressed up as an unfortunate figure from mythology (for example, as Actaeon, a hunter who accidentally saw the goddess Diana bathing; she turned him into a stag and let his dogs tear him apart). The Roman audiences wanted to see criminals suffer, they wanted to see criminals experience fear and degradation, and they wanted to see criminals begging for a fast and merciful death. The purpose of such harsh executions was to deter crime and to teach people that the Roman state triumphed over the forces of criminality and disorder.

The afternoon component was the gladiatorial games proper (generally termed a munus). Pairs and groups of gladiators fought each other, sometimes simply as gladiators and sometimes as ‘re-enactors’ of mythical or historical battles. The purpose of such fights was to give the audience a show of Roman bravery and skill, and courage in the face of death. As a purpose, that goal clashes dramatically with the goals of the executions and the beast hunts. So it’s important to realize that these three phases of a game were completely different and distinct events.

What cinematic depictions of gladiatorial games get wrong is that they generally conflate the three phases carelessly. Maximus is shown having to fight wild tigers during his second game, despite the fact that he was a gladiator, not a bestiarius. Actual gladiators never fought animals; it would have been beneath them. Although he is an elite man, the film shows him being sold as a gladiator, which would have been a shocking violation of his rights, and probably one that would have led to conspiracies and rebellions against Commodus, since if Commodus could strip a powerful man like Maximus of his legal rights, he could do the same to any other senator or general.

Most importantly, what every depiction of gladiatorial games gets wrong is that actual gladiators did not inevitably fight to the death. Most fights allowed for the possibility of missio, (roughly, ‘surrender’), unless they were explicitly billed as sine missione matches, (basically, fights to the death). A typical gladiatorial fight lasted until one fighter was too exhausted to fight, or if he suffered an injury or accident that prevented him from continuing. At that point, he held up two fingers as a gesture of surrender, indicating that he was conceding defeat. The host of the game (termed the editor) then had the option of sparing the gladiator or ordering the winner to kill him. But the editor (influenced by the crowd) would have made his choice based on how good a show he felt he had gotten for his money and how well he felt the loser had fought. Death was not the normal outcome of a gladiatorial fight.

The Romans did not go to a gladiatorial game to see gladiators die, any more than modern Americans go to NASCAR races to see flaming car wrecks; in both cases what the audience was seeking was a show of skill, daring, and courage. Both sports are dangerous and men certainly died during them; that risk made things more exciting, but it wasn’t the main purpose of the event. The notion that half of all gladiators died confuses gladiators with criminals to be executed, when those were entirely distinct things. The bravery that audiences wanted from gladiators was at odds with the humiliation and fear they wanted from criminals.

Films like Gladiator envision a system in which half of all the participants in any given combat will die. But the economics of this scenario doesn’t actually make sense. Gladiators were supplied to the editors by a man called a lanista, who trained, housed, and fed gladiators, and then rented them out to an editor for a show. In Gladiator, the lanista is Proximo (Oliver Reed). While slaves could, at many points in Roman history, be purchased rather cheaply, the expenses of training them were considerable. If a lanista lost half his gladiators at every fight, it’s very hard to see how he could possibly have gotten a return on his investment.

So contrary to films like Gladiator, gladiatorial combat was not usually a fight to the death. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a dangerous sport. It was quite dangerous. Clearly gladiators died when they received inoperable wounds, or if they bled out from an arterial wound. Some died when they slipped and fell onto their opponent’s weapon. And some were executed because the editor was dissatisfied with the fight. But it wasn’t the non-stop slaughter Ridley Scott offers us in the film.

So Why Show Us Constant Slaughter?

If gladiatorial combat wasn’t as lethal as the movies present it, why do the movies always show it this way? To some extent, it might just be what audiences expect from the genre. And in some cases perhaps it’s ignorance of what a real gladiatorial game was like, but Ridley Scott consulted with historians who were quite familiar with gladiatorial combat, so he probably knew better.

One thing that most depictions of gladiatorial combat have in common is that they spend some time dwelling on the bloodthirsty barbarity of the Romans who enjoy watching the slaughter. The people in the audience are usually shown eagerly awaiting the death blow, cheering or shouting for blood, and sometimes being spattered with blood. This allows the film to implicitly critique the Roman audience for being so bloodthirsty, and it allows the film to flatter its audience by demonstrating the modern audience’s moral superiority; we know that killing people for entertainment is wrong, even if the Roman audience doesn’t know it.

What has always bothered me about this is that it’s false flattery. Films like Gladiator try to eat their cake and have it too. They draw us in with promises of cinematic bloodshed shown in a theoretically realistic style (although with far more body parts getting lopped off than is likely the case in actual combat), while at the same time telling the audience that we’re better than the Romans because we don’t like actual bloodshed, just fake bloodshed designed to look real.

Scott’s film is particularly egregious in the way it plays this game. Most gladiator films leave the moralizing to the camera and let the viewer draw his or her own conclusion, but Scott actually includes a scene specifically designed to make the moral point. Early in his fighting career, Maximus fights alone against a large number of gladiators and defeats them all easily. Then he turns to the crowd and shouts “Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?” before spitting in disgust and throwing down his sword. The film explicitly condemns the Roman audience for its bloodthirstiness, but fails to acknowledge that the modern audience is just as culpable in the slaughter as the Romans are. After all, we’re going to see Gladiator because we want to see Russell Crowe kill people.

If Maximus is disgusted by all the killing he’s doing, he has a choice. He can stop fighting and choose to die instead; after all, that will reunite him with his dead family, which is what he spends half the film wanting. But that would violate one of the basic rules of Hollywood action films, which is that, contrary to what we’re taught in school and church and everywhere else, violence does indeed solve problems. In fact, in action films, violence is the only thing that ever solves problems. Bad guys must be killed because they cannot be reasoned or negotiated with or shamed into relenting. Violence is consistently depicted as the morally acceptable way to fix problems. Maximus’ slaughter is good because he’s fighting to save his life. Commodus is evil mostly because he’s just evil, and he won’t allow Maximus to not fight. And, of course, Maximus has a healthy dose of manpain because Commodus has had his wife and son killed and is threatening Lucilla and her boy. And that means that violence is the only option, and if Maximus is violent enough, if he can be more violent than his opponents, everything will be made better and society will be saved. This is the same narrative that every other Hollywood action film offers us, just with a different setting and characters.

Remind me again which morally corrupt society enjoys watching slaughter?

Want to Know More?

Gladiatoris available at Amazon.

There are a lot of good recent books on Gladiatorial Combat that you could look at. David Potter and Garrett Mattingly’s collection of essays, Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empirehas an excellent chapter on “Entertainers in the Roman World,” that does a very good job in a short space of explaining the issues. If you want something more substantial, try Thomas Wiedeman’s Emperors and Gladiators. Alison Futrell’s The Roman Games: A Sourcebook is a collection of primary sources related to Roman sports, including gladiatorial combat.

Gladiator: Anatomy of a Composite Character

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Ancient Rome, David Franzoni, Gladiator, Marcus Nonius Macrinus, Maximus, Narcissus, Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe

One of the interesting things about Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott) is that while several of the major characters (Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Lucilla, Lucius) are solidly historical characters, the main character, Maximus (Russell Crowe) is fictitious. Normally in historical films, it’s more likely to be the other way around, with the main character being real and the supporting cast being made-up. So let’s take a look at Maximus and where the screenwriters (David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson) got him from.

Gladiator started life as David Franzoni’s script about Narcissus, the wrestler who strangled Commodus to death in 192 AD. But Scott didn’t like the dialog, so he hired John Logan to rework the script. Logan heavily revised the first act and it’s probably at this point that Narcissus became the general Maximus. The obvious model for this was Marcus Nonius Macrinus, a successful Roman general and friend of Marcus Aurelius (not to be confused with the later Roman emperor Macrinus). Unlike Maximus, Marcus Nonius Macrinus did not suffer a humiliating fall from grace, but died a very wealthy man. In 2008, his tomb was discovered just north of Rome. Unfortunately it’s in very poor condition, and this year it was announced that the tomb was going to be reburied to preserve it until the funds can be raised to properly conserve and restore the site. Russell Crowe has gotten involved in the effort to raise funds and keep the tomb from being re-buried. (There’s an online petition that you can sign and donate to, and there’s more information about the whole situation here; watch the CNN video. One of the major problems in Italian archaeology at the moment has been the economic crisis in Italy, which has forced a sharp cutback in funding for archaeological work.)

Macrinus’ tomb

Once filming began, however, Crowe had significant complaints about the script, so William Nicholson was brought in to rework it again. Exactly what got changed I don’t know, but my guess is that it was somewhere in here that the whole ‘restore the Republic’ angle got added in, because it makes Maximus a much more virtuous character if his fight isn’t really just about a rivalry with the emperor but about a more lofty goal.

Some online commentators have suggested that Maximus owes something to Cincinnatus, a 5th century BC Roman general who briefly assumed the dictatorship of Rome during a military crisis and then promptly resigned the title and its powers to return to farming. I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Apart from both being virtuous generals who just want to return home to their farms, there’s not much to connect the two. They lived in very different circumstances 600 years apart, Maximus dies triumphant, while Cincinnatus triumphs and goes back to his farm, and one was a gladiator and the other wasn’t.

A more obvious comparison, and one that’s also been made, is Spartacus. Both were gladiators and both plan rebellion against the Roman state. But once again, there are more differences than similarities. Spartacus successfully rebelled against the Roman Republic for more than two years, whereas Maximus’ rebellion is nipped in the bud by Commodus. Maximus gets to kill Commodus in the arena, whereas Spartacus’ success was outside the arena and he was defeated by Crassus. So while Spartacus might have been the inspiration for the idea of a slave rebellion, it’s clear that the screenwriters didn’t draw too much from him.

As I’ve argued here, I think there’s an overlooked inspiration (or at least a very strong parallel) and that was the conspiracy of Quadratus and Quintianus around 183. If we change Senator Gracchus to Quadratus and replace Maximus with Quintianus, we see a lot of parallels. In both cases we have a plot against Commodus early in his reign, driven substantially by an unhappy senator and the scheming of Commodus’ sister Lucilla. Quintianus attempted to murder Commodus in an amphitheater, while Maximus kills Commodus in an arena. Both are attempting a political revolution or coup, and both fail and wind up dead. The major differences are that Quintianus wasn’t a gladiator and there was no abortive slave rebellion, and Quadratus wasn’t trying to restore the Republic (although as I’ve argued, I don’t think Senator Gracchus was actually trying to restore the Republic either).

Finally, I think another overlooked parallel is with Cassius Chaerea, the man who orchestrated the plot that murdered Gaius Caligula. While Chaerea wasn’t motivated by a desire to restore the Republic, that’s what the Senate attempted to do briefly after Caligula’s death became known. It failed when the Praetorian guards put forward Claudius. But the incident itself is quite famous, especially as a last futile Republican gesture, and this most have been on the minds of the screenwriters as they wrestled with the plot of the film over various rewrites.

So while Maximus is a fictitious character, and having a completely fictitious character as the star of a movie that claims to be historical is a serious problem, at least the screenwriters were thinking about different historical scenarios and how they might have played out in a semi-plausible way, instead of just making up whatever crap came into their heads. 300 2: Rise of an Empire, I’m looking at you.

Want to Know More?

Gladiatoris available at Amazon.

Gladiator: A Brief Comment about Names

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Commodus, Derek Jacobi, Gladiator, John Shrapnel, Maximus, Oliver Reed, Ridley Scott, Roman Names, Russell Crowe

One of the small things that sort of bugs me about Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott) is that is screws up Roman rules about naming. Roman society recognized that any upper class man belonged to a familia (a unit formed by the marriage of a man and woman, loosely comparable to the modern nuclear family) and to a gens, or clan, a wider descent group vaguely similar to the idea of Scottish and Irish clans today. By traditional Roman naming convention, a man had three names, his praenomen (his personal or ‘first’ name), his nomen (which signals which gens he belongs to), and his cognomen (the name of his familia, roughly comparable to a Western last name). So Gaius Julius Caesar is Gaius of the Caesarian familia within the Julian gens. The correct order is praenomen, nomen, cognomen.

The praenomen is a private individual name used by the members of a man’s familia, and his close personal friends. Using it is a sign of familiarity or that the speaker is socially above the person being spoken to. So only his close family and friends will call him Gaius. For anyone else to do so is rude. Everyone else will call him Julius, which is how they would also address any of his male relatives.

But Russell Crowe’s character is named Maximus Decimus Meridius, which is wildly incorrect, because it’s cognomen, praenomen, nomen. It ought to be Decimus Meridius Maximus. Everyone calls him Maximus, when they should probably call him Meridius, but there are enough examples of Romans known by their cognomens that we can probably overlook that. Marcus Aurelius and Commodus could reasonably address him as Decimus, since they are clearly his social superior; calling him Maximus would be a substantial courtesy, because it implies that he is their equal.

But that’s not the end of the problem. The two main senators are Senator Gaius and Senator Gracchus, and are addressed as such. Gaius is a praenomen, while Gracchus is a cognomen. So we’ve got Senator Fred and Senator Smith here, which doesn’t make sense unless Senator Gaius is considered a complete joke who doesn’t deserve the courtesy of being called by his nomen or cognomen, and it’s unlikely that any man was elevated to the Senate unless he commanded general respect.

Also, the lanista who buys Maximus, Antonius Proximo (Oliver Reed) has an Italian name; it ought to be Antonius Proximus.

In general, one of the things I’ve learned from watching historical films is that screenwriters just make up names based on rules known only to them. This is one of the very frustrating things for historians; it would take half an hour with a scholarly book or a phone call to a historian to figure out historically accurate names for characters, and instead, they just make shit up. I entirely get that the screenwriters of Gladiator wanted to stage Commodus’ death in the arena instead of his palace; it’s more dramatic in a film called Gladiator to have the bad guy die in the arena. But the names of supporting characters aren’t going to make much difference to the audience, so why not take the trouble to make them at least plausible?

Correction: My colleague Sarah Bond, who specializes in Roman history, pointed out a small overstatement that I made in the above post. Not all Roman men had three names. The trinomina (the triple name) was generally the mark of a Roman citizen, so that lower-class Roman men did not always have three names. Additionally, she tells me that while Hollywood movies often garble Roman names, sometimes Romans in the provinces of the Empire did as well, at least based on funeral inscriptions. So there is perhaps some precedent for a garbled name like Maximus Decimus Meridius, though probably not for man of his apparently very high standing. Thanks, Sarah!

Want to Know More?

Gladiatoris available at Amazon.

Gladiator: Just How Bad an Emperor was Commodus?

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Ancient Rome, Commodus, Connie Nielsen, Gladiator, Gladiatorial Combat, Joaquin Phoenix, Ridley Scott

Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott) depicts Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) as being a Bad Emperor. In the film he murders his father, usurps the throne, and tries to execute the much more virtuous Maximus (Russell Crowe) out of jealousy. When he returns to Rome, he demonstrates a general disinterest in ruling, preferring to spend his time and energies throwing a massive series of gladiatorial games that are scheduled to last for 150 days. He lusts after his sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), menaces Lucilla’s young son who innocently idolizes the gladiator that Maximus has become, and ultimately fights Maximus in the arena after giving Maximus a mortal wound just before the fight. That’s some pretty serious Bad Emperor shit.

The reality was probably worse, but in assessing Commodus’ reign, we have to deal with problems in the sources. None of the sources for this period of Roman history are entirely reliable. Herodian and Dio Cassius both make numerous errors; Herodian has been accused to being quite credulous, while Dio’s history survives only in substantial fragments. The anonymous Historia Augusta is filled with fabricated documents and large portions of it have been dismissed as fiction. Commodus’ legal edicts were all overturned after his death and thus have not survived. Dio is probably our best source for Commodus’ reign, because he was a senator and personally knew Commodus, but Commodus had very poor relationships with the Senate and the traditional Roman elite, and so Dio is quite hostile to the man. Thus we always have to allow room for the possibility that Dio is inventing or exaggerating what he saw as the emperor’s bad traits.

Despite these problems, the surviving evidence does point to Commodus being a pretty crappy ruler. He was a good-looking man, assuming the portrait busts are accurate. The Historia Augusta claims that he suffered from a large hernia in his groin that was visible through his loose robes and was the subject of many humorous poems. It also offers numerous salacious stories about his debauched behavior, but these were standard things to include in stories of Bad Emperors, so they may be fictitious. Gladiator’s Commodus looks pale and sickly, which is wrong; he seems to have been quite robust, given that his hobbies included hunting animals, fighting gladiators, and wrestling. If Ridley Scott wanted him to look creepy, they should have put glitter in his hair, since Dio tells us that he liked powdering his hair with gold dust. Instead, he gets a rather fey neckerchief.

Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus

Dio says that he was quite lazy, and more than happy to turn over the governance of the Empire to an unpopular and supposedly immoral Greek named Saoterus. But here we have to be careful. The Roman senate no longer ruled the Empire, but they were traditionally the class that supplied the high officials. Dio, as a senator, would naturally have resented Commodus’ preference for a non-senator, and thus may well have exaggerated just how disinterested in governing Commodus was.

Commodus’ preference for Saoterus quickly spawned a plot against the Emperor. In 182 or 183, after two or three years of Commodus’ reign, his sister Lucilla hatched a plan to murder her brother. Lucilla was not the imperiled widow with a young son that the movie presents her to be; she was the widow of Marcus’ Aurelius’ adopted brother Lucius Verus and, during Commodus’ reign, the wife of an important senator who was deeply devoted to Commodus. Since she disliked her husband and her brother, she hatched a plot with a different senator, Quadratus, who was probably a grand-nephew of Marcus Aurelius. Since Commodus was sleeping with Quadratus’ wife and Quadratus was sleeping with Lucilla, we can imagine that Quadratus had rather complex feelings about the whole situation.

Connie Nielsen as Lucilla

Quadratus arranged for another senator, Quintianus, to stab Commodus to death as he was passing through a tunnel into an amphitheater. But, rather foolishly, when Quintianus confronted Commodus and brandished a dagger, he made the mistake of going on at some length about how the Senate wanted the emperor dead. This gave Commodus’ body-guards a chance to intervene and save the emperor. So it turns out that Syndrome from the Incredibles was right; monologuing is a bad idea.

This failed plot poisoned the rest of Commodus’ reign, because it made him deeply suspicious of the Senate. From this point on, the emperor relied on personal favorites whom he felt he could trust more than the senators, which must have alienated the senators even more.

The film’s claim that Commodus sought to win the support of the Roman crowd through the use of lavish spectacles is basically accurate. Like many previous emperors, Commodus relied heavily on congiaria, massive gifts of food, wine, oil, and money to the general population. Over the course of his reign, he made 8 congiaria, about one every 18 months.

He also loved gladiatorial games, going so far as to participate in them personally, and he enjoyed killing captive animals as a show of his personal prowess. Dio and other senators were witness to a number of these. Dio emphasizes that Commodus was not particularly good in combat, being more likely to cut off a gladiator’s ear or nose than to actually kill one, but Dio’s claims of the emperor’s incompetence are probably exaggerated. Dio also particularly records an incident in which Commodus personally beheaded an ostrich and waved its head around; according to Dio, the senators were laughing so hard at the ridiculous scene that Dio had to improvise a cover for their laughter, because otherwise Commodus would have executed them all. Again, we have only Dio’s claim that this was so. Commodus also reportedly fought and killed a large number of men who had already lost limbs in battle. When he appeared in the arena, he did so for pay, forcing the city to pay him a hefty sum for the privilege of watching him fight.

Over the course of his reign, Commodus is reported to have executed a large number of people. He executed Quadratus and Quintianus (quite reasonably, really, given that they had tried to kill him); Lucilla he exiled and later had executed. When a second conspiracy took the life of Saoterus, he executed the senators behind that plot, but Perennis, another of his trusted inner circle, took advantage of the situation to implicate several personal enemies, who were also executed. He later became convinced that his wife was guilty of adultery, and had her executed. When a philosopher denounced Perennis, the philosopher was executed, but a year later, when a group of soldiers denounced Perennis as plotting to replace the emperor, Commodus listened and executed Perennis and a number of other men. Finally, there is a story that he executed a couple of men on the grounds that they were the sort of men who might have become discontented with the emperor and thus might have started to plot against him.

If this bust is accurate, they should have gotten Seth Rogen to play Commodus

However, the large number of executions were probably driven in part by the enormous expense that Commodus’ games and congiaria required. Such spectacles were extremely costly, and the funds for them had to come from somewhere. Confiscating the estates of the men he executed was a good way to pay for these expenses, and thus accusations of treachery may in some cases have been excuses to seize the property of wealthy men.

Eventually, in 192, after another round of gladiatorial games in which Commodus publicly hunted hundreds of animals and fought dozens of men, another conspiracy was planned. A group of senators schemed to replace him. First they bribed his mistress to poison him (although claims of poisoning are always suspicious in an era when food poisoning and undiagnosed illness was so common), but he vomited up the poisoned meat. Then they bribed his wrestling partner Narcissus to strangle him while he was taking a bath. Commodus was caught unawares and died.

So while Gladiator gets some things wrong, particularly the length of Commodus’ reign (which seems to be less than half a year in the film) and how he died, overall the picture that it offers of Commodus is probably broadly accurate.

Want to Know More?

Gladiatoris available at Amazon.

If you want to know about Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, an easy starting point is Michael Grant’s The Antonines: The Roman Empire in Transition. For Commodus, there’s the recent The Emperor Commodus: Gladiator, Hercules or a Tyrant?

Gladiator: Why Did Commodus Become Emperor?

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Commodus, Gladiator, Joaquin Phoenix, Marcus Aurelius, Richard Harris, Ridley Scott, Roman Empire, Russell Crowe

The first section of Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott) deals with the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (d. 180AD). Marcus (Richard Harris) is an old man who is tired of being emperor and wants to designate the successful general Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) to be his successor. But when he tells his biological son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) about this, Commodus responds by complaining that his father never really loved him and never appreciated his virtues, and then by smothering the old man with his chest. I’m not sure that’s actually possible, but let’s go with it. Because somehow there are absolutely no servants hanging around in the emperor’s palace-tent to see what Commodus has done, Commodus successfully claims the throne, since he is, after all, Marcus’s son. Then he proceeds to spend the rest of the film being a Bad Emperor, as Sellars and Yateman would say.

This is pretty lurid stuff, and, in case you were wondering, completely made up. Marcus formally named Commodus his co-emperor in 177 AD, which is a pretty clear statement that Commodus was his intended successor. Marcus did not die on campaign in the middle of nowhere as in the film; he actually died at Vindobona (modern Vienna). And Maximus is a fictional character, so Marcus couldn’t have wanted him to succeed to the throne. So the film’s claims are pretty clearly false.

However, unlike a lot of historical films that make things up, Gladiator is actually doing something interesting here. It’s exploring the minor historical puzzle of why Marcus Aurelius allowed his son to succeed him.

“The Five Good Emperors”

Probably the biggest flaw in the Roman Imperial system is that there was no formally-established mechanism for arranging the succession to the imperial office. The reason for this has to do with the odd way that the imperial office was established. When Augustus took power in Rome after the end of the civil wars of the Late Republic, he was acutely aware that his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, had been too blatant about his desire for power; Caesar’s naked ambition unnerved many of his closest associates and led to his assassination. Augustus wanted to live longer in power than his adoptive father, and he realized that Romans of his generation were too deeply attached to the notion of the Republic to allow one man to monopolize all the political power. So instead of seeking to become king the way Caesar had (since the Romans hated the idea of kings), Augustus sought to disguise his power grab with a claim that he wasn’t actually the guy running everything. He allowed the Senate to debate issues and ‘advise’ him, and he permitted prominent men to hold the top offices as long as they didn’t challenge his control. So while Augustus was absolutely in control of Rome, he chose to pretend that he wasn’t in control. Instead of calling himself rex (“king”), he preferred more Republican-sounded titles like princeps (“first citizen”) and imperator (“commander”). These are the root words for the modern English words ‘prince’ and ‘emperor’, but neither of them has the implications of royalty in classical Latin that they have today.

But this created a problem for Augustus, one that he never quite solved. If he’s denying that he holds complete power, how can he pass that power on to a successor? The best he was able to do was associate his chosen successor with him in public office and let the man inherit his vast wealth. As a result, the next several emperors, while all related to Augustus, succeed him almost at random. His dynasty died out with Nero in 68 AD. After a civil war, the Flavian dynasty tried direct biological succession. Vespasian was succeeded by both of his sons in turn. The second son, Domitian, was stabbed to death as part of conspiracy in 96 AD.

When news of Domitian’s death reached the Senate, it immediately named a successor to prevent a repeat of the civil war at the end of Nero’s reign. The man the Senate chose, Marcus Cocceius Nerva (known simply to history as Nerva) was a relatively obscure old senator with no children. But Nerva lacked the support of the military, and less than a year later he was taken hostage by his own palace guard, who demanded that he name a successor. Nerva chose Marcus Ulpius Traianus (“Trajan”) and then essentially abdicated.

Nerva

In doing this, Nerva blundered into a surprisingly effective system of succession. Trajan was a middle-aged man, a successful and popular general as well as a senator who had a good deal of experience in Roman government, having served as a governor and as a consul. But Trajan had no children, and as a result, after he became emperor, he adopted a distant cousin of his, Publius Aelius Hadrianus (“Hadrian”) as his son. At the time of the adoption, Hadrian was already middle-aged and, like Trajan, a successful general and administrator. Hadrian being childless as well, he eventually chose to adopt Titus Aurelius Fulvius Boionius Arrius Antoninus (known as “Antoninus Pius”; don’t you just love these names?) as his son and successor. Antoninus’ two sons had already died, although he had a daughter Faustina. He chose to adopt his wife’s cousin, Marcus Aurelius, and marry him to Faustina (which is sort of creepy to our way of thinking, but marrying adoptive siblings was relatively acceptable to Romans).

These five emperors, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, are technically called the Antonine dynasty, but they’re often called the Five Good Emperors. This system of succession by adoption meant that rather than relying on the accidents of birth, the emperors could select a man they considered a competent successor and give him experience administering the Empire alongside the emperor.

Marcus Aurelius

However, it’s not clear how intentional this system was. Did the emperors consciously view this as a superior system to simple inheritance, or was it just the result of the fact that for four generations, the emperors had no surviving sons and thus had to adopt a successor? We don’t really know.

Regardless, this system came to an end in 177, when Marcus Aurelius chose to designate Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus Augustus, or Commodus, the only survivor of his fourteen children, as his heir.

Why Did Marcus Aurelius Choose Commodus as His Heir?

It has generally been agreed that Commodus made a poor emperor. He was disinterested in the responsibilities of government and tended to hand authority over to a series of favorites. When this proved unpopular and provoked conspiracies to remove him, he became increasingly dictatorial. On one occasion, he executed two men who were not involved in any plots on the pretext that their wealth meant that they were liable to become dissatisfied with him. He showed signs of megalomania, associating himself with the god Hercules, who was the son of Jupiter, the highest deity in the Roman pantheon. He spent lavishly on entertainment and fought in the gladiatorial arena on numerous occasions, something that Romans regarded as deeply scandalous (perhaps comparable to the reaction people might have if Barack Obama started a second career as a WWE wrestler). He has also been accused of cowardice, a somewhat odd charge for a man who enjoyed fighting as a gladiator.

Commodus dressed as Hercules

All of this stands in odd tension with his father’s life. In addition to being a very conscientious emperor, Marcus Aurelius was one of the last great Stoic philosophers. Like all Stoics, he placed a very high value of duty and virtue and advocated for self-control of the emotions and passions. His Meditations is a treatise on self-improvement that calls for self-analysis. So it is odd that such a man would have been willing to break with nearly a century of practice and allow his biological son to inherit the throne when Commodus seems rather clearly to have been a poor candidate for the imperial office.

Several factors were probably at play. Although Marcus Aurelius advocated for emotional self-control, that doesn’t mean that he was capable of being emotionally objective about his own children. Perhaps he simply couldn’t see Commodus’ character flaws, or perhaps he saw them but simply couldn’t bring himself to disinherit Commodus. Maybe he thought that Commodus would rise to the occasion and find the duties of the imperial office a goad for improving his character. Marcus provided Commodus with excellent tutors, so he may simply have felt that Commodus was better prepared than he actually was. The two men were co-emperors for three years, so Commodus certainly had time to learn the skills it took to be emperor.

Another factor is that most of the negative evaluation of Commodus is based on things he did as emperor. His gladiatorial excesses, his dictatorial response to opposition, and his lavish spending on entertainment were all developments of his time as emperor and as such were traits that Marcus couldn’t easily have predicted. Only Commodus’ disinterest in the day-to-day affairs of state is something that his father could have observed. It is only in retrospect that Commodus’ personal failings are obvious, so perhaps Commodus appeared to be a good successor. Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.

A third issue is that, although the imperial office was about 200 years old, Commodus was, in fact, the first son born to a sitting emperor; he was the first emperor “born in the purple”. So there was no direct precedent for what to do with such a child. The system of adopting successors was born out of expediency; for close to a century, no emperor had had a surviving son to consider for the succession. Marcus way well have felt that his unique situation justified allowing him to succeed.

Gladiator’s answer to this small historical puzzle is a novel one. Marcus didn’t want Commodus to succeed him, but never got the chance to announce the fact since Commodus killed him. As I already noted, that’s almost certainly false. There’s no evidence for it, and the fact that Commodus was co-emperor for three years before his father’s death is fairly strong evidence that Marcus wanted his son to succeed him. But at least Gladiator is trying to be intelligent about its historical inventions, which I as an historian have to cheer for.

Update: I was just looking at Michael Grant’s The Antonines, which has a section on Commodus, and Grant offers a couple of points relevant to this post. First, he points out that, had Marcus Aurelius attempted to appoint someone other than his son, he would inevitably have had to draw from a small number of prominent Romans, which would inevitably have been contested by the other prominent Romans; in other words, attempting to designate anyone other than his son would probably have triggered a civil war after his death.

His other interesting point is that we don’t actually know much about Marcus Aurelius’ death. While it is commonly thought that it happened at Vindobona, no source actually tells us exactly where or how he died. Dio Cassius, one of the best sources for Marcus’ reign, says that he was quite sick for much of the German campaign, but also says that he heard a story that Marcus’ doctor hastened his death in order to please Commodus. So while Gladiator’s scenario of Commodus personally killing his father is still false, it’s not quite as improbable as I had assumed.

Want to Know More?

Gladiatoris available at Amazon.

If you want to know about Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, an easy starting point is Michael Grant’s The Antonines: The Roman Empire in Transition.Anthony Birley’s biography of Marcus Aurelius: A Biography is sound, although it’s quite academic. For Commodus, there’s the recent The Emperor Commodus: Gladiator, Hercules or a Tyrant?