In
the year 167 A.D., the first full-scale barbarian attack on
Rome destroyed aqueducts and irrigation conduits, but the
army of emperor Marcus Aurelius repelled the invaders. In
176, Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus entered Rome after
a campaign north of the Alps in which they were again victorious
over the "barbarians." In 180, Marcus Aurelius died at age
58 from an illness at the time of the Battle of the Danube
led by General Narcissus Meridas, and was succeeded by his
18-year-old son Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus. In 183, Commodus
escaped death at the hands of assassins who attacked him at
the instigation of his sister Lucilia and a large group of
senators, whereupon he put many distinguished Romans to death
on charges of being implicated in the conspiracy. In 185,
Commodus drained the treasury to put on gladiatorial spectacles
and confiscated property to support his pleasures. Finally,
in 192 Commodus was murdered by the wrestler Narcissus after
the emperor’s mistress, his chamberlain, and the prefect of
praetorians found their names on the imperial execution list.
These events frame the film Gladiator, a blockbuster
directed by Ridley Scott on a grand scale not seen since Spartacus
(1960), though the story is a permutation of the plot set
forth in The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
in which Marcus Aurelius is poisoned. If we are to believe
the fiction in Gladiator, before Marcus Aurelius
(played by Richard Harris) dies, he asks his commanding general
Maximus (played by Russell Crowe) to visit him; after articulating
some vague Stoic observations, the emperor asks Maximus to
succeed him and then to end the corrupt court politics by
returning power to the Senate of Rome for the good of the
people. When Marcus Aurelius discloses his plan of succession
to his son Commodus (played by Joaquin Phoenix), the latter
kills his father in order to ensure his inheritance and orders
the execution of Maximus and his loyalists. Maximus, however,
overpowers those assigned to kill him and escapes to the desert
stronghold of Zuchobar, where he is enslaved and trained by
Proximo (played by the late Oliver Reed) to be a gladiator.
When Commodus orders one hundred days of gladiatorial games
to commemorate the memory of Marcus Aurelius, Maximus disguised
as "the Spaniard" heads for Rome along with Proximo’s other
slaves. Ultimately, Maximus triumphs in the Coliseum and fulfills
his destiny as "the general who became a slave, the slave
who became a gladiator, and the gladiator who defied an emperor."
Commodus wounds a chained Maximus and then insists on combat
in the Coliseum, but Maximus triumphs, kills Commodus, and
then dies of the wounds originally inflicted by Commodus.
Power then reverts to the Senate, or so the film tells us.
Thematically, Gladiator glorifies violence. We find that soldiers
say that they fight for "glory and honor," though in fact
Maximus is motivated by the desire to defend his family and
the prosperous way of life that Roman imperialism provides.
The simple materialism that motivates Maximus is contrasted
with Commodus’s profligacy. Whereas Commodus proves that the
masses enjoy bread and circuses, Maximus in the end gains
support from the masses by displaying the martial virtues
that supposedly made Rome great, but of course these virtues
were most heroically illustrated by the Germanic fighters
who were defending themselves against Roman imperialism at
the beginning of the film, so the message of the film is in
the end as confused as the historical fictions of the scriptwriter.
The subliminal subtext, however, is that politicians are assholes
while soldiers fight nobly but are not given the credit that
they deserve, a moral that recalls the unfinished national
debate over the American role in Vietnam, another war in which
the superpower of the day failed to bomb the adversary back
to the stone age. MH
I
want to comment on this film
