The Only History ‘Gladiator II’ Cares About Is Its Own
[Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for “Gladiator II.”]
As should be abundantly clear after “Napoleon,” “Robin Hood,” and “Kingdom of Heaven,” Ridley Scott is interested in history as a vehicle for studying characters and/or huge volleys of flaming arrows. His historical films, like all historical films, are so much about us and what we believe and how we would like to understand ourselves that it’s almost silly to try to assign a level of “historical accuracy” to any of them.
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But the more serious a historical film gets, the more money gets thrown at it, and the bigger its scope, the more danger there is of Victorian literary tropes and conveniently dramatic film writing being mistaken as historical fact.
Without the cheeky David Bowie needle drops in something like “A Knight’s Tale” or the limited and intentionally fictional framing of something like “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” a film like “Gladiator II” runs the risk of being fodder for incorrect AP world history questions and incorrect ideas about empires, Roman or otherwise.
Which is why it’s useful that “Gladiator II” is so obsessed with its own history and continuing both its visual legacy and the plotlines of the main characters in the original 2000 film. There are kernels of historical events in there, kind of, but if you are looking to “Well, actually” anyone after a “Gladiator II” screening — sometimes correcting movies is my Roman Empire, so I won’t judge — then, bona dea, you do have a lot of material to work with.
Set sixteen years after Maximus’ (Russell Crowe) and Commodus’ (Joaquin Phoenix) deaths in the arena in the first film, Paul Mescal enters the Coliseum as the vanquished, Roman-hating Numidian warrior Hanno, who is also secretly Lucius, the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielson) and Maximus. That marks him as a potential savior of Rome, the one man who might free the empire from the rapacious appetites of the twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and the rich Macrinus (Denzel Washington).
This is, functionally, an alternative reality Rome.
Because, OK, where to even start? Numidia was part of the Roman Empire and had been for a while by this point, so there was absolutely no need for poor, benighted General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) to bring his ship/siege tower combos to attempt the world’s most extra amphibious assault at the start of “Gladiator II.”
In our reality, Commodus’ death in 192 CE led to a period known as the Year of the Five Emperors, which is something Armando Ianucci could totally write about if HBO forces him to make a period show because one of those emperors won the title in an auction put on by the Praetorian Guard, only to be repeatedly stoned by the people of Rome for eight miserable weeks before he got murdered, too.
The successful general who cemented his right to be Roman monarch out of this scrum was a guy named Septimius Severus, who ruled the empire for 18 years, counting the post-Commodus power struggle. So he’d still be alive at the start of “Gladiator II” — although I suppose since he’d probably be up in Scotland at this point, miserably tramping around after Caledonian guerillas and wishing for death, it’s a mercy to leave him out of it. His family, the Severan dynasty, is technically represented in “Gladiator II” through Geta and Caracalla, but only just.
The Severans were, first of all, a far more international clan than is generally reflected in depictions of the Roman world — ruling the entire Mediterranean, after all, means you start to have generals and leaders and power players from the entire Mediterranean. Septimius Severus was born to an Italian mother and an African father in what is now Libya, married a rich Syrian woman, and did indeed have two sons that we now know as Geta and Caracalla. Their real names were Publius Septimius Geta and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, but you can’t swing a sword in Imperial Rome without hitting a Marcus Aurelius, so: Caracalla.
The Severans boast some of the most dynamic women to ever play imperial power politics (treat yourself to a Wikipedia dive on Julia Maesa) as well as some of the most tragic and twisted young emperors. There’s Geta and Caracalla, of course, who, far from being kind of mystically codependent as they are portrayed in the film, hated each other with such passionate immaturity that they built a barricade to divide up their bits of the imperial palace — that is, before Caracalla went to a peace talk with his brother, organized by their mother, and deliberately had Geta murdered while, again, their mom was trying to shield her younger son in her arms.
Caracalla gets his nickname from a kind of Gothic tunic he wore obsessively. You can picture him as the sort of guy who would be in tactical boots on the New York subway; a lad’s lad who tramped around with his troops most militarily. He would go on tours across the empire, deliberately ordering seafood when he was far enough inland to make it really expensive, and commanding all sorts of improvements built for him only to declare them inadequate and have them torn down. Just Emperor things.
Arguably the biggest thing Caracalla did as emperor, besides terrorize people, was make every free man in the Roman Empire a citizen. Before, citizenship had been a privilege parceled out by the empire’s ruling Italian elite for good behavior, army service, and/or monetary contributions to the glory of Rome. After Caracalla, the empire was closer to what Alexander Karim’s ex-gladiator-turned-doctor Ravi describes as the miracle of becoming Roman: E pluribus unum.
The Severans brought the periphery of the empire into the imperial court itself. The Senate may well have all been murdered on Lucilla’s weird, theater-y funeral bier. Never again would they weigh in on imperial power in the same way. But Caracalla was still a horror show, and after six years in which he behaved as, in Edward Gibbon’s words, “the common enemy of mankind,” the emperor was stabbed to death by one of his troops while taking a piss.
The dick-stabbing was organized by a Praetorian prefect who shares the name Macrinus with Washington’s character in Scott’s film. But that is all that they share. Macrinus was a judge and administrator, who really only made a play for the throne because word was about to get to Caracalla that he was a potential enemy, if not prophesied to be emperor. And it’s hard to picture this Algerian nerd — who was soft-hearted enough to let the remainder of Caracalla’s family live and return to Syria, from where they organized the army that overthrew Macrinus — with even an ounce of Washington’s charisma.
And the less said of Mescal’s Lucius Verus, the Prince of Rome, perhaps the better. Lucilla was, in fact, the name of one of the daughters of Marcus Aurelius (he had four that outlived him) and did in fact plot a coup against her brother Commodus. But the plan failed, and Commodus executed her for it around the time she was 33. By then, most of her children by the Lucius Verus who was co-emperor with Marcus Aurelius, were already dead. This is one of those scenarios, I suppose, where the Anastasia fantasy that someone in Marcus Aurelius’ line got away is much a better story than the reality of getting your throat cut by a centurion on Capri.
In so many ways, “Gladiator II” is playing the hits of historical myth as it engages seriously with its own lore. Caracalla installing a beloved monkey (long live Dundas!) in the Senate echos the famous story about the emperor Gaius making his horse consul, while Geta’s conviction that he is capable of channeling the divine perhaps points ahead to the emperor Elagabalus, so-called in history because of a cult-like devotion to the sun god Elagabal.
Roman emperors did put on spectacular aquatic naval battles going back to Julius Caesar, although most were done on natural bodies of water or purpose-built arenas; really, it’s that sicko Titus who would’ve been most likely to flood the Coliseum. Public executions did happen in Roman arenas, but they were separate from the sport of gladiatorial combat, which was itself distinct from beast hunts. They all got different billing.
And it is worth knowing these distinctions because — however one feels about the legacy of Maximus Decimus Meridius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife — “Gladiator II” does take place at an interesting moment in history. Representative (oligarchic) government was so dead a return to it wasn’t even desired, let alone attempted. But who counted as Roman, what being Roman meant, and which ethnic groups would be in the drivers’ (charioteer’s?) seat of power were all changing.
There are many other stories that, if we pull at different pieces from this point in history, can teach us things about “the dream that was Rome” and how it can live — or die. As Scott’s films themselves prove, history is what we make it.
A Paramount Pictures film, “Gladiator II” is now in theaters.
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