Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals epic is rightfully regarded as the movie that rekindled Hollywood’s love for the classics. Gladiator has all the ingredients for the perfect historical drama: a stellar cast, groundbreaking special effects and a Hans Zimmer soundtrack. The film also perfectly captures the powerful essence of the High Roman Empire under the Antonine emperors, if not in the exact details then at least in the overall feel.
Is Gladiator a True Story?
Gladiator features several historical characters, including the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus and the young Lucius Verus. However, the main plot is completely fictitious, as is Maximus Decimus Meridius, the protagonist who propels it forwards.
As long as we bear this in mind, the film’s inaccuracies are few are far between. Scott’s commitment to his project is evidenced by the fact he hired scores of advisory historians; where he does depart from history, he does so entirely by choice. So when Scott has Commodus murder his father Marcus Aurelius in a double-barreled act of patricide and regicide (there’s actually no evidence that foul play was involved in Marcus Aurelius’s death), he does so to create a plotline of succession and illegitimacy, with Marcus Aurelius naming Maximus as his rightful heir.
There are plenty of other examples of Scott bending history to his whims. The emperor Commodus did, in fact, fight as a gladiator in amphitheatres. Our main source for his reign, the dubiously reliable Historia Augusta records him taking part in 735 gladiatorial bouts (Historia Augusta, Life of Commodus, 11.12) But he also liked shooting lions with arrows or javelins or beheading defenceless ostriches to fighting vengeful legionary generals in single combat.
Suffice to say that Commodus did not die on the Colosseum’s arena floor imploring his Praetorians to throw him a sword. Instead, he met the much more inglorious end of being poisoned by his mistress before being strangled in the bath by his wrestling partner. Still, after his death the Senate published a lengthy decree calling for his damnatio memoriae (the erasure of his name and legacy from the public record), beseeching the Roman people to “Let the memory of the murderer and the gladiator be utterly wiped away.”
But the biggest inaccuracy in “Gladiator” is the city of Rome itself.
For a start, Scott whitewashes Rome’s buildings which we know were ornately coloured. He also creates a city so blotted in shadows that it almost resembles one of his future dystopias, like Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. Perhaps most significantly, Scott’s Rome is a city of vast open public spaces. Nowhere is this more visible than towards the beginning of the movie during Commodus’s triumphal entry into the city.
This is completely anachronistic. Nowhere in the second century CE, Rome was there these kinds of spaces. What Scott has done is to retrospectively project imagery from the Nuremberg Rallies of Nazi Germany back onto antiquity (let us remember that the Nazis drew heavily from Roman art and architecture for their neoclassical style). It serves Scott’s purpose well though: in introducing Nazi totalitarian imagery, he gives his audience that powerful, frightening sense of the might of Rome and the unchecked tyranny of its emperor.
