The True Villains of Gladiator II are its Heroes
The Roman Republic was far more tyrannical than the Roman Empire, and restoring it would have been disastrous for ordinary Romans
The first Gladiator is a cinematic masterpiece, to which a tremendous debt is owed for the revival of interest in the classical world that it irrefutably inspired.
Naturally, there are notable historical inaccuracies. Many are trivial, and even simply cosmetic. Unfortunately, the worst miscarriage of history is not only carried over into its successor, but given centre stage in Gladiator II — the plot to restore the Roman Republic.
The script of the first film has the Emperor Marcus Aurelius declare his wish to Maximus, in what then serves as the driver for the entire plot, for Rome to "be a Republic again". This dialogue, along with another prior line, when a senator utters "Rome was founded as a Republic", despite the Eternal City being birthed under a monarchy, was at best included as a fiction for narrative purposes.
At worst, it was inserted as a Trojan Horse to implant political beliefs dominant at the turn of the 21st century into a character of the classical world widely revered as virtuous in order to manufacture credibility.
A great deal of the narrative tragedy of the first film stems from the fact that Marcus Aurelius is slain before his desire is publicly known. Yet in Gladiator II, the ‘dream’ of Rome’s most virtuous emperor appears to be common knowledge among the protagonists, the principal villain, and even the army. Characters frequently invoke his memory in order to legitimise ‘the plan’, which is treated as a self-evidently good idea by all involved.
“Had father had his way, the empire would have been torn apart", Commodus remarks in a little discussed scene of the first film. Unfortunately for the writers, the man presented as the antagonist of Gladiator appears to have a better grasp of politics than Marcus Aurelius, Lucilla or Lucius, and perversely, considering his cruelty, a better grasp of virtuous government too.
The Reality of the Roman Republic
Except for in the symposia of a handful of idealistic patricians, by the 2nd century AD the Republic was overwhelmingly seen as a disastrous failure, under which the provinces had been ruled as kleptocratic fiefdoms of the oligarchic classes, presided over by a Senate in Rome devoid of any meaningful authority, since private interests controlled the Roman state so completely that holding public office was meaningless by the days of Julius Caesar.
Indeed by its final decades, the status quo was entirely untenable, with the Republic locked into a perpetual cycle of civil war or the imminent threat of it, while unrest in the provinces was a habitual occurrence.
It is often forgotten that all three of the great slave revolts in Ancient Rome occurred under the Republic, not the Empire, with Sicily being a particular hotbed of unrest, on account of the island being dominated by absentee Roman landlords who flooded it with slaves transferred from Asia, and who leveraged their political connections in Rome to avoid prosecution — Gaius Verres being the exception that proved the rule.
Worse, tax collection under the Republic was outsourced to private entities, who readily and frequently extorted the provinces where they operated, free from the authority and oversight of the Roman state. As the historian Michael Crawford adroitly observed, a Roman magistrate hoped to make "three fortunes out of his province — one to pay his debts, one to bribe the jury if he were brought to trial, and one to keep himself".
Under the Empire, notably under Augustus and Domitian, taxation was brought under much tighter supervision, eliminating one of the gravest injustices of the Roman state. That any Roman Emperor, and the philosopher Marcus Aurelius above all, would have sought the restoration of such a system is divorced from reality, and flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence that the Empire, at least in its early centuries — before the accumulated consequences of its failure to properly address the issue of succession placed it squarely back in the situation of the Late Republic — represented an objective improvement in the quality of governance for its citizens and subject peoples.
The Problem of ‘The Plan’ in Gladiator
What makes the depiction in the original Gladiator even worse is that the film clearly establishes both through other characters and the dialogue of Marcus himself that the Senate is corrupt beyond all hope. Yet the bright idea the writers give him on his deathbed is to surrender total power to them - “my powers will pass to Maximus to hold in trust until the Senate is ready to rule once more” - apparently trusting a lone Maximus with few allies will not be immediately assassinated upon trying to "end the corruption that has crippled it".
The first film largely gets away with this because the political plot is completely overshadowed by the masterfully executed revenge plot that overtakes it almost immediately. Gladiator II, however, does not have this luxury…
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