‘Let Them Eat War’

There is a dream of Rome, and it goes like this: a once glorious republic, now fallen into tyranny, will be glorious again. This is the political vision that the aging philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) invokes in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) when he names his loyal general Maximus (Russell Crowe) as his successor and, improbably, tasks him with leading Rome’s transition back to republican rule. Before this plan can be made public, the emperor’s conniving son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) murders his father and seizes the throne. Maximus escapes a death sentence only to find his wife and child slaughtered; he is enslaved as a gladiator and eventually ends up as the Colosseum’s star attraction. At the end of the film, Maximus kills Commodus in gladiatorial combat, liberating the Roman people from his iron thumbs-down, and with his dying breath honors Marcus Aurelius by transferring power to the Senate: “There was a dream that was Rome. It shall be realized.” 

It’s not. Gladiator II opens in AD 200, some sixteen years later, with a disillusioned Roman general halfheartedly conquering a new province before trudging back to a capital ruled by debauched twin emperors whose approach to governance is “Let them eat war.” We’re told nothing of what made Rome, in a few short years, reject liberty and backslide into autocracy, but the popularity of violent public spectacles may have had something to do with it. That the movie ends with our hero Lucius, in many ways a Maximus redux, again heralding the return of Roman republicanism might therefore give us pause: how long can this new era be expected to last? 

Nostalgia for the “dream that was” the republic—a period usually dated from 509 to 27 BC—has been a powerful cultural current for millennia, both within and beyond the Roman Empire. In the early years of Augustus’s reign, between 27 and 9 BC, Livy wrote a history of Rome from its founding to the present, aiming to show readers how the recent end of civil war had led not to the restoration of the republic’s glory but to a further degradation of its original promise: “how, as discipline broke down bit by bit, morality at first foundered; how it next subsided in ever greater collapse and then began to topple headlong in ruin—until the advent of our own age, in which we can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them.” Tacitus, writing at the beginning of the second century AD, likewise lamented the devolution of republican values into imperial decadence. By the final years of Augustus’s reign, he bitterly remarked, “the former morality” had evaporated. Ideals and institutions like “liberty and the consulship” were a distant memory. “How many were left who had seen a republic?”

And yet Macrinus (Denzel Washington), an arms dealer, gladiator promoter, and villain of Gladiator II, is right to dismiss the republicanism longed for by Scott’s fictionalized Marcus Aurelius as itself a “fiction,” nothing but “an old man’s fantasy.” Neither the warfaring republic nor the prosperous period known as the Pax Romana, from Augustus’s ascension in 27 BC to Marcus Aurelius’s death in 180 AD, were characterized by “peace” as we would understand it. Scott implicitly acknowledges this: Gladiator opens with Maximus leading Marcus Aurelius’s troops in a brutal suppression of a Germanic revolt. “People should know when they’re conquered,” the army’s second-in-command murmurs. “Would you?” Maximus asks him pointedly. “Would I?”

Macrinus’s alternative to the old man’s fantasy of republicanism isn’t reality, exactly. It’s a young man’s fantasy, or a fantasy of still being able to have a young man’s fantasy: a fantasy of power. Romans come to the Colosseum, Macrinus explains to one of his gladiators, because they want to see the strong subdue the weak. They don’t want self-discipline and deliberative government. They want blood, backstabbing, and banquets with severed rhino heads as centerpieces. They want to see the empire’s insatiable appetite for foreign expansion domesticated in the arena. And so, of course, do the crowds excitedly consuming Gladiator II, crowds likely to include the husbands and boyfriends who were asked, in a viral TikTok trend, how often they think about the Roman Empire (answers ranged from “every other day on average” to “once a day” to “three times a day”). There is not, to my knowledge, a TikTok trend of asking men how often they think about the Roman Republic.  

Like its predecessor, the sequel begins with Roman military forces bearing down on an enemy, though this time our hero is fighting on the other side. We pick up the story with Maximus’s son Lucius, introduced in the first film only as the son of Commodus’s sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and grandson of Marcus Aurelius and here revealed as the product of an affair. (We learn in Gladiator that Maximus and Lucilla have sons the same age, meaning that Maximus, whose character is defined in large part by devotion to his murdered wife, must have fathered both around the same time—bad news either for narrative continuity or for Roman family values.) Having been exiled as a child after Maximus’s death for fear of reprisal (from whom is unclear), Lucius takes on the name Hanno and comes of age in Numidia, in North Africa, where he gets married and lives a quiet life—until a Roman naval battalion, led by General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), arrives at its shores. Rather quickly, the Numidians surrender. Hanno, having pretty much checked out of the battle after watching his warrior wife die on the front lines, is enslaved. Some people know when they’re conquered. 

“They create destruction and call it peace,” Hanno informs the soldiers under his command as they prepare for the Roman invasion. This anticolonial sentiment comes straight from Tacitus, who attributes the line to Calgacus, a Scottish chieftain who fought the Roman army in the first century AD: a Roman posing as a barbarian, played by an Irishman whose accent is all over the place, quotes a Roman ventriloquizing a barbarian. 

It’s as eloquent as anyone criticizing empire gets in the film. None of the good guys look or sound like they want to be there. Hanno and his wife gird themselves for battle less with grim resignation than with a sulking shuffling of feet. When Acacius, returned to Rome and disgusted at his complicity in death and destruction, is goaded by the emperor Geta (Joseph Quinn) to address the Colosseum, he prefaces his remarks by saying, “I am not an orator or a politician.” He’s really not. When he’s later captured for planning a coup, Geta shrieks that the name Acacius will be forgotten; the general replies that he doesn’t really care. (The historical Geta’s name and likeness were in fact wiped from official memory by the imperial decree of his brother Caracalla—played in the film by Fred Hechinger—who murdered him in front of their mother.)

The screenwriters seem as pessimistic about posterity as the characters; much of the dialogue feels written for consignment to oblivion. Even Maximus’s famous catchphrase about immortality from the first movie—“What we do in life echoes in eternity”—may not be immortal, despite the fact that it ends up emblazoned on his tomb. When the gladiators’ team doctor uses the line while stitching a wound Lucius sustained in the arena, as the kind of stock phrase medical professionals employ to keep patients’ spirits up, Lucius has the same reaction as someone who saw Gladiator sometime in the last twenty-four years might have today: that it sounds vaguely familiar. What we do in life fades into obscurity. 

Unless, of course, some bard brings it back. That bard is not Lucius, whose final oratorical salvo is a lifeless heap of abstractions:

My grandfather, Marcus Aurelius, talked of a dream that would be Rome. A dream that my father, Maximus Decimus Meridius, died for. An ideal. A city for the many and a refuge for those in need. A home worth fighting for. A home that Maximus spent his life defending. That dream is lost. But dare we rebuild that dream together? What say you?

The approving cries of the gathered armies notwithstanding, the film has proven repeatedly that this kind of pablum is not what people want. Despite frequent references to the Roman population’s unfreedom and pans of poverty on the streets, the people riot only once, when the Praetorian Guard summarily executes their war hero, Acacius, rather than letting his fate play out in the gladiatorial ring. The people want to eat war and circuses; bread is apparently a lower priority, and the “dream of Rome” lowest of all.

The weakness of Roman “strength and honor” when up against strength without honor is also the central conflict of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy, which might be read as a key to Gladiator’s Roman mythologies. Titus, like Maximus in the first film, is a great general who subdues a Germanic tribe and is then prevailed upon to lead Rome. When power instead goes to the dead emperor’s evil son, Titus’s fall is precipitous: several of his sons are killed; his daughter is raped and mutilated; he is tricked into cutting off his own hand. 

Even after all that, Titus still believes in a dream of Rome—so much so that when he murders his own daughter, he cites a story from Livy where a soldier does the same to protect his daughter’s honor from a tyrannical decemvir, leading to the fall of the corrupt decemvirate and the restoration of the republic. Shakespeare’s dream of Rome, like Scott’s at its least boring, is not a policy wish list but a fever dream, a garbled version of historical figures and events condensed and displaced into a pastiche of cartoonish violence, satirical sybaritism, and dead-end idealism—Shakespeare’s self-consciously so, Scott’s not—that nonetheless captures something of the spirit of the late empire. The real Rome was more chaotic and confused than any philosophy dreamt of the Horatii.

In Gladiator II, no one understands the real Rome better than Macrinus, the best foreign former slave who rises to the most powerful role in the Roman Empire through manipulation and murder since Titus Andronicus’s Aaron. Aaron, a Moor captured by Titus who spends the play wreaking his revenge, gets the best lines—an antiracist ode to blackness; a memorable “your mom” joke—and, like Washington’s Macrinus, is clearly having the most fun. Like Aaron, Macrinus has the ear of a pair of royal party boy brothers; like Aaron, his superiority to the idiot degenerates in power is signaled both by his strategic intelligence and by his superior knowledge of Latin poetry. (At a crucial moment, Aaron recognizes a line from Horace; Macrinus clocks couplets from Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid.) And like Aaron, he meets his downfall at the hands of a presumptive restorer of the Roman dream named Lucius. In his fluency in the universal language of violence, the foreigner is more Roman than the Romans. As Macrinus tells Lucilla, wrapping up the villain origin story that began with his enslavement to her father, where else but in Rome could someone like him achieve so much?

Restoring republican Rome may be an old man’s fantasy, but the eighty-seven-year-old Scott is also peddling another fantasy: that the movies can be good again. Gladiator grossed $460 million globally, won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor, brought back the long dormant genre of sword-and-sandal epic with a vengeance, and won legions of loyal fans. But while Gladiator II may well meet its box office benchmarks, the film is haunted by a past cinematic glory it can’t recreate, leaving some Gladiator fans like the disappointed tourist who, in Ezra Pound’s translation of a Renaissance sonnet, “seek’st Rome in Rome/And finds in Rome no thing thou canst call Roman.” Paul Mescal, as many reviewers have remarked, is no Crowe. His performance in between the fight scenes, melancholy and flirtatious at once, recalls his bashfully vulnerable character in the Sally Rooney adaptation Normal People, in fact the basis for his casting (Scott, who “binged eight hours” of the show, was impressed by Mescal’s “emotional layers”). As he soaks in a bath or endures medical treatment, he lets out lines in affectingly soft, half-laughed groans. When rallying the troops, though, his outdoor voice sounds strained, as if he’d been skipping vocal exercise day in his rigorous preproduction workout routine.

Things will never be as they were in Hollywood c. AD 2000, when we had real movie stars who didn’t have to fight quite as many fake animals (the less said about the CGI baboons the better). But more to the point, we had real stories. Now we have what feels at best like ChatGPT’s hallucinated account of the Severan dynasty, brimming with weird errors and whimsical extrapolations, and at worst like a Google search for “inspirational quotes freedom peace democracy.”

The dream that structured the original film was not the political vision of Marcus Aurelius but the recurring mental image of Maximus, that memorable opening shot—spliced repeatedly and often awkwardly into Gladiator II, like an autoplaying ad—of a hand grazing the grain in a field. What at first seemed like a flashback to Maximus’s prewar farm life turned out to be a flash-forward to his reunion with his wife and child in an Elysian afterlife, a dream deferred until the very end of the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime. This was a device for playing out the most entertaining dynamic ever: the one between the pleasure principle and the death drive, between wanting an experience to continue and wanting it to end. The mob wants the gladiator to die, but not yet; we can rejoin our dead loved ones after we fight and kill a little longer, but not yet (“Not yet,” a smiling fellow gladiator, played by Djimon Hounsou, always reminds Maximus when his will to live starts to flag); we want to see the movie reach its spectacular conclusion, but not yet. Maximus selflessly devoted his life to a greater cause (our narratological satisfaction); Lucius comes off like a career politician assigned by the party machine to defend a dead-end dynasty against a charismatic veteran of the entertainment industry. Compare Lucius’s bland, barely rhetorical “Dare we rebuild that dream together?” to Macrinus’s devilish hiss in a senator’s ear after laying out a plan to cut off Caracalla’s head and display it to the people: “That, my friend, is politicssssssss.” That’s entertainment, too.