Obama Aurelius
Empires die, but their propaganda echoes in eternity
“There once was a dream that was Rome.”
Everyone’s favourite swords and sandals epic Gladiator (2000) has a lot to answer for. Not because it’s riddled with factual inaccuracies, those are awesome — even historians (the cool ones at least) will agree. Historical films don’t need to be accurate, they need to be fun. The nerds don’t get it: no one has to care what kind of tridents real-life gladiators would have used, or who won which forgettably horrible war in the woods, or how “Roman chariots didn’t have obvious gas canisters in them,” apparently. Artistic license is sacred, and that movie is still great twenty years later (sorry).
By far the most accurate thing about Gladiator is its depiction of the personality traits of Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who became emperor after the death of his father, the great philosopher-ruler Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). By all accounts he was a shallow, decadent, incompetent monster who habitually made death threats to senators he found annoying. He’s even recorded as having fought in the Colosseum, even if the lions he slew would almost certainly have been starved in captivity for several weeks beforehand. His sister Lucilla (Connie Nielson) really did make a failed assassination plot against him. Commodus’s…
