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A
GLADIATOR FINDS VIETNAM ON THE DANUBE
In
the year 167 A.D., the first full-scale barbarian attack on
Rome destroyed aqueducts and irrigation conduits, but the
army of emperor Marcus Aurelius repelled the invaders. In
176, Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus entered Rome after
a campaign north of the Alps in which they were again victorious
over the "barbarians." In 180, Marcus Aurelius died at age
58 from an illness at the time of the Battle of the Danube
led by General Narcissus Meridas, and was succeeded by his
18-year-old son Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus. In 183, Commodus
escaped death at the hands of assassins who attacked him at
the instigation of his sister Lucilia and a large group of
senators, whereupon he put many distinguished Romans to death
on charges of being implicated in the conspiracy. In 185,
Commodus drained the treasury to put on gladiatorial spectacles
and confiscated property to support his pleasures. Finally,
in 192 Commodus was murdered by the wrestler Narcissus after
the emperor’s mistress, his chamberlain, and the prefect of
praetorians found their names on the imperial execution list.
These events frame the film Gladiator, a blockbuster
directed by Ridley Scott on a grand scale not seen since Spartacus
(1960), though the story is a permutation of the plot set
forth in The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
in which Marcus Aurelius is poisoned. If we are to believe
the fiction in Gladiator, before Marcus Aurelius
(played by Richard Harris) dies, he asks his commanding general
Maximus (played by Russell Crowe) to visit him; after articulating
some vague Stoic observations, the emperor asks Maximus to
succeed him and then to end the corrupt court politics by
returning power to the Senate of Rome for the good of the
people. When Marcus Aurelius discloses his plan of succession
to his son Commodus (played by Joaquin Phoenix), the latter
kills his father in order to ensure his inheritance and orders
the execution of Maximus and his loyalists.
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Maximus,
however, overpowers those assigned to kill him and escapes
to the desert stronghold of Zuchobar, where he is enslaved
and trained by Proximo (played by the late Oliver Reed)
to be a gladiator. When Commodus
orders one hundred days of gladiatorial games to commemorate
the memory of Marcus Aurelius, Maximus disguised as "the
Spaniard" heads for Rome along with Proximo’s other slaves.
Ultimately, Maximus triumphs in the Coliseum and fulfills
his destiny as "the general who became a slave, the slave
who became a gladiator, and the gladiator who defied an
emperor." Commodus wounds a chained Maximus and then insists
on combat in the Coliseum, but Maximus triumphs, kills Commodus,
and then dies of the wounds originally inflicted by Commodus.
Power then reverts to the Senate, or so the film tells us.
Thematically, Gladiator glorifies violence. We find that
soldiers say that they fight for "glory and honor," though
in fact Maximus is motivated by the desire to defend his
family and the prosperous way of life that Roman imperialism
provides. The simple materialism that motivates Maximus
is contrasted with Commodus’s profligacy. Whereas Commodus
proves that the masses enjoy bread and circuses, Maximus
in the end gains support from the masses by displaying the
martial virtues that supposedly made Rome great, but of
course these virtues were most heroically illustrated by
the Germanic fighters who were defending themselves against
Roman imperialism at the beginning of the film, so the message
of the film is in the end as confused as the historical
fictions of the scriptwriter. The subliminal subtext, however,
is that politicians are assholes while soldiers fight nobly
but are not given the credit that they deserve, a moral
that recalls the unfinished national debate over the American
role in Vietnam, another war in which the superpower of
the day failed to bomb the adversary back to the stone age.
MH
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