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Human existence is full of an unfathomably infinite number of things — real and fake, abstract ideas and actual physical objects, past and present and future — to consider, fixate on, learn about. Still, for many men, there’s one thing they specifically think about constantly: the Roman Empire.
Director Ridley Scott, a man, very clearly thinks about it a lot. But maybe not in exactly the same way others do.
Scott’s new movie Gladiator II officially hit theaters this past weekend, and made $55.5 million domestically and $220 million worldwide. The sequel stars Paul Mescal, a man with the most adored side profile in Hollywood, and is set within the same world — with many of the same characters — as Gladiator, Scott’s Oscar-winning film from 2000.
Many things happen in the movie. Mescal’s character, Lucius, bites a CGI baboon and chokes it with handcuffs; Denzel Washington’s Macrinus flounces around in caftans, terrorizing Roman senators about loyalty. There’s also a lot that doesn’t seem quite based in history: a naval battle in the Colosseum where sharks eat human competitors, at least one domesticated battle rhino, and what seems to be a newspaper despite Ancient Rome predating the printing press.
While your mileage may vary on the movie, there’s something entertaining about how Scott imagines Ancient Rome to be more exciting than it was. Maybe one day our descendants will imagine our mundane lives with as much anachronistic gusto as Scott.
To get a better understanding of what Scott was aiming for in this movie and what he was inspired by, I chatted with Vox senior politics writer Christian Paz, another man who thinks about Ancient Rome often. Since middle school, Paz tells me, he was obsessed with the Roman Empire and that fixation has only grown stronger in adulthood. Paz is also slightly fascinated by Paul Mescal and, now, Ridley Scott’s off-kilter version of Ancient Rome. We talked about Roman naval battles, the egos of emperors, and what is, really, so endlessly fascinating about this period in history.
How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
I think about it quite a lot. Its influence and legacy are everywhere. I see reminders of it when I walk around DC, when I scroll TikTok and get videos about the Galactic Senate, the Galactic Republic, and the Empire, and when I watch videos about what ancient and historical peoples used to cook and eat.
Also I took Latin in high school.
How often do you think Ridley Scott thinks about the Roman Empire?
Insofar as he thinks about big battles, big historical events, and believes in the Great Man theory of history, probably often enough to want to recreate the magic of the original Gladiator. And he probably wants an Oscar, no?
If his movies reflect his personal desires and needs, I believe that man wants a lot of things. And sometimes I think this world simply does not have enough to offer Ridley Scott, so he sensationalizes. It feels like he is constantly tarting up the world he lives in or learned about.
For example, in Gladiator II, Paul Mescal bites a baboon in one of the arenas. Were there actual baboons in Roman gladiator fights?
Lol, most definitely not. I was trying to track down where he got this idea for baboons, and apparently it came to him from a trip he took to South Africa where he saw some tourist approach a baboon in a parking lot. The baboon, naturally, freaked out when the man tried to pet it, and attacked — and that seems to be Scott’s inspiration for wanting this group of captives and future gladiators to fight something “formidable.”
But how would [the Romans] capture and release these, like, 12 baboons?
Well, obviously one would need to train and house the baboons too!
Also, if these are based on the baboons Scott saw in South Africa — the Roman legions never got that far!
There’s also a moment where they fill the Colosseum with water and stage a naval battle with sharks.
Right, and to prep for that battle, Paul’s character is forced to practice rowing a boat until his hands bleed and blister. God, this Colosseum scene was actually ridiculous because, where are they finding these sharks? How would they catch them and transport them back to Rome?
Modern-day aquariums have a tough time keeping sharks alive. But Ridley Scott believes Ancient Rome could.
Sharks can’t really survive in freshwater, so where are they holding these massive amounts of salt water and tanks and sharks? Flooding the Colosseum with water was actually a thing that was done a few times earlier in the Roman imperial period — but that was fresh water transported through aqueducts and diverted from the Tiber River. On every level, that’s actually an insane decision to make.
But mock naval battles were once actually fought in the Colosseum, or in bigger locations around Rome, as early as Julius Caesar’s reign toward the end of the Republic. They were a hugely extravagant and expensive thing to do, so they didn’t happen too frequently. Even gladiatorial games were an irregular occurrence — happening like three to four times a year at most — because they were just so expensive to hold. And that’s the bottom line of why they went out of commission. It was just too expensive to run an empire, and to keep these circuses going contributed to the empire’s resource drain — and the gradual spread of Christianity finished the games off.
How do they get the sharks in and out?
Movie magic.
There’s also one gladiator who rides a trained rhino. I’m guessing that’s a bit of embellishment too.
Yup, another wild decision — made for great cinema action, but it’s not likely that Romans would train and ride a rhino into battle. There are records of rhinoceroses being brought into the Colosseum — like during the celebrations for when it was inaugurated and when the emperor Commodus, the inspiration for Joaquin Phoenix’s villain from the first Gladiator, killed a rhinoceros with spears and arrows from an elevated platform in 192 AD. When used, rhinos would fight other animals instead of gladiators.
Could you imagine all that effort to bring a rhino into the Colosseum, telling all your friends about it, getting the gladiators set, and then have it just run around killing a lion — a lion that may have been hanging around in the bowels of the Colosseum for ages because everyone was out trying to find a rhino? So then the rhino waits for another crew to find a hippo or something and the cycle repeats itself!
God, I’d hate to be a rhino and just be killed because of ego.
But the whole point of having rhinos and other exotic animals in the Colosseum was to represent and demonstrate the power, wealth, and reach of the empire, and more specifically, of the emperor.
Another surprising thing: the Roman newspaper that one of the senators is reading.
This was one of the more ridiculous things in the film; it has been ridiculed extensively. It was actually in two scenes, if I recall — in the pseudo-cafe in which a senator is having a beverage (which I will assume is wine, or a spiced wine, because the Romans didn’t really have tea or coffee yet) and then at the senator’s home when Macrinus shows up.
For those who need clarification: Paper, of the mass-produced variety, has not been invented yet, never mind the printing press.
Sadly, the Ancient Romans never knew the font that is Times New Roman.
Romans did have a version of, like, important announcements and news that were inscribed into a stone tablet and which was primarily placed in public places — the Acta Diurna, or “Acts of the Day.” But it wasn’t very widely circulated to people — it might have been sent to some senators but was primarily shared with governors and administrative government officials.
Was the gladiator system — that wins could make you a celebrity and eventually a free man — real?
Yes and no. It was absolutely a system with schools and cells, and sponsors and teachers, and funding and people who fed you and tended to you; you were specially trained, and became a master essentially of a particular kind of weapon and armor and dress usually based on your ethnic or national origin — like Gauls, Thracians, Britons. Gladiators lost personhood and became a form of property — prisoners of war, enslaved people, people with significant debts who sought to repay those debts, and poor, lower-class people who volunteered. So the whole operation that Denzel Washington’s character is running was very real.
And yes, you could essentially become a celebrity, and aristocratic women, of high society, would take them as lovers — but even if you got discharged or won your freedom after winning or surviving matches, there wasn’t much you could do in society — so they would return to teach other gladiators or fight again as free men.
The real gladiator “system” feels more like an MLM than whatever’s happening in Scott’s movie. Why do you think Scott is so obsessed with it?
Honestly, I was thinking that too. When you’re in, you’re kind of stuck. You get nice perks on occasion but it was a nasty, brutish, short life. And I think that is probably part of his fascination — to trade up freedom for something greater, or to make the most of the hellish lot life has cast you.
I feel like you and Ridley Scott think about different things when thinking about the Roman Empire. What is it about the Roman Empire that fascinates you?
I think we think very differently about the Roman Empire. Scott loves the battles and the concept of great men — and don’t get me wrong, me too! My favorite games are Rome Total War and Empire Total War. In middle school I recreated a Roman camp in Gaul in my school’s cafeteria for a class project and made a set of armor like what Julius Caesar’s legionaries probably wore.
Did this make you popular? Like, did you have a lot of friends?
Um. First of all, that’s rude. And second of all, I didn’t go there to make friends. I came to win and put on a spectacle.
But also, I was fascinated by the politics of the Roman Republic, specifically — the concept of the senate, the idea of the “Senate and the People of Rome” being the source of power and legitimacy, of consuls and of aediles and of quaestors, of a civil service. And I was fascinated by its fall, the rise of a rag-tag system of tyrannical government in the form of the empire — which, for most people, didn’t really mean anything different in their lives but changed the world.
And so I think specifically of the tenuousness of democracy, the appeal of strongmen, and the fact that what binds so many nations today — representative democracy and imagined community — has its roots in Rome’s centuries of existence. I think what fascinates me the most is the “fall” of Rome — something that Gladiator II delves into with its talk about the “dream” of Rome, the threat of “tyranny,” and the idea of “civitas” or Roman citizenship. They were all such amorphous, delicate concepts.
What do you think men who think about the Roman Empire a lot will think about Gladiator II? Will the historical inaccuracies and sensationalizing turn them off?
True Roman history nerds will probably be annoyed and laugh at the inaccuracies and sensationalizing. But let’s be honest. We’re going to see this movie either because of the nostalgia, because we want to see battles and fights on the big screen, because of Denzel Washington’s stunning performance (which will be noted in my Letterboxd review because he’s basically the main character), or because we want to admire Paul Mescal’s … everything.
In the next life, may you be reborn as a baboon in Paul Mescal’s Ancient Rome.
I am ready to be bitten, Paul.
Update, November 26, 2 pm ET: This story, originally published November 21, has been updated with box office numbers for Gladiator II.
