I’m somewhat of a Gladiator super fan. I’ve watched the first film more than any other movie and can recite almost all of the script. On top of that I had Amy walk down the aisle at our wedding to Now We Are Free (the track over the closing credits - and yes it was my only contribution to our wedding service!), and I ran the Rome marathon wearing a centurion’s outfit whilst listening to the soundtrack, that’s normal right?
I know all this makes me something of a cliche (middle aged man who thinks about Romans a lot) but there must be a reason why so many men are drawn to the genre and indeed to this period in history.
Watching the sequel the other day it struck me how often objects and physical things are given significance and take on meaning within the world of the film.
In contrast to the Marvel universe with its appeal to superhuman powers or the sci-fi genre and the magic of digital technology, Gladiator is rooted within a world we’re all familiar with albeit a little estranged from and nostalgic for. Perhaps that's part of why it's so popular?
Consider some of the things that take on significance in the films. There are broken arrow heads, hands covered in dirt, grain and wheat, scars and torn flesh, jasmin and rosemary, wooden swords and splintered oars, steel blades against marble floors, smoking braziers, fire and shadows. All of them build upon each other to create a world that’s both familiar to us and absent from us.
The world of Gladiator is one of pain and sweat, of harsh landscapes scorched by the sun. It’s an unforgiving place in which survival is carved out by force and it’s a world where skill and expertise, self-mastery and camaraderie keep a person alive. It’s a world (yes) of strength and honour. The world of Ancient Rome is a world that many men daydream about and feel more intuitively at home in than our current age.
In Ancient Rome men enjoy the benefits of friendship not by being emotionally open (something many men find unnatural) but by demonstrating their capabilities. A man is rewarded with the honour of the crowd and the affection of a woman because he stands for something and because he is capable of doing something.
In Max Dickens book on male friendship ‘Billy No Mates’ he explains how this way of relating to others (the ‘doing stuff’ in groups approach) is a much more familiar path to intimacy for men than the, now ubiquitous, path of talking about our inner worlds. Gladiator’s appeal is no doubt rooted in some of these realities. It’s a world that many men instinctively understand.
What also struck me however was how the heart and spirit of the film’s storyline, the way it appeals to us on a deeper level, gets transmitted through the physical matter (the ‘stuff’) within the films. Consider how the things we listed earlier establish themselves as having symbolic meaning within the arc of the main characters:
The arrow heads, whilst objects of death and aggression, in both films become symbols of revenge and the letting go of them an important step along the hero’s journey. Dust and dirt rubbed between the fingers, or splattered over faces, connects our characters to the earth and also foretells their return to that same earth - Maximus’s death is relayed by the displacement of dirt.
Grain and wheat, images of civility and peace, portray the inner longings of the characters and exist to remind them what all the fighting is actually for. The alien and ancient world is also made familiar by the references to the jasmine of Maximus’s farmland home and the presence of Lucilla’s lavender in the second. In the former it’s about a pipe-dream of peaceful, mediterranean evenings whilst in the second it’s used as protection against the stench of Rome’s corruption; which signifies that the dream is in fact over.
We’re kept grounded to the world as we wince at the brutality of the blood and the harsh stitching of wounds, in each case by the healing powers of Africans, those who are wise outsiders to Roman society. We peer through shadows and flames never quite sure who is hiding in them, just as dust clouds obscure the vision of advancing armies and charging rhinos.
Consider also the place of stones in the films. Hanno lies on a bed of stones in the underworld, stones are later thrown at him in the slave’s waggon and he eventually overpowers Macrinus with a stone. Finally, and perhaps most moving of all, happens when Lucius mixes the blood of his fallen mother with the soil on which his father died.
All these items and objects have important meaning within the film. The characters ascribe value and meaning to inanimate items and are thereby moved out of cold materialism into a fuller understanding of the world. I believe that's also why the film appeals to us.
We know that a cold fact-based definition of reality is deficient and yet we also fear that admitting so risks us being called irrational or sentimental, or worse ‘religious’.
We’re all therefore a little confused (given secularisms emphasis on the meaningless of matter) why it is we feel an instinct to bow before coffins or place our hands over our hearts when we sing national anthems. We cry over lost wedding rings, kiss inanimate objects and cherish items with ancestral significance. We run our fingers through the grass, we experience gardening as 'spiritual' and we gush over the connection we feel to the ocean.
None of the above makes sense in a world of cold fact, with only scientific propositions to guide us. In Gladiator we see hard men who know the truth of steel, also kissing figurines and praying before household altars. We see muscle submitted to meaning and we recognise its superiority to the empty nihilism of our age.
On the face of it Rome is about strength and power but it’s the force of spirit that ends up subduing it and restoring order to the streets.
Recently eminent psychiatrists like Iain McGilchrist have been talking of the world as panpyshcic (that everything possesses consciousness) and once committed materialists like Sam Harris are now imploring us to practise meditation and consider psychedelics to aid us on our journey toward enlightenment. What makes life worth living is that it is both physical and meaningful, Gladiator offers us this world as it enables a re-connection between us and the earth and a re-engagement with the importance of spiritual values.
The ‘dream’ of Rome is set against the ‘power’ of Rome. Is Rome only what human might can make or is it nobler and more all encompassing than that? We’re told throughout that Marcus Aurelius dreamt about a city of freedom, a city within which every citizen had value and all strangers could find welcome.
It’s a noble dream and an aspirational vision but, it’s worth saying, it isn't a Roman vision. Classical philosophy never would have sought to produce the city they dream of.
To philosophers like Aurelius the universe had a perfect order to it, one that we humans simply had to try and find our place within. The cosmos had to be complied with, and the will of the universe revealed to us in the natural orders had to be submitted to; be those orders slavery, poverty or power.
The irony of course is that the dream of Rome put forward in the films is one much more at home within the world of Christianity than within classical philosophy. It’s these Christian ideals, appealed to in the film, that make it so attractive to us shaped as we are by Christianity.
The story of one who was strong becoming weak and eventually overthrowing an evil empire by his death is literally the gospel. Maximus is Jesus, except that Christ overcame not through violence but through submission. Jesus didn’t obey the dictates of a cold and pitiless fate but rather the good and pleasing will of his Father.
Finally the physicality that makes Gladiator so appealing, that grounds it within the world appeals to us since the characters in their interaction with it manage to hold fact and value, objective and subjective reality together. This too is also best expressed in Christianity.
Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took up a piece of bread and blessed it. He took an inanimate and meaningless combination of atoms, and transformed it into a thing of remarkable power and importance. Jesus, in sharing a meal with his followers and commanding his followers to ‘do likewise’ gave us a spirituality that is earthed and that contains material substance.
Christians aren’t those who retreat from the world into spiritual experience, disregarding the physical world and treating it as nothing more than malleable plastic. Instead Jesus blessed the stuff of God’s good world.
He overcame the cruel will of the universe and he emptied it of its gods and godesses. No longer does the river belong to Tiberinus or the harvest to Ceres, wine to Dionysus or the grave to Pluto. Rather Christ has conquered them all and filled them all with his presence. He came to this world and claimed it all as his.
In the dying words of the anti-Christian emperor Julian “you have conquered, O Galilean” and that's what makes the Gladiator movies so appealing.
Cristus Victor!