Rome Sweet Rome

Why the World's Richest Man Hates Gladiator 2

As we brace ourselves for the next four years of The Omen franchise to open in Washington in January, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2 may not register very highly on your hierarchy of things worth paying much attention to. But for twenty-first century culture war sentinels manning the frontiers of anti-wokery, there is no job too small, and everyday is another battle.

Last year it was the John Lewis Christmas advert that roused their righteous indignation. Last month it was the Jaguar ad. And now the World’s Richest Man and self-appointed Lord of the Trolls has turned his attention to Ridley Scott’s latest trip to the Colosseum.

Musk - for it is he of whom I speak - describes himself as a ‘student of history’, which will surprise many people familiar with his endlessly dim pronouncements. Like many men of his political orientation, he also professes to have a particular interest in ancient Rome. In September 2023, he referred to ‘late-stage civilization vibes’ in response to a Tiktok video about how often men spent thinking about the Roman Empire. And in July this year, before Gladiator 2 had even been released, Musk returned to the same theme, in response to a tweet from an anonymous Internet classicist:

‘100 percent’ anti-Western civilization nonsense. And that was just the trailer. And now Musk has seen the film (we suppose) and delivered a damning judgement with the laser-sharp wit for which he is well-known:

Last time I looked, that tweet had 78 million views, which is a lot, considering how stupid it is. I mean seriously, ‘art’ and Elon Musk? And Gladiator 2 doesn’t have much to do with art either. Or ‘woke’ for that matter.

The original Gladiator was one of those rare Hollywood epics in which all its ingredients blend perfectly. A sharp script; terrific performances with characters; a tragic but satisfying revenge theme; battles, fights, intrigue, power, perversion, blood, dust, honour - Gladiator had everything you can expect from a sword and sandals movie. And all of it whirled through Ridley Scott’s directorial mixer to produce a thrilling and irresistible cinematic spectacle .

None of this applies to the sequel. Forbes magazine has dismissed Gladiator 2 as ' a dreadful, pointless sequel that never should have seen the light of day’ - a harsh judgment, but I can see their point. I saw it on the big screen a couple of weeks ago, and unlike the calamitous folly of Napoleon, I didn’t wish I hadn’t seen it.

Once you accept the fact that nothing you are watching has any meaning or significance, Gladiator 2 isn’t the worst way you could spend a grey Sunday afternoon.

It doesn’t have the heart of the original - or the likes of Russell Crowe, Richard Harris and Joachim Phoenix to make you suspend disbelief. Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington do their best, but the script doesn’t give them much to work with.

Paul Mescal’s Lucius lacks the imperious fury that drives Russell Crowe’s Maximus. Supposedly consumed with ‘rage’, he delivers his lines with the kind of passion you might expect from a Curries assistant explaining the advantages of a new mobile phone.

Early on in the film, he tells Denzel Washington’s Macrinus that he doesn’t know who his parents are. Then he pretends not to recognise his mother, before recognizing her after all. He then rejects her for having abandoned him as a child. Finally, he ends up fighting in the Colosseum to save her life, wearing his father’s armour. Maybe this was meant to be Freudian, or Oedipal destiny or something, but it feels more like sloppy writing.

Other aspects of Lucius’s character are equally incoherent. One minute he hates Rome and boasts that it will fall if he gives it ‘just one push.’ The next minute he’s quoting Virgil. By the end of the film, he’s calling on the legions to remember the ‘dream of Rome’ as a ‘place of refuge’, much like Kamala Harris calling on voters to believe in the promise of America.

There’s no way any of this makes sense. But sense isn’t the point here. This is a money-making spectacle - a pallid photocopy of the original which numbs the viewer into a state of dazed indifference through the kind of overkill that Ridley Scott can still provide even at the age of eighty-six.

So this time, we get not just one pervy dictator, but two, with orange hair and syphilis! And one them carries a monkey - in a dress! - on his shoulder, which he appoints as his consul, because why the hell not?

It’s like a Viz comic version of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that spells out D.E.C.A.D.E.N.C.E for the hard of hearing.

Fortunately, there is enough violence to keep you from dwelling on such things. So much in fact, that the fights blur into a whizzbang Dolby crunching, squelching and grunting, spurting blood fest. Mescal, like all the other gladiators, looks like he’s spent months at the gym with a personal trainer, preparing for a role which requires him to do little more than smash peoples heads in at little or no cost to himself.

At one point, a gladiator trainer pummels him in the face with a spiked leather glove. A few blows like that would strip the flesh from most men’s faces in short order, but Mescal is barely scratched, either in this or any of the other brawls that eventually transform him, like his father into Rome’s saviour and redeemer.

During this Joseph Campbell-like heroic journey, he throttles a CGI baboon dog that looks like Gromit injected with crack; slaughters a gladiator riding a CGI rhinoceros - and the rhinoceros; and goes on to fight a sea battle in the Colosseum - difficult enough if you think it through - with sharks thrown in for good measure.

Sharks? I hear you ask. Where did the Romans get them from? How did they transport them to Rome?

Stop. It’s not a documentary, and as long as you don’t think about it much - or preferably, at all - it’s good, wholesome, blood-soaked fun. And yet the World’s Richest Man is not amused. And other Internet swamp-dwellers, following in the wake of Maximus Rocketus, are asking the million-dollar question of whether or not ‘Gladiator is woke?’

The most obvious reason for this disquiet is the presence of Denzel Washington. Then there is Paul Mescal’s North African wife - a fighting woman, though not for long. Black men in positions of power in ancient Rome? Female fighters? Political correctness gone mad.

Some of these culture warriors have criticised Washington’s New York accent as an anachronism. Have these critics not heard Tony Curtis proclaiming ‘Yonder stands the castle of my faddah’ in Vikings? Or identifying himself as ‘Antonius, singer of songs’ in Spartacus, in the kind of accent you would expect to find from a pretzel seller in Prospect Park?

The Netflix series Barbaren has Romans actually speaking Latin, which is rather enjoyable, and even though the German-speaking barbarians look like members of an obscure Teutonic heavy metal band, it’s satisfying to see the Romans get a kicking in the Teuteburger wald.

But no one in this or any Hollywood Roman movies ever sounds like a Roman. It’s difficult not to conclude that the criticisms of Washington’s character have another source…I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I suspect it has something to do with Musk’s suggestion in a podcast that ‘Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans’. He made the same observation here:

Musk is a proponent of the white nationalist ‘great replacement theory’. Earlier this year, he suggested that Joe Biden is smuggling immigrants into the US to become Democratic voters. So when he says that Romans weren’t producing enough Romans, it’s fairly safe to assume that he means they weren’t producing enough white people.

And someone who looks at the present and the past through a lens like that is not going to accept that a black former gladiator might have hung around with syphilitic emperors.

White Rome

This association between the Rome and whiteness is a well-worn theme in the far-right’s fascination with the Roman Empire. As Donna Zuckerberg, the author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, argues:

“Western civilization” has, for the alt-right, become culturally acceptable code for “white culture.” So celebration of Western civilization is really a way to celebrate the cultural achievements of white men. They see ancient Greece and Rome as a starting point for this imagined idea of Western civilization, and later it evolves to include Christianity in the medieval period. It gives them a unified cultural narrative to draw on.

This ‘narrative’ is one of the reasons why Internet trolls once freaked out at the suggestion that Roman Britain might have been racially and ethnically diverse. And when such claims from a historian who also happens to be a woman, they can always expect to be viciously trolled, as Mary Beard has been on various occasions, because the Roman Empire was a man’s world and thinking about it is a man’s work - even men who dress up in togas in their mother’s basements.

Romophilia isn’t a product of the internet age per se. Like the 300 Spartans, or the Crusaders, Rome constitutes a kind of mythos that the fascist imagination can apply to different historical contexts.

In his bestselling 1961 novel The Centurions, the ex-paratrooper Jean Lartéguy, compared his former comrades in Algeria to Roman legionnaires, guarding the limes (frontiers) of civilization against ‘international communism’, to the indifference of a decadent French society infested with effete intellectuals.

In one episode, Lartéguy’s paratrooper-centurions kill the entire adult male population of a village in response to an FLN atrocity, and line up the bodies ‘with their throats cut, their heads turned towards the West, in the direction of Rome.’

Marvellous stuff. But that’s how you have to defend civilisation sometimes. And when you stop fighting, or even worse you let the barbarians live in your capital, then your women will stop producing little Romans, and Rome stops being Rome, and ipso facto, civilization collapses before you can say quo vadis.

Such possibilities have increasingly found there way into discussions of the world’s only superpower. In a March 2001 article in Time magazine on the ‘Bush Doctrine’, the late Charles Krauthammer described America as ‘the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome’ with a similar ability to ‘reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities’ through ‘implacable demonstrations of will’.

The question of whether ‘America is Rome’ often flitted in and out of foreign policy discussions during the ‘war on terror’. And these discussions were increasingly accompanied by declinist anxieties that the United States might actually be ‘like Rome’ in the way that Edward Gibbon once depicted the Roman Empire - a disintegrating republic overwhelmed by political and financial corruption and public dishonour, and finally by dictatorship, before succumbing to the barbarian invasions.

In the early years of the century, that outcome didn’t seem as probable as it does now. Then, the ‘new Rome’ reigned supreme. Now, neo-Nazis at Charlotteville carry the Roman Legion flag, and immigrants and refugees are the new barbarians - whether ‘shipped in’ by Joe Biden or by foolish multiculturalists and ‘race traitors’ - who will bring civilization to an end with the help of the ‘feminazis’ who are failing to churn out enough manly white Romans.

This is the toxic trough the World’s Richest Man drinks from. And you can see why he wouldn’t want to see Rome populated by black gladiators and crazed dictators with orange hair, and heroes preaching to the legions about Rome’s lost honour, ending corruption, and falling standards in public life.

It must all feel a little close to home to the billionaire tech bro who now sits on the shoulder of the mad Emperor of Mar-a-Lago - both of whom bear out the old Roman adage: in regione caecorum rex est luscus ‘in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’