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38). Although dismayed by the games’ brutality, Marcus Aurelius justified
them as a diversion for the masses (Plass, 60, 71). Constantine I, the first
Christian emperor, tried to abolish gladiatorial contests in ad 326, but
subsequent emperors continued the bloody spectacles through the end of
the fourth century (Malam, 83). In the final days of the Western Empire,
the emperor Honorius finally closed the gladiatorial schools in ad 399,
although gladiators may have continued to fight unofficially for another
century or so.
Background to the Film
Gladiator takes up the same pivotal moment in Roman history treated by
the earlier film, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), directed by Anthony
Mann. This was the period, around ad 180, in which historian Edward
Gibbon, author of the six-volume work History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire (1776–88), located the beginning of Rome’s decline. At
the height of its prosperity and power, the empire suffered the loss of the
last “Good Emperor,” the cultured writer and Stoic philosopher Marcus
Aurelius, and experienced a decade of terror inflicted upon them by the
brutal tyrant Commodus. Like the earlier film, Gladiator superimposes a
fictional story over the historical events of this transitional period, capitalizing
upon sensational rumors in some ancient sources that said the great
Marcus Aurelius could not have favored his worthless son Commodus to
succeed him, and the old emperor’s death on the northern frontier came
at a suspiciously convenient time and place. In The Fall of the Roman
Empire, the fictional character of the Roman general Livius serves as a
cinematic catalyst in the historical study of tension between Aurelius and
Commodus, just as the fictional character of Maximus, the general-turnedgladiator,
does in Gladiator.
But at the time The Fall of the Roman Empire was made in the early
1960s, it had become clear the economic success of the dominant Hollywood-style
epic film could no longer be maintained. The financial disaster
following the release of Cleopatra (1963) and the subsequent bankruptcy
of 20th Century Fox, which produced the film, “marked the final decline
of the old studio system whose infrastructure had, in the past, been capable
of supporting spectacular historical reconstructions on screen” (Wyke,
184). Critics have suggested several reasons for the decline of the epic
movie in this period. As more of these extravagant films were produced
and viewed by the American public, the initial novelty may have simply
222 GLADIATOR (2000)