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ief, brutal life. In conversations about their families and the afterlife, the
script presents Juba’s love of living as a reverse-image of Maximus’ gloomy
obsession with death, and Juba encourages his friend not to hurry to be
reunited with his dead family: “You will meet them again, but not yet.”
The screenwriters also polished and deepened the tensions reverberating
from Maximus’ past love affair with the emperor’s daughter Lucilla,
and her plan to restore Rome to Republican rule with the help of the
civic-minded Senator Gracchus, whose name also recalls a similar political
character in Spartacus. While it is historically accurate that Lucilla planned
a failed revolt against her brother Commodus, the film’s innovation is to
emphasize the Republican theme and to portray Lucilla as an encouragement
to Maximus in his wish to see the Good Rome restored. “I knew a
man once,” she tells him, “a noble man, a man of principle, who loved my
father and my father loved him. This man served Rome well.” That Lucilla
is depicted as a motivation and instrument in the hero’s journey towards
his goal recalls earlier epic cinematic convention where female love is the
source of the male protagonist’s redemption (Elley, 88–9, 125; Fitzgerald,
34–5). Yet Gladiator renders her role more complex, in that Lucilla’s
desires are political as well as romantic. The screenplay never wanders,
but keeps a firm grasp on the conflict at the heart of the drama, between
the two competing visions of Rome, between the forces of tyranny and the
“fragile dream” of Marcus Aurelius.
The portrait of Maximus, the fictional protagonist of Gladiator, raises
several questions about the definition of heroism the film challenges contemporary
audiences to accept (Cyrino, 131–3). Some critics suggest the
character of Maximus reaches back to an idea of masculine bravery and
goodness defined as more old-fashioned, by both modern American and
ancient Roman standards. Gladiator cloaks Maximus in Republican
Roman values, suggesting a comparison with the farmer-turned-general
Cincinnatus, “an early Roman exemplar of nobility” (Solomon, 2001a,
94). Like him, Maximus wants to return to his farm after the fighting is
done. When Marcus Aurelius asks Maximus after the battle in Germania,
“How can I reward Rome’s greatest general?” Maximus replies, “Let me
go home.” It is no surprise the hero Maximus displays “old-fashioned”
Republican virtues among the jaded Romans of the late empire. In this
film, the Republic as a historical period of Rome serves to represent
the same powerful retro glamour and gilded integrity that “the greatest
generation” of World War II does for Americans at the turn of the twentyfirst
century. Gladiator invites the audience, like the more democraticminded
Romans in the film, to view the character of Maximus in the same
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