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ecause I loved you.” The more love Maximus finds, the less poor
Commodus gets. In one of Gladiator’s most daring and astonishing updates
of epic film conventions, even the wicked Roman tyrant is not a
totally unsympathetic character, his main defect being that he lacks his
family’s love.
As the emperor’s daughter Lucilla, who was once involved in a love
affair with the hero Maximus, Connie Nielsen, a Danish actress largely
unknown to American audiences, lends her stately presence and sophisticated
European beauty to the film. The portrayal of Lucilla in Gladiator
resists the traditional Good Woman/Bad Woman polarity evident in earlier
epics. She is neither the feline, sexually aggressive Roman seductress,
like the empress Poppaea in Quo Vadis, nor the pure, Christian or proto-
Christian maid who becomes the wife-redeemer of the male hero, like
Diana in The Robe (1953), Lygia in Quo Vadis, or Esther in Ben-Hur.
Instead, Gladiator suggests a more nuanced and multifaceted network of
sexuality, power, femininity, and domesticity in the depiction of Lucilla.
An evocative onscreen precursor might be Elizabeth Taylor’s incarnation
of a sexually liberated, lusciously maternal, and politically visionary
Cleopatra. Although Cleopatra dominates her narrative as its eponymous
protagonist in a way Lucilla as a supporting player in Gladiator does not,
the characters of the two women share some remarkable similarities,
especially in their attempts to influence men in their lives towards particular
political goals.
Like Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemy, Lucilla is manifestly
the only one of the two Aurelian siblings who has the natural talent and
disposition for just rule: “If only you’d been born a man,” her father tells
her, “what a Caesar you would have made!” When the irritated Commodus
threatens to dissolve the Senate, a wary Lucilla expertly intervenes and
thereby acquires the trust of Senator Gracchus: “My lady, as always your
lightest touch commands obedience.” Taylor’s Cleopatra is also overtly
represented in the earlier film as a mother, fiercely protective and concerned
for the political future of Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar.
Throughout Gladiator, Lucilla expresses her anxiety for her son, Lucius,
because he is the heir to the throne. Her worries are well founded, since
Commodus suspects the plot against him by wringing information out of
his young nephew, and then forces a terrified Lucilla to give up the rest by
threatening Lucius’ life. Commodus explicitly compares Lucilla to Cleopatra
in the famous “busy little bee” speech: “Royal ladies behave very
strangely and do very odd things in the name of love.” Lucilla’s ability to
instigate and guide the Republican coup attempt reflects contemporary
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