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The field of wheat is thus a symbol of resurrection, the promise of rebirth
in a peaceful afterlife, and the happy reunion with loved ones. “What we
do in life, echoes in eternity,” Maximus assures his men.
In Gladiator, these images evoke an impression of the advent of death,
and mark crucial scenes in Maximus’ journey towards his destiny. The
film audience glimpses the hand in the wheat field against a flash of gray
when Maximus is about to be executed in the first act of the film, and as
he begs Quintus to protect his family, his former comrade-at-arms roughly
replies: “You will meet your family in the afterlife.” The dream imagery
occurs again at the beginning of the second act, with an image of a bleak,
rock-strewn path and the voices of laughing children, as the broken, lifeless
Maximus is found upon his family’s newly dug graves and taken away
by the slave traders to Zucchabar. As Juba tends Maximus’ near-fatal
wound, he instructs him: “Don’t die.” Again at the transition to the third
act, Maximus tells Juba his family is waiting for him in the afterlife, and
they share a pledge to meet their families after death. Then, as the provincial
gladiatorial troupe approaches the outskirts of Rome, accompanied by
children running through fields alongside their caravan, flashes of the
stony landscape under a vivid sky again appear onscreen. In the final scene
as Maximus dies in the arena, we see a man’s bloodied hand pushing
through a door in the pale wall, and beyond that, a dream-image of the
tree-lined path leading up to Maximus’ house in Hispania. Only at this
moment do the viewers realize it is Maximus’ strong hand ruffling through
the wind-blown wheat fields around his own farm, and the sound of the
laughing child is that of his own son, who now runs towards his father
on the pathway as his beautiful wife waits on the porch, shielding her
eyes from the burst of warm sunshine. In the Colosseum, Lucilla closes
Maximus’ eyes, and as he floats over the sand covered with rose petals, she
weeps and tells him: “Go to them . . . you’re home.” Only at the end of the
last reel is it evident that this circular film has been one long, mystical
flashback at the moment of the hero’s death, anticipating his reunion with
his beloved family in the afterlife.
As Marcus Aurelius looks wearily around the frozen German battlefield,
he sighs: “So much for the glory of Rome.” The lines etched on the
emperor’s face describe the trajectory of an absolute empire, from the
opportunity to affect positive change in the world, to the responsibility for
that involvement to be moral and meaningful, followed by the jaded recognition
of the burdens imposed by such imperial obligation, and finally,
inescapably, complete exhaustion (Cyrino, 148–9). America, like Rome,
persists. Empire goes forward on its own institutional momentum, even as
254 GLADIATOR (2000)