Gladiator

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Are his kids not entertained?

The Romans did have a concept of something like Hell, but it had a different name. A single movie is way too short to go off on an exposition of ancient Roman metaphysics, but Infernus or Hades was where most mortals would end up. "Heaven"....AKA The Elysian Fields or Elysium, was for the few and the chosen, mostly heroic warriors. If you listen to the dialog in the movie, you'll hear Elysium mentioned by someone.

As for the "unleash hell"....it was dialog that people in our era understand. Again, an exposition of Roman metaphysics would have taken too long and most of us are fairly rusty on our Latin.

For all of its sketchy history, Gladiator is the best Roman Empire movie in recent decades. The whole topic and setting of the Empire is clouded by 2000 years of Christian disapproval and its lack of understanding of what made the empire work in that brutal time period that rewarded conquest and domination. It's worth noting that in real history, once the empire was gone, the European world spent the next thousand years trying to figure out how to bring something like that back. Barbarian invasions, crusades, the Bubonic Plagues, dark age wars, medievalism all made the Empire seem like a lost dream.

One I recall seeing that removed most of the propaganda from the time was a "little" movie, The Eagle, about a soldier in search of a lost family emblem. People expect epics of sin and spectacle but The Eagle was small and personal.

Well, that and he's saying it in contemporary English, LOL.


Language is inevitably grounded in idiomatic non-literal expressions which have devices that will be anachronistic and/or non-existent in a separate language, especially a dead language.



The faux Olde Timey resources of English are that of dipping into King James Bible - era phrases that we use incorrectly and inconsistently. And even if they did would be "ancient" only in the sense of reaching back a few hundred years.

Yeah, it's a movie, after all. Having actually studied Latin in school a few centuries ago, I know a bit of Roman profanity and due to lost cultural references, most of it would be completely non-sensical to a contemporary audience. You can catch up at -

https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/articl...-ancient-rome/

Fragmentary source. No reference to Biggus Dickus or Incontinentia Buttocks.

Among the numerous historical movies Hollywood has produced, I rate Gladiator as my favorite thanks to it's almost flawless execution and intense atmosphere (a general characteristic of Scott's other movies such as Kingdom of Heaven, Alien and Blade Runner).

No other movie set in antiquity has worked so well to convey the greatness of the ancient world as well as the brutality of Roman culture. Another great movie set in antiquity is 300, but Gladiator functions better by being less cartoonish and more serious.

What we do in life echoes in eternity.

Death denial at its finest.

I'm enjoying this new ironic silly phase of Russel Crowe's career.

For me, The Gladiator (2000) is overrated I never in my life got so happy as the movie was finishing and the was 2 and 35min but it feels like its an 3 hours long. I love Russel Crowe's performance in the movie and the battle scene in the movie where it is slow down that just reminds me of the late 2000s edits in youtube on an Microsoft editor

I am adamantly moderate in my support for Gladiator. Yes Maximus, I was entertained. No, it wasn't the bestest movie ever, but so what? The music is good, the costumes and cinematography are nice, the acting is good, the story works. It's fine. It was watchable and I find it to be moderately rewatchable.

With my Latin background, while I'm extremely glad to be living here and now rather than then and there, I still like to dip my toe into the glory that was Rome, way back when. Gladiator will do that. The problem with movies about Rome is that they always seem to get dragged down into attitudes inherited from 2000 years of church disapproval. Hence we end up with epics like the 1950's Ben Hur.

One of these days, I need to do a movie search and resurrect some old movies I almost recollect that, like Gladiator, jump into Rome without first applying a Christian filter about how evil they were.

We tend to forget that much of the ancient world was cruel, harsh and deadly but, for a while, Rome had the best thing going in the ancient world, something that Europe tried to revive for centuries after the empire was gone. Movies notwithstanding, more people wanted to get INTO the empire than wanted to get OUT. Boundaries, a standing army to repel invaders, paved roads, literacy and some semblance of orderly law, were rare commodities back then. Gladiator puts us right into that world....harsh and savage on the one hand, but better than what awaits us on the outside.

Except they kinda were evil. They were the Frat-Bro version of the Ancient Greeks. They were violent and decadent. Carthage would certainly like a word here.

By our standards, of course they were. Kings "laid waste" to their enemies. That's what kings did. Plunder, slavery, mass murder and destruction were all part of that. It's hard to fathom just how hard it would have been, given the lack of machines or explosives, to destroy a city or breach its walls, but that's what happened. It took 2000 years to even find where Troy HAD been after the Greeks finished with it. The Romans were not the least bit unique in that, just better at it than the Greeks, Trojans, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc.

In a way, that's what I liked about Gladiator. The Romans lived in a much larger universe than any of the other societies of the Mediterranean and, when they conquered a place, they generally allowed it to continue its culture, didn't even care about religion, with the proviso that they obey the edicts, pay their taxes and put up Roman statues that deified the emperor. That conquest also brought the protection of Roman legions from the Germani and law and even some primitive forms of social welfare as long as you recognized who was in charge and made the appropriate acts of obedience.

The cultures that suffered the worst were ones like the Jewish kingdom that not only could not tolerate what they saw as idolatry (statues of the emperor inside their temples), didn't pay their taxes or that rebelled. That never ended well because, as a Roman subject, it was your duty to do what they told you to do. If you were lucky enough to be granted citizenship, it meant that you would not die in the arena.

That's what Gladiator got right. If you don't rebel, don't run afoul of authorities, and if you cheer for the emperor, you can have all the fun you want watching people have parades, re-enact battles, butcher animals and kill each other, not just in the great coliseum, but in numerous smaller venues out in every corner of the provinces. You paid for a ticket and spent the afternoon watching the spectacle.

We do exactly the same thing, but we call it movies and hopefully even the actor that portrays the bad guy gets to go home when the job is finished, rather than being beheaded or staked out in the hot sun for the crows to eat. We don't kill the cast. When we lay waste to a city, it's done digitally. Our sense of being better is a work in progress...still have those evil impulses.

The Greeks developed democracy, poetry, mathematics, philosophy, music, etc. The Romans were basically "bigger and dumber" and dismissed the intellectual pursuits of Greeks as weak and effeminate, calling them "Greeklings." The Romans were a bit more "Arnold Schwarzenegger." The Greeks gave us the ideas. The Romans left behind an empire. Some great engineering and infrastructure, but Romulus and Remus were really born of the Aegean. I'll stop here because I'm getting dangerously close to asking "What did the Romans ever do for us, apart from the medicine, the irrigation, the medicine, the roads, the wine, the cheese, the education, and the baths?"

Somehow, however, those monsters managed to build multi-level arches, aqueducts, the Coliseum in Rome, plumbing, concrete that lasted 2000 years and has never been duplicated, social welfare, bound books, advances in medicine and basic laws that we still use....not bad for a tribe of knuckle-dragging brutes. Some of these are quite visible in Gladiator, notably spear launchers, body armor and organized armies rather than mobs of skirmishers.

I thought Roman concrete was solved, no?



Yes, the Romans were impressive, particularly in warfare and engineering. There's a practicality to the Roman empire which commands attention. That singular practicality, however, bespeaks a brutality as well.

>>>>I've been upstaged....a recent discovery. I guess I don't spend enough time reading about concrete.

https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-conc...ime-casts-0106