The illusion of Roman civilization

Rating: 9/10 (3 July 2008)

This extended version is a lot denser that what I remembered of the 2000 commercial version. The politics of Rome are explored in a lot more detail, particularly that strange power the Roman Emperor had because of his own praetorian guard that was doing absolutely everything he ordered, and took orders only from the Emperor. At the end, when the Emperor is dead or nearly dead because he is defeated and disarmed, they refuse to obey their own officer. They will obey him only when the sister comes down and legitimizes Maximus. You only meet servile people and even the Senate and the Senators are just as servile out of fear for their welfare. That could be extended to today, even if today in our democratic countries this manipulation of people is less obvious, less direct, less based on the fear of the leaders but on the fear of an external danger propped up and exploited by the leaders. Fear is still the main nerve of the crowd, and then provide them with some bread and good circus entertainment and they will follow your fears to the end of the world. The film is also extremely clear about two barbaric practices of this supposedly civilized Roman Empire. The conquest war that is not, far from it, always justified by any offensive aggressivity from the "barbarians" from beyond the frontiers of the empire. It is brutal and unequal. The advanced technology of the time is on the Roman side. Easy to win when you add to this advanced technology the military professionalism of the Roman Legion. And even so it is shown as what it is: an unclean inhumane and inhuman practice. Worse even the film shows the slave trade and the total reduction of these slaves not even to animals but to objects, properties, commodities you deal with and dispose of the way you want. What the film does not say is that the vast majority of this Roman society is composed of slaves, house slaves, garden slaves, hard work slaves, sex slaves and of course the famous gladiators, the fighting slaves. They all end in death, these slaves, a vast majority premature death imposed onto them by their masters or circumstances, but always to satisfy the desire of a free Roman citizen. The particularity of gladiators is that their end is to die in public from the hand of another gladiator or just mangled by a wild beast or some technical trap. At the top of the ladder of that death is the death decided by the Emperor himself. The film is of course extremely precise about these circus entertainments though concentrating only on the gladiators. There were many other ways to entertain the populace in the Coliseum, true entertainment always bringing death to some people down there in the arena for the real pleasure of the public. This has not changed at all, I mean the pleasure of being the witness of some gross, violent, repulsive dying process imposed onto the dying person by one or many other human beings. The only change is that it does not happen in circuses any more, and with real live, if I can say so, performances of the death of each victim. We have invented in the meantime a machine that enables us to give the illusion of seeing that and yet that does not happen for real. That is called the cinema. In the old days, the Greeks had dramatic productions for that cathartic function, but the Romans did not want anything illusionary, they wanted the real thing and they got it for several centuries with these gladiators and later the Christians, and all the time the executing in public places of all discontents, and even, when you could afford a slave, the real torturing and killing in all possible variations of your slave. We seem to forget, and this film reminds us of it, that the Roman Empire, and before it the Greek or Hellenistic empire was just based on the inflicting of death to any kind of people as the very justification of the social order, the political order or plainly your own prestige or authority. And some speak of this empire as a great period of civilization. Due to these slaves some inventions like watermills devised in the first century BCE were only exploited in the 10th century CE by the Benedictines, hence in the middle of what some call the dark ages (sorry no capital letters). A great film in this extended version.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines