After a hiatus of several decades, more or less, Hollywood has again produced a Roman epic on the grand scale. Gladiator , the recently released film by director Ridley Scott and the Dreamworks studio, stars the Australian actor Russell Crowe in the not unfamiliar but always satisfying tale of a brave man who is brought low by his enemies and then gets even. The movie would have its audience accept the bizarre notion that a popular gladiator, because of his celebrity, was in a position to politically challenge an emperor. This idea has more to do with the obsessions, delusions, and megalomania of the twenty-first century, than it does with the political realities of the second. Events of the reign of the emperor Commodus,during which most of the film's action unfolds, do not furnish much in the way of either gripping melodrama, or noble cant about fame and popular government.
History is more complex.
And far more sordid. Dutiful and unambitious to a fault, he longs only to return to the wife, son and olive groves he has left behind in Spain. Commodus murders his father and prepares a similar fate for Maximus, who escapes his executioners. Maximus rides across Europe only to find on his arrival the burnt and crucified bodies of his wife and child. His true identity kept hidden, Maximus distinguishes himself in the bloody combat of the arena.