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Nitpicking Gladiator II, Part II

Last week, we started our nitpicking of Gladiator II (2024) by looking at the problems with the films chronology and its portrayal of the Roman army of the early third century, both in its equipmen…

After all, as we’ve discussed, land this close to the city center was really valuable; the suburbium is where the rich had their large pleasure villas, but it also would have been a region of very intensive agriculture and especially horticulture and thus, by rural standards, quite densely peopled, albeit nowhere near as built up as the urban core. What I want to note is that whereas many earlier emperors in the principate ruled from Rome and dispatched generals to handle their wars, Septimius Severus apparently greatly preferred to lead his armies in person on the frontiers and did so, to the annoyance of the Senate. Accepting the ‘lore’ of the Gladiator films, Septimius Severus – a frontier general who seized power after the death of Commodus – basically is ‘what would happen if Maximus became emperor’ and the answer was that, in the long run, it turns out poorly!

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