Speaker 1: Gentlemen, what we do in life echoes in a tanity.
Speaker 2: He's fucking obsessed with Gladiator.
Speaker 1: A man, it's a great fucking film. Strength and honor,
Speaker 1: Scotch and shoulder holds you to the uh so Russell Crowe.
Speaker 3: I mean he's trapped right.
Speaker 2: They've gotta sever off his head, and he's telling him
Speaker 2: how to do it, and.
Speaker 1: Then he yanks the sword from that dude that was
Speaker 1: so fat.
Speaker 3: What about when the guy gets with that spike thing
Speaker 3: and chunks of his head go flying.
Speaker 1: I don't know if already it's grit and said Iraq everywhere,
Speaker 1: like I was supposed to be the franchise player, and
Speaker 1: we in here talking about.
Speaker 3: Practice, ladies and gentlemen, we got him.
Speaker 1: Our next door neighbors are foreign countries. I call upon
Speaker 1: all nations to do everything they can to stop these
Speaker 1: terrors killing me. Now watch his drive, Hey everybody, and
Speaker 1: welcome to remember Shuffle. My name is Ben, with me
Speaker 1: as always my co host Jordano Ben.
Speaker 3: There are rich Lanisti and there are poor LANISTI. Then
Speaker 3: there's fifty cubits of crap, and then there's our ludus.
Speaker 3: We are an organ donor for the rich.
Speaker 1: Editors.
Speaker 3: Our goal shouldn't be to buy gladiators. Our goal should
Speaker 3: be to buy plebeian jeers jeers or cheers cheers, cheers.
Speaker 3: We don't have the dinari for a secuteur. Okay, we're
Speaker 3: not selling togas here. What if I told you Retiario's
Speaker 3: fighters lost one hundred percent of their fights, but one
Speaker 3: more favor than any other gladiator. We used analytics to
Speaker 3: pick our gladiators. It's a new method I've developed called counting.
Speaker 1: E e e e e E.
Speaker 3: His acclaim perd sestori ratio off the chart. That's what
Speaker 3: I like about them.
Speaker 1: Welcome to our episode on Gladiator. If you were expecting
Speaker 1: part six of our series on the global financial crisis,
Speaker 1: fear not, it's coming. Sometimes these episodes take a little
Speaker 1: bit more time, a little bit more research, and we
Speaker 1: don't want to leave you hanging. So here's Gladiator.
Speaker 3: It's really hard to try reading about the Eurozone crisis.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so fucking boring, dude.
Speaker 3: There's all sorts of like currency concepts involved. It's not
Speaker 3: an easy read.
Speaker 1: Keep finding myself reading lines like grease owed so many
Speaker 1: billions of euros. I just want to be like two
Speaker 1: National Dead is dumb. But yes, we are turning to Gladiator.
Speaker 1: Why are we doing this, Tordano.
Speaker 3: One, I mean at one best picture, you know, I
Speaker 3: feel like at some point we'll probably get to all
Speaker 3: of them. I mean, first of all, it's a good movie.
Speaker 3: It's a fun to watch movie.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Obviously it's like kind of a sports movie and like
Speaker 3: a revenge film. But most of the plot occupies itself
Speaker 3: with this intrigue over trying to get the Roman Empire
Speaker 3: to go back to the Roman Republic. And I was
Speaker 3: talking to my dad about this movie recently and he
Speaker 3: was like, oh, yeah, that movie was interesting. You know,
Speaker 3: it is interesting the way that Romans wanted to go
Speaker 3: back to the republic like that. And Ben has pointed
Speaker 3: out to me before that this was not ever a concern, right,
Speaker 3: And so I think the fact that we made in
Speaker 3: the year two thousand, the plot of our Best Picture
Speaker 3: winner about gladiators about wanting to fix their political system
Speaker 3: to be like a more liberal one, I think says
Speaker 3: a lot about the era in which this movie came out, right,
Speaker 3: Because if this concern wasn't actually part of like Roman
Speaker 3: society back then, then that means it's purely for the
Speaker 3: audience in two thousand and so it speaks mostly to
Speaker 3: the type of art that we're making and the type
Speaker 3: of art that we wanted to see about democracy. It
Speaker 3: is really sort of like our end of history. Insert
Speaker 3: into a sword and Sandals movie. Right, And if I
Speaker 3: can walk you through popular sword and Sandals movies over time, right,
Speaker 3: you got ben Her and Quovadas in the nineteen fifties, right,
Speaker 3: both of which are about Christian faith essentially, right at
Speaker 3: a time when Americans are juxtaposing themselves with like atheism
Speaker 3: in the USSR. And Quovadis is also about a corrupt emperor,
Speaker 3: but only in the sense that he's persecuting Christians.
Speaker 1: Right. I'm like this movie. They remade ben Her a
Speaker 1: few years back. I'm surprised they didn't call it ben
Speaker 1: Them am I Right?
Speaker 3: Okay? And then Spartacus is made in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: The author was someone who was persecuted by the House
Speaker 3: on Unamerican Activities, right, and so it has a lot
Speaker 3: of that baked into it. It opens with a nod
Speaker 3: where Rome is described as a republic and quote fatally
Speaker 3: stricken with a disease called human slavery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a film about a slave revolt, and I
Speaker 1: would just say, you know, push up nerd glasses. The
Speaker 1: Spartacus slaves were not abolitionists. They didn't want to free
Speaker 1: other slaves. They wanted to be free themselves. The ancient
Speaker 1: world never actually produced an abolitionist movement. No matter what
Speaker 1: kind of radical new religion or philosoph was produced, nobody
Speaker 1: ever said like, this is a moral wrong that we
Speaker 1: should do away with. I think the closest they got
Speaker 1: is like, this is a moral wrong, but it is
Speaker 1: necessary evil.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean it's about civil rights, right, and
Speaker 3: it's coming out in the nineteen sixties, and about racism.
Speaker 3: I think there's like some racial mixing in the gladiatorial
Speaker 3: school going on in that movie King of Heaven We've
Speaker 3: mentioned on this pod before about like a confusing quagmire
Speaker 3: of a war in the Middle East three hundred about
Speaker 3: sort of like aughts East versus West fascism. And so
Speaker 3: now you have this like pre nine to eleven Sword
Speaker 3: and Sandal movie and it's about liberalism, which is so funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like classical liberalism, and I think it speaks really
Speaker 1: well to nineties era liberalism because we see the empire
Speaker 1: reach its zenith, both the American and the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1: The Romans are fighting far off on the frontier in
Speaker 1: Germany when we check in with them, but it's specifically
Speaker 1: in the Roman instance in a lot of ways, about
Speaker 1: a cultural decline, a society that has expended all of
Speaker 1: blood and treasure and man hours to create the best
Speaker 1: blood sport entertainment in the world, international networks of slaving
Speaker 1: to get the exotic animals and the people from all
Speaker 1: over for the sake of blood sport. Roman military might
Speaker 1: unquestioned in this movie, just like American military might was
Speaker 1: in the end of history unipolar moment. And I think
Speaker 1: some of this obsession with cultural decline is wrapped up
Speaker 1: in that late nineties early two thousands. Our politics has
Speaker 1: become a politics of scandal, Monica Lewinsky, impeachment, etc. That's
Speaker 1: like their comedists. I know I'm kind of stretching it
Speaker 1: a little bit here, but we've mentioned a lot on
Speaker 1: this pod about postmodernism of the nineties, anything cynical or
Speaker 1: snarky or ironic or irreverent. And this movie is not postmodern.
Speaker 1: And that's not just because of the Sword and Sandals movie.
Speaker 1: It's not postmodern in the sense that it is earnest
Speaker 1: to a fucking fault. In many ways, this is an
Speaker 1: anti postmodern nineties reaction film, and I think that's like
Speaker 1: the kind of decline that sort of envisioned and of course,
Speaker 1: like Jordano said, the like stupid imagined, we gotta bring
Speaker 1: the republic back, which nobody ever mentioned for real or
Speaker 1: thought about. And yeah, why this matters, Why this particular
Speaker 1: film matters. Think about your classic ninety Sword in Sandals movies.
Speaker 1: Name me some, Jordano. There's so many, they're so famous.
Speaker 1: That's the bit you can't. If I asked you to
Speaker 1: think of a two thousand Sandal movie, you might say
Speaker 1: Troy or Alexander or King Arthur or Kingdom of Heaven
Speaker 1: or three hundred or a bunch of other ones that
Speaker 1: are like the B and C and D list here
Speaker 1: that you probably haven't seen or heard of, like Spartacus,
Speaker 1: Blood and Sand on the Stars with the Z Network
Speaker 1: or The Eagle, or even POMPEII. In twenty fourteen. This
Speaker 1: film was so successful that it kicks started. That's Sword
Speaker 1: and Sandal's renaissance. So that's why we're talking about it. Bibliography,
Speaker 1: we read a book by this dude named Harry side Bottom.
Speaker 3: Insane British name, Harry's Sidebottom good God, yeah, truly English
Speaker 3: gay porno actor's name.
Speaker 1: Yes, they're developing new positions over there. Harry's Sidebottom wrote
Speaker 1: a book on gladiators that came about just last year
Speaker 1: called Those About to Die, which I really dug. But
Speaker 1: I think you kind of already need to know a
Speaker 1: lot about classics to really appreciate it. Tornado, you were
Speaker 1: so so on it.
Speaker 3: I thought it was interesting enough.
Speaker 1: I also read one of his other books called The
Speaker 1: Mad Emperor, for some of the other stuff here. Before
Speaker 1: we turn to the film, I want to give you
Speaker 1: a little bit of background on gladiators. And this might
Speaker 1: run a little long, but it's only going to run
Speaker 1: long because gladiators in history are far more interesting than Gladiator,
Speaker 1: the two thousand film. So cut me a little slack,
Speaker 1: spend a lot of my life dealing with this classic stuff.
Speaker 1: Come in with an open mind. Okay, So we're gonna
Speaker 1: walk into this conflict between the Emperor and the Senate.
Speaker 1: You know, whoever the emperor is, because comdists the emperor
Speaker 1: commitist is the start of this precipitous decline in the
Speaker 1: Roman Empire. When I took my Roman History courses back
Speaker 1: in the day, they periodized the upper level courses into
Speaker 1: three chunks. You got Roman History colon Republic, which went
Speaker 1: from the earliest shit that we have down to the
Speaker 1: death of Julius Caesar. Then you had Roman History colon
Speaker 1: High Empire, from the reign of Augustus down to Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker 1: This is your Pax Romana. Things are ticking along, got
Speaker 1: some good emperors in there, got some bad emperors in there,
Speaker 1: got some civil wars in there, got the eruption of
Speaker 1: Pompeii in there. Most of the famous buildings come from
Speaker 1: this period. Then you get Roman History colon later Empire,
Speaker 1: which actually started with commitists. So this film is set
Speaker 1: at the starting gun for the decline of the decline
Speaker 1: and fall of the Roman Empire, and it gets almost
Speaker 1: everything wrong about Roman politics entirely. I have a section
Speaker 1: for a Pedants corner later. This is the pre Pedants
Speaker 1: Penance corner. But the Roman Republic was basically an oligarchy,
Speaker 1: not a democracy. People voted in tribes in descending order
Speaker 1: from richest to poorest in their democratic assemblies, and they
Speaker 1: stopped voting when a majority was hit, like for just
Speaker 1: one of the many anti democratic aspects of the Roman constitution.
Speaker 1: There's no evidence that Marcus Aurelius, or any other emperor
Speaker 1: for that matter, had any notion of restoring the republic
Speaker 1: because officially it never died. The fiction that they did
Speaker 1: is like, I'm just the first citizen. I'm just the
Speaker 1: first citizen among equals. The Senate still existed. That's what
Speaker 1: the emperor saying. That's what the emperor is saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the magistrates still existed. They still had elections that were
Speaker 1: just like you know, the candidates had to be hand
Speaker 1: picked a rubber stant by the emperor. There were some
Speaker 1: things that were banned, but it was some minor tinkering
Speaker 1: around the edges.
Speaker 3: I guess that's the key part of ending the republic
Speaker 3: is you don't say the republic sending. You keep it
Speaker 3: all around as like window dressing.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Yes, And basically the Roman Empire was a military
Speaker 1: dictatorship because the emperor was the commander in chief of
Speaker 1: all the legions. We see this in the film Real
Speaker 1: Marcus Aurelius is out there on the frontier and then
Speaker 1: communist joins him. So here's how this weird ass state worked.
Speaker 1: Emperor's authority rested on four basic pillars or constituencies that
Speaker 1: he had to please. If too many of these guys
Speaker 1: get pissed off, you get overthrown. These are the folks
Speaker 1: who mattered. To keep things going, you had the Senate.
Speaker 1: The emperor needs the Senate, who are the elite of society,
Speaker 1: rich property, aristocratic men. He needs them to govern the
Speaker 1: provinces because Rome never developed an independent bureaucracy where you
Speaker 1: could just hire whoever to be a governor.
Speaker 3: Interesting, he goes out and sort of administers it independently
Speaker 3: for a fixed fee or something like a franchise.
Speaker 1: Yes, the franchise of empire. You get to be governory,
Speaker 1: you get to be nice and corrupt and do some
Speaker 1: graft off the top, and then you would actually hire
Speaker 1: private tax collectors to do your tax collecting for you.
Speaker 1: That's why they were so hated in like the New
Speaker 1: Testament or whatever. It's like, why the Judeans hated the
Speaker 1: tax collectors so much because they were frequently local collaborators.
Speaker 1: The Senate would be all the generals for the emperor's
Speaker 1: many armies, because the emperor is just one guy. The
Speaker 1: Senate is still voting the titles and powers of the
Speaker 1: emperor to give him a veneer of legitimacy. And they're
Speaker 1: going to become the consuls and the aide aisles and
Speaker 1: the queists and all these magistrates, just like it was
Speaker 1: during the Republic, but the emperors choosing the candidate. So
Speaker 1: what these rich old men want from an emperor They
Speaker 1: want respect, you know, digny toss. They want freedom of
Speaker 1: speech and freedom from condemnation and detention, liber toss. That's
Speaker 1: the kind of freedom that they want. Let us at
Speaker 1: least say the things we want to say. They want
Speaker 1: the emperor to be first among equals, and they want
Speaker 1: this fiction of power with the emperor helping them maintain
Speaker 1: the prestige of the body. They still had certain rights,
Speaker 1: like a feudal aristocracy, and they wanted those respected. They
Speaker 1: want the emperor to attend all their meetings. They want
Speaker 1: him to act correct and dignified when he does. They
Speaker 1: want free access to the emperor. They want the emperor
Speaker 1: to spend a majority of time with them, and they
Speaker 1: want the emperor to take advice only from them. And
Speaker 1: what they don't want is to be treated with contempt.
Speaker 1: They don't want the emperor getting too close to the
Speaker 1: common people or the common soldiers. They definitely don't want
Speaker 1: him ignoring them. It's about respect, Giordano. At the end
Speaker 1: of the day, these are Italians here.
Speaker 3: What were the senators in charge of in the republic?
Speaker 3: Just electing the consuls or like making laws or what so.
Speaker 1: They were mostly an advisory body, but they also were
Speaker 1: in charge of doling out the money.
Speaker 3: Okay, and then in the empire period it sounds like
Speaker 3: they'll still consult in theory, but they just wouldn't be
Speaker 3: doling out the money.
Speaker 1: That's the thing about the Senate is that it didn't
Speaker 1: actually officially have all that much power. They had really
Speaker 1: limited authority. They couldn't even introduce laws to be passed
Speaker 1: in the assemblies. Only the magistrates could pass laws. But
Speaker 1: it was a body that was made up of Rome's
Speaker 1: richest guys and most experienced guys. Because after you were
Speaker 1: elected consul, once you were an ex magistrate, you could
Speaker 1: join the ranks of the Senate. It was the only
Speaker 1: way the body could be replenished. It had a lot
Speaker 1: of influence, even if it didn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: formal power, which is part of what the movie gets
Speaker 1: so fucking wrong, where it's like the Senate is elected
Speaker 1: and represents the people, because that sounds like America, but
Speaker 1: it was not that really at all. Okay. The next constituency,
Speaker 1: which we also see in the film is the army.
Speaker 1: This is the most important one because armies can declare
Speaker 1: our emperors, and they can depose emperors, and they can
Speaker 1: depose pretenders and successors. And by the time of the Empire,
Speaker 1: Rome's army is this fully professionalized force, and it's more
Speaker 1: less an entirely independent institution tied to the emperor. Once
Speaker 1: upon a time, Rome's army was made up of volunteers.
Speaker 1: No longer they lived apart from civilian society. They lived
Speaker 1: under different laws where they had extremely harsh discipline that
Speaker 1: they were subjected to, but they were also compensated with
Speaker 1: social benefits. They're all kinds of stories in Roman literature
Speaker 1: of some random soldier just roughing up a civilian and
Speaker 1: getting away with it because they can. They even dressed
Speaker 1: and walked differently than a civilian, and so civilians feared soldiers,
Speaker 1: but soldiers fucking despise civilians. We are very, very far
Speaker 1: from the golden age of the republic, and what the
Speaker 1: army wants from an emperor is that is money. The
Speaker 1: soldiers want to get paid, and by the late empire
Speaker 1: in that period of decline, there are rich guys who
Speaker 1: are just buying their way to the emperorship by bribing
Speaker 1: the right soldiers. And they want an emperor who is
Speaker 1: a commander in chief, not just in name, but is
Speaker 1: one of them. They want a soldier acomlito in Latin.
Speaker 1: They want a soldier who's eating our rations, wearing our
Speaker 1: uniform and talking like a soldier. They want an emperor
Speaker 1: who's want of dubois, you know. And also like the senators,
Speaker 1: they want attention and respect.
Speaker 3: Everybody wants attention, yes, and then opposite wants like the senate,
Speaker 3: they want the emperor to be respectable, and the soldiers
Speaker 3: want the emperor to eat rations.
Speaker 1: Yes, you can see how it's a delicate balancing act,
Speaker 1: and you can see why so many of them were deposed.
Speaker 1: The third constituency is one that we don't really see
Speaker 1: in the film, but they are the most interesting. The
Speaker 1: Familia Kaisaris. This is the emperor's family, staff and counselors.
Speaker 1: This is your palace intrigue shit, right, they're the most fun.
Speaker 1: It's all of the emperor's slaves, and importantly it's the freedmen,
Speaker 1: the former slaves of his household. The emperor would have
Speaker 1: these highly educated, usually Greek slaves that he would free,
Speaker 1: and that's how you knew you could trust these guys
Speaker 1: a lot, because you know you're responsible for their freedom,
Speaker 1: responsible for advancing them to this exciting position. And it
Speaker 1: really is the west wing staff of an emperor. Including
Speaker 1: this is a crazy ass list. Okay, you ready for this. Doctors, messuses, astrologers, cooks,
Speaker 1: wine stewards, waiters, gardeners, jewelers, a range of wardrobe masters
Speaker 1: for different types of clothing, one guy for your private clothes,
Speaker 1: one guy for military, legal, triumphal hunting, Kinglean, Greek, and
Speaker 1: so on. You had a special bureaucrat functionary for your studies,
Speaker 1: and you basically had a sex guy, a procurator woolup
Speaker 1: tactum that's Latin for the manager of pleasures or the
Speaker 1: overseer of the pleasures. You had a functionary bureaucraph for finances,
Speaker 1: for correspondence, for embassies, for legal affairs, a chief of
Speaker 1: staff for appointments, and one who even ran the bedchamber.
Speaker 3: I'd love to see like the Roman West Wing with
Speaker 3: Toby speaking to the overseer of Pleasures and the wine
Speaker 3: steward and the astrologer, mister President. The astrologer says, the
Speaker 3: omens are bad this year, mister Caesar Emperator.
Speaker 1: The astrologer says, the omens are bad. But I do
Speaker 1: have this Thracian maden for you. Yeah. So the senatorial
Speaker 1: elite generally hated all these guys because these people had
Speaker 1: so much power and they were so close to the emperor,
Speaker 1: and these guys were generally not chosen from the aristocracy.
Speaker 1: These aristocrats are scheming, they might want to be an emperor,
Speaker 1: so instead you choose these like foreigners and former slaves.
Speaker 1: And they're also fucking wealthy. The largest known private fortune
Speaker 1: in the ancient world four hundred million, sister sees. I mean,
Speaker 1: what the fuck does that mean? I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't know. The ancient conversion. It's the property qualification for
Speaker 1: two thirds of all members of the Senate was amassed
Speaker 1: by one guy, the correspondence manager, Narcissus of the Emperor Claudius.
Speaker 1: What was he up to? Graft? Probably we've got we're
Speaker 1: all corrupt as fuck.
Speaker 2: Dude.
Speaker 1: The people who hold up Rome as a model of
Speaker 1: equality before the law are fucking laughable. Like they had
Speaker 1: chattel slavery. They want what all the other groups wanted,
Speaker 1: money power, emperor to themselves. If the Senate wants an emperor,
Speaker 1: that's first among equals, a princeps kiillis civilian prince, the
Speaker 1: familia of the emperor. They want an emperor who is
Speaker 1: as a part and above from the rest of the
Speaker 1: elites as possible.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: Our last constituency and the funnest one and one that
Speaker 1: we see in the film, the urban plebs of the
Speaker 1: city of Rome. Remember that Rome was a city of
Speaker 1: one million people with no police force, and these urban
Speaker 1: plebs could and often did riot, hence the bread and circuses.
Speaker 3: Your average guy, your average Joe, the pleb joe.
Speaker 1: The plumbo plummer comes from the Latin word plumbus, meaning Latin. Okay,
Speaker 1: they have to be placated. The historical comedy had this
Speaker 1: member of his staff named Cleander who was really really unpopular,
Speaker 1: and the urban plubs was so pissed that Communists had
Speaker 1: to have him killed and put Cleander's head on a
Speaker 1: pike just to placate the Plubs. They're probably the least
Speaker 1: important of these four constituencies because the PLBs never actually
Speaker 1: successfully overthrew an emperor on their own, but they could
Speaker 1: destabilize regimes enough that another constituency could come in and
Speaker 1: overthrow the emperor. And these guys also had certain privileges
Speaker 1: that were grounded in history that had to be respected.
Speaker 1: Because the Romans had this one democratic element of their constitution,
Speaker 1: laws could be passed by voting them through popular assemblies,
Speaker 1: and the executive branch all those offices had to be
Speaker 1: elected by the people as well. And so what the
Speaker 1: Plubs want from an emperor, they want the day of
Speaker 1: bread and circuses. Right, give me the shows, give me
Speaker 1: the gifts.
Speaker 3: Nam Chomsky said the same thing about sports in America,
Speaker 3: apparently that they're used to keep public disaffection down.
Speaker 1: It fucking works, DUDEA.
Speaker 3: Wait, So during the Republic to empire transition, were the
Speaker 3: offices and political power of the PLBs unchanged as well?
Speaker 1: They are curtailed. In the republic, you had a special
Speaker 1: office called the Tribune of the Plebs, this elected office
Speaker 1: that's there just to represent the plebs, which was very,
Speaker 1: very powerful and over the centuries of the republic, their
Speaker 1: power ebbs and flows, and then by the time of
Speaker 1: the Principate Empire, that is one of the offices that
Speaker 1: is very much curtailed. There were also specific sessions of
Speaker 1: public debate that could get quite rowdy. These were kind
Speaker 1: of done away with. Some of the more like public
Speaker 1: discourse around the laws was curtailed in the transition from
Speaker 1: republic to empire, but they were still voting. Just I
Speaker 1: don't know, remember this for reasons in twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: just vote maybe.
Speaker 3: What did the plebs want from an emperor? Who's their
Speaker 3: ideal emperor?
Speaker 1: What does he do? What's he like? I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a number that you might want to say. I just
Speaker 1: want to have a wine with him? And Tabarnah. They
Speaker 1: loved Claudius bantering them. You know, Claudius at the Games
Speaker 1: called them my lords. You know, you guys are the
Speaker 1: lords today.
Speaker 3: They just want a guy who goes out to the
Speaker 3: Laddiefunda state fair and eats the garum.
Speaker 1: They want an emperor who's a man of the people.
Speaker 1: The trait that they appreciate in an emperor is called
Speaker 1: laywe toss levity, which is quite literally the opposite of
Speaker 1: the stern digny toss that the Senate wants dignity. They
Speaker 1: love all these wacky stories in our sources about emperor's
Speaker 1: cross dressing as poor people and like sneaking out to
Speaker 1: hang out with the urban poor. They love that shit.
Speaker 3: They like Bill Clinton jocks with the McDonald's.
Speaker 1: Yes, they love when the emperor humiliates the upper classes
Speaker 1: like they're these stories of these bad emperors like Caligula
Speaker 1: forcing aristocratic people to fight in the arena. The pluvs
Speaker 1: eat that shit up.
Speaker 3: One of like the criminal elements of this movie, honestly,
Speaker 3: is that they conflate both of these groups, like the
Speaker 3: Senate and the people, being like, yeah, like their interests
Speaker 3: are aligned and they're basically the same thing. When like,
Speaker 3: as you've told me, often the interests of the Senate
Speaker 3: and the interests of the people are in direct opposition
Speaker 3: to each other, and in fact, they don't like it
Speaker 3: when either of them advances their own causes, And like,
Speaker 3: often the Emperor might have been supporting the people at
Speaker 3: the expense of the Senate.
Speaker 1: Yes, quite often the Emperor would be better for your
Speaker 1: average Joe citizen than he would be for your senatorial.
Speaker 3: Elite or your arid land downing aristocracy. No way, the landlord.
Speaker 1: Class exactly, Jordaano. Our film flattens all that cool shit out.
Speaker 1: I'll talk more about this later in Our Thieves. But
Speaker 1: the way that the army is portrayed as this highly
Speaker 1: patriotic institution who are fighting for Rome in a very
Speaker 1: particular way is fucking fantasy. The idea of Rome. We
Speaker 1: had the idea of Rome. Excuse me, yes, okay. Second thing,
Speaker 1: for historical context, Let's talk a little bit about gladiators,
Speaker 1: because they're cool and they're fun and they're interesting. They're
Speaker 1: a uniquely Roman institution, which is interesting given how much
Speaker 1: of Roman culture is cribbed from other people's, especially the Greeks.
Speaker 3: This part seems weird because, like one, the idea of
Speaker 3: making two people fight for entertainment doesn't seem all that novel.
Speaker 3: So it's like it is strange that it is not
Speaker 3: more universal in a way, like the Joker saying we're
Speaker 3: having tryouts or whatever. But I did read that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're unsure if it's in a Truscan practice or a
Speaker 3: practice from CAMPAIGNA. I think the best bet is that
Speaker 3: we used to do human sacrifices a lot of times,
Speaker 3: especially around funerals, and so they know that like the
Speaker 3: earliest gladiator games were tied to funerals, Like you would
Speaker 3: be like, Oh, my dad's dead, I'm going to honor
Speaker 3: his memory by throwing a twenty five gladiator match to
Speaker 3: honor him. And it's like, well, instead of doing a
Speaker 3: human sacrifice, in some ways, this is like slightly maybe
Speaker 3: more humane in the sense that like one of them
Speaker 3: might live. Yep, but that's kind of like the natural
Speaker 3: evolution that I had heard had happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the human sacrifice bit is like highly contested. That
Speaker 1: is what the ancient Christians who hated the games accused
Speaker 1: the Pagan Romans of doing. Changing it from human sacrifice,
Speaker 1: and like I'm being a little simplistic, I guess like
Speaker 1: the Gauls had some kind of tradition of making guys
Speaker 1: fight for entertainment. It's probably not a totally unique convention
Speaker 1: to the Romans, but nobody went as hard with it
Speaker 1: as the Romans did.
Speaker 3: There are Roman colosseums like all over the former empire today, right,
Speaker 3: It's like it's like one of the main marks that
Speaker 3: your country used to be part of the Roman empires.
Speaker 3: Like there's probably still like a colosseum somewhere.
Speaker 1: They exported those amphitheaters. Doesn't matter in the West. In
Speaker 1: the Greek East, the Greeks didn't do.
Speaker 3: It, but that they took to it three continents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's four basic ways for you to find
Speaker 1: yourself on the sands fighting for your life. How do
Speaker 1: you become a gladiator? Number one? The most common a
Speaker 1: foreign captive of Rome's overseas wars history has may remember
Speaker 1: Spartacus was from Thrace, and the exoticism of the fighters
Speaker 1: probably makes the shows more enticing for a Roman audience. Right,
Speaker 1: this reinforces empire. Look at all the lands we control.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I got the sense that a lot of it
Speaker 3: was different gladiator types, Like there are stock characters in
Speaker 3: the arena, and so you have like the Thracian, you know,
Speaker 3: like the I don't know if the Bactrian was actually one,
Speaker 3: but it's reinforcing this idea that we conquered these people.
Speaker 3: And so now there are like a figurine in our
Speaker 3: little play death matches here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a figure called the Gall that existed
Speaker 1: during the Republic, and then Gall became so Romanized that
Speaker 1: the figure of the Gall drops off from the sources. Wow,
Speaker 1: so yeah, that's the most common way you get conquered
Speaker 1: by the Romans. You find yourself in the arena. Number two.
Speaker 1: It could be a criminal convicted of particularly egregious crimes
Speaker 1: like sacrilege, arson, murder, adulterers, male prostitutes, burglars, cut verses,
Speaker 1: and kidnappers could all be sentenced to become slave gladiators.
Speaker 1: This was better than a death sentence be heading for
Speaker 1: elites crucifixion for slaves, because you at least had a
Speaker 1: chance of surviving right a slave. You could be a regular,
Speaker 1: non gladiator style slave and your master could just sell
Speaker 1: you to a gladiator school. And some slaves would run
Speaker 1: away to try and sell themselves to a ludus to
Speaker 1: Eludus is a gladiator school, rather than stay with their masters.
Speaker 1: And then the last source, which I think is the
Speaker 1: weirdest but the most interesting, are free men who volunteered.
Speaker 1: Why do this? And nobody is certain. Some ancient sources
Speaker 1: say it's because free people fell on hard times, so
Speaker 1: it's their own fault. You know, these guys are just
Speaker 1: moralizing prudes. It's like, yeah, you drank and you hoard
Speaker 1: and now you're broke and you're selling your body to
Speaker 1: be in the arena. But some people might have done
Speaker 1: it for a pursuit of celebrity, for an addiction of
Speaker 1: the adrenaline rush of extreme risk taking. They live in
Speaker 1: a society that glamorized violence. You know, Marshall Valor fighting
Speaker 1: in war. But now there's no more wars. You're living
Speaker 1: in the packs romana. Maybe you want to fight in
Speaker 1: the arena.
Speaker 3: They never took up bushido arts.
Speaker 1: Eh, yeah, no, I never wrote the samurai poems.
Speaker 3: I guess there was a story I came across of. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like two friends. This is from the classical world where
Speaker 3: it's like two friends who were traveling and then like
Speaker 3: were robbed and so they didn't have any money, and
Speaker 3: so one of them had to volunteer to be a
Speaker 3: gladiator and win enough money so they could make it home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's from one of the novelists. Though you got
Speaker 1: to put an asterisk, but it is something that is
Speaker 1: a story that people told from the time. You might
Speaker 1: end up wealthy because this was so popular that there
Speaker 1: was a lot of money that changed hands when putting
Speaker 1: on a gladiatorial show. You may have immediately immolated your
Speaker 1: social status, but you did it for that sweet sweet
Speaker 1: cash money. Now here's where it's like some true pedants
Speaker 1: corner shit. In reality, no one knows for sure what
Speaker 1: the risk of death was in the arena, but it
Speaker 1: was probably one in eight, give or take. That's like
Speaker 1: a middle of the pack estimate between the two extremes
Speaker 1: is that your risk of dying into gladiatorial match was
Speaker 1: one in eight because you fought until one guy submitted,
Speaker 1: and then the crowd got to cheer or boo, and
Speaker 1: then the giver of the games gets to decide whether
Speaker 1: or not you live or die. So even if you lose,
Speaker 1: if you are showy enough, if you are brave enough,
Speaker 1: if you put on a good enough show, if you
Speaker 1: win over the crowd, you could lose a fight and
Speaker 1: still survive one in eight.
Speaker 3: That's very often, like way more often than is ever
Speaker 3: present in a movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's gonna say, trade, what do you think the
Speaker 1: death rate is in the film Gladiator from two thousand
Speaker 1: nine nine percent? An individual gladiator probably fought just once
Speaker 1: or twice a year, and their career might not extend
Speaker 1: more than three years. Once or twice a year is crazy.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess if you get injured you know,
Speaker 3: it's probably gonna be like a month or two to
Speaker 3: come back, but it's still like as long as we
Speaker 3: wait to do a UFC fight, Now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a combat's more so. More on the historical gladiators.
Speaker 1: They were fat and deformed and ugly and sex symbols.
Speaker 1: So gladiators got fat on carbs. Their diet was this
Speaker 1: stew of barley and beans, and then they just ate
Speaker 1: more of it than your average joe, like quite literally
Speaker 1: feed them the slop, be them the beans and barley slop.
Speaker 3: They're bean maxing, they're bean maximussing.
Speaker 1: So like soldiers got wheat and less than a gladiator,
Speaker 1: gladiators got barley, more calorically dense, and they got more
Speaker 1: of it. They also drank this weird mix of ash
Speaker 1: dissolved in watered down wine because they thought it would
Speaker 1: strengthen their bones, which is crazy because apparently it did.
Speaker 1: When archaeologists dig up their bones they see like a
Speaker 1: huge surplus and calcium. I want to know how some ancient,
Speaker 1: maybe illiterate Roman doctor was like, oh yeah, let's mix
Speaker 1: this like ash of burned bones into the wine and
Speaker 1: your bones will be That's crazy. I don't know how
Speaker 1: they figured that out. Yeah, they were ugly because they
Speaker 1: had bad teeth from all that bean chewing and all
Speaker 1: those lagoons. This like hold's true for animals too, Like
Speaker 1: carnivores had better teeth than herbivores. They were essentially just
Speaker 1: like swool vegetarians. They had one arm longer than the
Speaker 1: other from carrying like a heavy weapon and training with
Speaker 1: it for so long, a bunch of healed blunt force
Speaker 1: trauma wounds. And the benefit of this carb heavy diet
Speaker 1: is that gladiators would get this thick layer of subcutaneous
Speaker 1: fat that would shield your vital organs, but it would
Speaker 1: let you take flesh wounds that would bleed a lot
Speaker 1: and put on a good show. When you look at
Speaker 1: some of these engravings of gladiators, they are some thick boys. Wow.
Speaker 3: So that gladiator he fights at the end of the
Speaker 3: movie is actually kind of like an accurate depiction of
Speaker 3: what a gladiator might look like. Yeah, so you could
Speaker 3: just take a lot more flesh wounds if you're a
Speaker 3: big guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, truly. It's like the type of athletic they're looking for,
Speaker 1: I think is like an NFL lineman. You need to
Speaker 1: be a big guy who can do short intense bursts
Speaker 1: of speed and violence.
Speaker 3: And take stabs. You can get stabbed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm just saying. They could have cast Russell Crowe.
Speaker 3: Now, they should have put him in gladiator too. He
Speaker 3: would have looked more like a real gladiator than Paul Mezcow.
Speaker 2: As Russell Crowe said, we on hey day, how we dying?
Speaker 1: Now? So like, why do this? What was the purpose
Speaker 1: of gladiatorial shows? The purpose is quite literally said in
Speaker 1: the most famous line of this film, are you not entertained?
Speaker 1: Unlike chariot racing or other ancient games you can think of,
Speaker 1: like the Olympics, gladiatorial shows were not tied to the
Speaker 1: state or any official state religion. They were put on
Speaker 1: by the elite. They are a great way to garner
Speaker 1: goodwill with the plebs. During the Republic, rich aristocrats put
Speaker 1: on private games of their own private money to get
Speaker 1: the good will of the plubs. And then when Rome
Speaker 1: switches to an empire, all the games in Rome itself
Speaker 1: exclusively put on by the emperor and the imperial household.
Speaker 1: They own every single gladiator school in the city of Rome.
Speaker 3: Wow, so the government has a monopoly on gladiator shows.
Speaker 3: They have a monopoly on cheers and pablian acclaim for gladiators.
Speaker 3: It's like a crazy way to like control political support.
Speaker 3: M Like, you know, Mao said political power comes out
Speaker 3: of the barrel of a gun. Yeah, the Roman one
Speaker 3: is like political power comes out of the gladiator school.
Speaker 1: Our blood sport that we put on. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Tacitus I saw once wrote that gladiatorial matches were the
Speaker 3: most common topic of conversation amongst contemporaries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like sports, right. You see it in the wall
Speaker 1: art of Pompeii on the lamps where they decorate the
Speaker 1: lamps with a drawing, Gladiators are the second most common
Speaker 1: thing that they would draw.
Speaker 3: They found it on cups as far as Afghanistan, I believe,
Speaker 3: on like glass cups.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: And this was only one of their sports leagues, right,
Speaker 3: Like they also had cherry racing Lose versus the Yellows.
Speaker 1: Or whatever, like yeah, yeah, yeah, the Green Team. I'm
Speaker 1: a Green Team guy myself.
Speaker 3: Okay, So house is work. Okay, So in the republic
Speaker 3: period from a noble family, and I'm like, you know what,
Speaker 3: I kind of want to get involved in politics, thinking
Speaker 3: about running for office, you know, maybe maybe some lower
Speaker 3: office the idea is like I go to an editor
Speaker 3: and I'm like, here's so together.
Speaker 1: As the person putting on the game.
Speaker 3: Oh, I become the editor. Okay, so I'm both the
Speaker 3: editor and the What is the muneris.
Speaker 1: Munus is the Latin word for gift. Is what they
Speaker 1: call the games that were put on right, because you
Speaker 1: are gifting the games to the people.
Speaker 3: So the modern equivalent is like Kamala Harris is like
Speaker 3: I want to run for president. I'm going to put
Speaker 3: on an NFL game, and I'm going to pay for
Speaker 3: the teams to be there and for the stadium operation
Speaker 3: that day, and I sort of sell like subsidized tickets
Speaker 3: or I give away tickets to be I guess the
Speaker 3: giving away is really the key part there. That's kind
Speaker 3: of how you get the support.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the tickets were free.
Speaker 3: The tickets were free. Oh interesting? Or Kamala is giving
Speaker 3: them away kamal loose. Yeah, okay, So that kind of
Speaker 3: makes sense because I always assumed it was just like
Speaker 3: today's show is sponsored by Gracchus or whatever. It is
Speaker 3: partly that, but then also just like he gets to
Speaker 3: give away the tickets.
Speaker 1: And you're standing in the box, you're the one who's
Speaker 1: deciding who lives or who dies.
Speaker 3: That's an insane political system.
Speaker 1: But okay, that's why we started with forty five minutes
Speaker 1: of history. It's because this shit is interesting.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to be I mentioned a couple of
Speaker 3: fun facts about the Colisseum itself, like as a building,
Speaker 3: I had saw that they used to have these sort
Speaker 3: of wooden structures for watching gladiators fight, but there were
Speaker 3: like massive crowds that caused a collapse of one that
Speaker 3: apparently caused twenty thousand people to die, which was the
Speaker 3: low estimate. Twenty thousand is insane. That's like a third
Speaker 3: of the size of the Colosseum, which convinced the Senate
Speaker 3: to were like, we need a better stadium, but fifty
Speaker 3: thousand is not that different from a stadium of today,
Speaker 3: Like we really haven't increased stadium capacity that much in
Speaker 3: the last two thousand years. And I also did see
Speaker 3: that not only do you like need a ticket to enter,
Speaker 3: and it had tickets, but your ticket had a section,
Speaker 3: row and seat number, which is crazy, Like that still
Speaker 3: exists in the exact same way.
Speaker 1: In a mostly illiterate society too. It's like the other
Speaker 1: crazy thing I'm sure those must have been like pictograms, right,
Speaker 1: or like maybe you could recognize like an I or
Speaker 1: an X or whatever. Maybe it was just Roman numerals, but.
Speaker 3: Right, I'm in seat cow, I'm in seat bowl, you know.
Speaker 3: And they were also programs printed for the day's events
Speaker 3: and breakdowns of the fights. This is such a similar
Speaker 3: experience to how sports spectatorship happens today. I also saw
Speaker 3: that the gladiator season is in the fall and spring
Speaker 3: because the summer was too hot, even with those shaded
Speaker 3: apparatuses that they installed on the roof.
Speaker 1: Nice. Yeah, there's one quick little note, because I think
Speaker 1: it does kind of matter for a film. If you
Speaker 1: become a gladiator, you get something called infamia infamy. You
Speaker 1: are at the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. I mean,
Speaker 1: you are quite literally a slave, but you're selling your
Speaker 1: body for money, So you're up there with pimps or
Speaker 1: down with PAMs and sex workers at all the other
Speaker 1: jobs that involve selling your body. If you end up
Speaker 1: forfeiting some of your rights, you can no longer represent
Speaker 1: yourself or others in court. You can't witness a whale,
Speaker 1: you can't vote, you can't serve in the army. You
Speaker 1: can't act as a magistrate or a juror. You can't
Speaker 1: even go to the fucking theater.
Speaker 3: Really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wow, there's no recourse from arbitrary physical punishment by magistrates.
Speaker 1: And this also applied to gladiator trainers. Lnis Stai interesting, right?
Speaker 1: It is moral delinquency. So in our film, when we
Speaker 1: eventually get to it, when you have this like general
Speaker 1: in the Roman Army become a gladiator and you see
Speaker 1: him all shook up about it, this is like how
Speaker 1: far he has fallen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a weird class idea here where it's like,
Speaker 3: because you are serving someone else, you're low class, like
Speaker 3: you're an entertainer. It's almost not compatible with the way
Speaker 3: that we view class in modern life, where a lot
Speaker 3: of it is driven by like how much money you
Speaker 3: have and like how much capital you own, but.
Speaker 1: Like how much fame you have? Right, the fact that
Speaker 1: you could have money and fame and still be at
Speaker 1: the bottom rung of the social hierarchy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I guess like the closest thing we would
Speaker 3: have would be like a porn star.
Speaker 1: I suppose, And not every emperor liked gladiator shows. The
Speaker 1: real Marcus Aurelius didn't attend them. He tried to regulate them.
Speaker 1: He required these blunt weapons. And he's not the only
Speaker 1: emperor to attempt to regulate this institution. One of the
Speaker 1: funniest things about reading this book is reading about all
Speaker 1: these attempts of the emperors to pass laws or regulate
Speaker 1: but in a pre modern state, before advanced bureaucracies, they
Speaker 1: have like very little ability to enforce their will. So
Speaker 1: we see in thirty eight PCE a laws passed prohibiting
Speaker 1: any senator or their sons from appearing as gladiators. Sixteen
Speaker 1: years later in twenty two BCE, Augustus has to restate
Speaker 1: the law because I guess it didn't stick, and even
Speaker 1: extends it to the next lower order, the equestrians, just
Speaker 1: below senators. But people kept ignoring the law, so Tiberius,
Speaker 1: the next emper, he decrees exile for senators and equestrians
Speaker 1: who deliberately acquired Infamia, and he extends the band even
Speaker 1: further to the great grandchildren of senators. The punishment for
Speaker 1: doing this now was the prohibition of proper burial, which
Speaker 1: means that your soul can't go to the afterlife. Wow,
Speaker 1: it's Augustus, Tiberius, and then thirty eight PCE. I don't
Speaker 1: know who passed that law because before Augustus but after
Speaker 1: the death of Caesar. But like that is two and
Speaker 1: a half successive emperors who are trying to regulate this thing,
Speaker 1: and they can't keep these affluent motherfuckers from death driving
Speaker 1: their way into the arena.
Speaker 3: I had a couple miscellaneous notes on slaves that didn't
Speaker 3: really fit anywhere else, but it was in that book
Speaker 3: that I thought were really interesting. Harry Sidebottom talks about
Speaker 3: just how alien people were in the sense of like
Speaker 3: how they treated sex and their slaves. Where there are
Speaker 3: frescoes apparently that people would have in their own homes
Speaker 3: in like rooms that other people would see of like
Speaker 3: them having sex with their wife, And there's one of
Speaker 3: like a guy and his wife and the wife is
Speaker 3: doing reverse cowgirl and she's staring in the eyes of
Speaker 3: a slave while the slave is like about to offer
Speaker 3: some kind of drink right where it's like either they
Speaker 3: just weren't shy about sex and like didn't care if
Speaker 3: their friends saw a painting of them doing it, or
Speaker 3: they just thought so little of slaves that to them
Speaker 3: it was like I can't be embarrassed over a slave
Speaker 3: seeing me have sex. That would be like being embarrassed
Speaker 3: because the dog saw me having sex or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no such thing as privacy in the aged world.
Speaker 3: We talked about this with Mike Duncan. Remember you just
Speaker 3: have people in your room all the time. Yeah, all right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's been a while now, so let's let's get into
Speaker 3: the movie. Damn, I love when we shoehorn in your
Speaker 3: classics background into an episode. All right, let's talk about
Speaker 3: our characters.
Speaker 1: Of the two thousand film Gladiator, to remind you in
Speaker 1: case you for god right, we.
Speaker 3: Got Maximus gay Sexicus. Sorry, Maximus Decimus Meridius. This is
Speaker 3: a real salt of the earth guy right here, you know.
Speaker 1: Oh, tell me about it. He can't stop thinking about
Speaker 1: touching wheat.
Speaker 3: That it's all he wants. He's humble, you know, he
Speaker 3: yearns for a Bucolic life. He's put in his time
Speaker 3: in the Roman Army as an incredible general, but not
Speaker 3: for personal empowerment or riches or fame. It's just's he's
Speaker 3: a real lunch pale general.
Speaker 1: He's never even been to Rome, said the first. He's
Speaker 1: from Spain, your favorite adjective for a flat character. He
Speaker 1: is stoic, unflappable. Right. The only time we see him
Speaker 1: lose his cool is the are you not entertained? Line?
Speaker 1: That's like the most emotion we're going to see or
Speaker 1: the most agitation we're going to see him show.
Speaker 3: And yet he's reluctant. He doesn't want to even be
Speaker 3: the Emperor when he's like offered the role the leader
Speaker 3: of Rome. Unless I can touch wheat and throw a
Speaker 3: ball my son, I don't want it.
Speaker 1: Pilum, I believe it's the lad word or pila.
Speaker 3: Excuse me, Yeah, unless I can throw a pila with
Speaker 3: my son. And he doesn't want to fight in the
Speaker 3: Gladia air pits. He always has to be cajoled into it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: He's not a guy who's like necessarily violent by nature.
Speaker 1: This is just a job clocks in, blocks out. The
Speaker 1: only other character with Eddie depth is the Emperor, Comedis
Speaker 1: played by Joaquin Phoenix. He is indulgent, he is sadistic,
Speaker 1: he is narcissistic, and he's got major daddy issues.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's unstable. He craves approval from his father. He's
Speaker 3: power hungry.
Speaker 1: He is incestuously infatuated with his sister.
Speaker 3: He's the opposite of Maximus Decimus. Basically, I just.
Speaker 1: Want to say, in real history, Comedist was the gladiator
Speaker 1: of the title. He clocked in so much time. Like
Speaker 1: my hot take is that the actual gladiat commonists in history.
Speaker 3: He killed like I think a hundred lions in the
Speaker 3: coliseum with one shot a piece apparently. Yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 3: put on a lot of games for himself. But we'll
Speaker 3: talk more about this later. Yeah, a quick note on
Speaker 3: these actors. By the way, Russell Crowe, this made him
Speaker 3: into the A lister that we've had ever since. But
Speaker 3: like he had only done La Confidential and Michael Mahns
Speaker 3: the Insider at this point, and likewise, you know, the
Speaker 3: studio actually wanted Jude Law to play commedists, but Scott
Speaker 3: insisted on Joaquin Phoenix, who had this kind of jokerfied
Speaker 3: twinkle in his eye.
Speaker 1: I guess it's true now he crushes in the role.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm. Okay, let's get into the plot of Gladier Tour.
Speaker 3: They're doing the Roman woman singing style thing like from
Speaker 3: Rome Total War. There's a battle in Germany. They're always
Speaker 3: trying to conquer the frontier, right. I think as you
Speaker 3: put it, didn't you know, not always looking to settle
Speaker 3: these lands, but important to have like a buffer. Yes,
Speaker 3: Germany's always bubbling over with these insane giant blonde hair people.
Speaker 3: And I love that this movie opens with like a
Speaker 3: long battle scene because this is coming out in the
Speaker 3: shadow of saving Private Ryan, and you really get the
Speaker 3: sense that this is like the kind of beat that
Speaker 3: Ridley Scott is trying to recreate.
Speaker 1: Here, m m.
Speaker 3: This is a Beaches of Normandy ass battle.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We get to see every different phase, every different
Speaker 1: possible combination of ancient warfare. We got the archers and
Speaker 1: the arrows and the fire arrows. We got the heavy
Speaker 1: infantry who are going to do the Testudo formation to
Speaker 1: block the arrows. We get the cavalry charge, we get
Speaker 1: the Ballistai siege equipment, you get it all. It is
Speaker 1: a maximalist movie, no pun intended.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you see the kind of contrast between the
Speaker 3: primitive passion of the Barbarian Germans versus the mechanic discipline
Speaker 3: of the Roman army.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So yeah, Maximus wins the day committists. You know, he
Speaker 3: arrives late with his sister and he's exciited, He tells
Speaker 3: his sister, Oh, you know, actually father is about to
Speaker 3: announce me his successor today. Ben. Yeah, you mentioned that
Speaker 3: the Roman emperor would have actually been with the army,
Speaker 3: because it's a good way to make sure that they
Speaker 3: don't like mutiny. Yep.
Speaker 1: And if like most of your authority comes from the army,
Speaker 1: certainly by like the high and later Empire, the Roman
Speaker 1: emperors are spending very little time in Rome. They're spending
Speaker 1: a lot of their time with the army, traveling to
Speaker 1: the various frontiers. They're on the road. They're road dogs.
Speaker 3: And right away you're seeing conversations between commedists and Maximus,
Speaker 3: where commtist is like who you got, well, you know,
Speaker 3: who do you support? Thro the Emperor of the Senate?
Speaker 3: You know, there's two types of guys, Like you're a
Speaker 3: republican or democrat, you support the Emperor of the Senate?
Speaker 3: Not a subtle film and communist. He's more of an
Speaker 3: emperor guy. He tells Maximus the Senate. You know, they'll
Speaker 3: pour honeyed potion in your ear about how great the
Speaker 3: Senate is.
Speaker 1: And he just tries to dodge a question. Like in
Speaker 1: the same way, it's like, are you a boobs or
Speaker 1: ask guy like, I'm a personality guy. It's like, are
Speaker 1: you a senate or an? He's like, I'm a Rome guy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, Marcus Aurelius, he's old as hell. He's in a
Speaker 3: tent and he's he's like, damn, what do we here for?
Speaker 3: He's getting real philosophical and.
Speaker 1: What Jordeo says, he's old as hell. The actor is
Speaker 1: like two years away from dy. It's the first Dumbledore
Speaker 1: who is playing birth.
Speaker 3: And he's saying stuff like, what kind of emperor will
Speaker 3: I be known as? Why be known as a philosopher?
Speaker 3: A little bit of that winking you know here? Everybody
Speaker 3: you know is familiar, I'm sure with Marcus Aurelius's meditations, And.
Speaker 1: I gotta jump in for just a quick second here.
Speaker 1: I did an undergrading classics, that I did a master's,
Speaker 1: that I did a PhD. I spent thirteen years of
Speaker 1: my life studying this stuff. I never once was assigned
Speaker 1: Marcus Aurelius's medications in all of that time, because it's
Speaker 1: the stoic shower thoughts of a kind of dumb guy.
Speaker 1: Like one of the quotes, one of his deep philosophical
Speaker 1: quotes is something along the lines of you spend enough
Speaker 1: time trying to define what a good man is. Just
Speaker 1: be one, Just do it man. Yeah, there's a reason
Speaker 1: that this particular brand of stoic philosophy was picked up
Speaker 1: by the self help online Stoic Bros. There was so
Speaker 1: much more to stoicism than the self help books.
Speaker 3: Yeah, truly. Like the Facebook posting Emperor, you know some
Speaker 3: of these quotes. He's posting these quotes with like a
Speaker 3: picture of a peaky blinders guy with a cigar in
Speaker 3: his mouth. You know, these were from his diary. We
Speaker 3: don't know if this was actually meant to be published, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it just like appeared in like nine hundred some like
Speaker 3: Monk had It was like, dude, this shit fucking goes hard.
Speaker 1: The happiness of your life depends on the quality of
Speaker 1: your thoughts. Live, laugh, love. When you rise in the morning,
Speaker 1: think about what a privilege is to be alive, to think,
Speaker 1: to enjoy, to love. The soul becomes dyed with the
Speaker 1: color of its thoughts. It is not death that a
Speaker 1: man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
Speaker 1: Y oh, hell yeah, bro Okay, back to the movie.
Speaker 3: So Marcus Relius is like, what are we doing? Like,
Speaker 3: why why are we killing all these Germans? I love
Speaker 3: the Maximus is almost like a little insulted by this
Speaker 3: introspection where he's like, well, we should have figured that
Speaker 3: out before we came here, you know, and all these
Speaker 3: people died, and so Marcus Relius he's like, what if
Speaker 3: there's an idea of Rome? One of many times where
Speaker 3: the phrase idea of Rome is set out loud and
Speaker 3: you're just supposed to know what it means. It's never
Speaker 3: elaborated on ever.
Speaker 1: It's because Rome is whatever it means to you, Jordano
Speaker 1: in the year two thousand.
Speaker 3: Your own personal Roman Empire. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the weakest parts of this movie definitely is
Speaker 3: this just like shoehorned in Empire senate thing. They don't
Speaker 3: even know what they're doing. What do you mean the
Speaker 3: idea of Rome, that's what it's all about. You care
Speaker 3: to flesh that out a little bit.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that like slaughter you just did on
Speaker 1: the Frontier, that's the idea.
Speaker 3: Of Rome, right, Yes, that's true.
Speaker 1: Well you just did it, my man.
Speaker 3: But Marcus really is he's like, you know what our
Speaker 3: idea of Rome levels are historically low. Right now, we
Speaker 3: need to get our idea of Rome levels back up
Speaker 3: to the top by going back to the Senate. The
Speaker 3: classic probably like Boomer thing. Honestly, they always look back
Speaker 3: to the greatest generation. They were doing that a lot
Speaker 3: right now, Saving Private Ryan was all about that.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: We are a decade in society that has forgotten where
Speaker 3: we came from. Right, we need to return, return, return, Right,
Speaker 3: That's what this conversation is about. And so the emperor
Speaker 3: he goes to his son and he's like, listen, I
Speaker 3: know you always wanted to be emperor, but we need
Speaker 3: to return or whatever, and commedists. He doesn't take this well.
Speaker 3: He kills his foster.
Speaker 1: He literally hugs him to death. Yeah. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: nice little dialogue where comedist is like the crying woe
Speaker 1: Jack what he hears that he's not going to be emperor.
Speaker 1: And he has a line where he says, he wrote
Speaker 1: to me what the virtues are again, like winking at
Speaker 1: the audience about the four Stoic virtues, And then it
Speaker 1: gets the four Stoic virtues wrong, which is very funny.
Speaker 1: He says, none of your virtues are mine. Temperance, wisdom, justice,
Speaker 1: Fortitude says, but I got my own virtues. You know,
Speaker 1: I got ambition, and I got courage. And basically he
Speaker 1: goes fishing for compliments and he catches a boot when
Speaker 1: Marcus Areli says, your failures as a son are my
Speaker 1: failures as a father?
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 1: Then Communists hugs his father to death.
Speaker 3: Now Commonists has Maximus. He hasn't taken out to be killed,
Speaker 3: right because even though Maximus has tried to decline the offer,
Speaker 3: all he wants to do is go back to his
Speaker 3: farm in Spain, but his duty keeps him from doing so.
Speaker 3: He loves thinking about this farm. He wants to go
Speaker 3: touch the wheat.
Speaker 1: They announced that the emperor is dead. Maximus is getting
Speaker 1: ready to take power, but look at this, he's arrested.
Speaker 1: Guards take him out back to be killed, but there's
Speaker 1: yet another scene. Maximus, even with his hands tied overpowers
Speaker 1: these guys, escapes and then rides directly from the Rhyane River,
Speaker 1: presumably on the border between France and Germany, all the
Speaker 1: way to Spain to the Sepia toned wheat fields. He
Speaker 1: just wants to go out and touch wheat so bad,
Speaker 1: but his family has been killed. He is too late.
Speaker 1: They have been like burned and hanged and crucified in
Speaker 1: all those nasty Roman death stuff. He's on the ground
Speaker 1: in Spain where he's picked up by some slavers of
Speaker 1: some kind and brought to Algeria.
Speaker 3: And this place is very Arabian coded. They got the
Speaker 3: turbans on. They're negotiating by squeezing each other's balls. You know.
Speaker 3: We meet Proximo, Maximus's trainer throughout the movie, played by
Speaker 3: some British actor apparently like a legendary drunk actor. He
Speaker 3: actually died during the filming of the movie because he
Speaker 3: got in a drinking contest with some British sailors on Malta.
Speaker 1: That's so sick. Yeah, Oliver Reed is the guy. Oliver Reed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, go look up like the number of drinks he
Speaker 3: had before he had a heart attack and died. Well,
Speaker 3: he specifically had like a million drinks drink against these
Speaker 3: young sailors and then arm wrestled them, apparently beat three
Speaker 3: of them, and then like died of a heart attack.
Speaker 3: I think it's the arm wrestling, like it's a dangerous
Speaker 3: port that needs to be regulated. It's human cockfighting, is
Speaker 3: what it is. So yeah, he's bought and sold as
Speaker 3: a gladiator. I think they see that he's a former soldier.
Speaker 3: He makes friends with a Nubian gladiator from a salt
Speaker 3: mine and carthage and they trained together. Meanwhile, back in Rome, commodists,
Speaker 3: he gets a famous Roman procession. The crowd they don't
Speaker 3: love him though, they call him the usurper. Ben you
Speaker 3: said that this probably not how regular people would have
Speaker 3: seen an emperor like commodists.
Speaker 1: Certainly not right at the beginning of the rain. Usually
Speaker 1: I think they would take pretty kindly to a new emperor.
Speaker 3: But also like the things that he likes is like
Speaker 3: he likes throwing games, you know, he likes cross dressing
Speaker 3: or whatever, like yep, And he's saying stuff like the
Speaker 3: Senate doesn't understand the needs of the people. Actually, I
Speaker 3: guess not far off with that kind of right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One, he wants to get rid of the Senate.
Speaker 1: Yeah again, something no ever ever thought of doing. Nobody
Speaker 1: ever thought of abolishing the Senate entirely, you need it
Speaker 1: to manage this fucking thing. But we need to heighten
Speaker 1: this conflict. He's going to get rid of the checks
Speaker 1: and balances Jordano.
Speaker 3: Right, They want to project like modern American sensibilities onto
Speaker 3: the setting, right, So this is what they're projecting into
Speaker 3: this situation. Oh, they're getting rid of the institutions, the
Speaker 3: erosion of institutions. And he declares one hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: days of games. Damn, that's a hell of a gladiator season.
Speaker 1: I don't know if comedists put up these numbers, but
Speaker 1: I know that Trajan's games were over one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty days. This is not absurd.
Speaker 3: I think At one point the senators want him to
Speaker 3: provide sewers for the city's Greek district where the plague
Speaker 3: is raging, but commitist he says, no, we need to
Speaker 3: focus on the games. He's ignoring infrastructure projects in favor
Speaker 3: of bread and circuses, or just the circuses.
Speaker 1: Well, we see them throw bread at some point.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 1: We flash back to Algeria and Maximus, after initially refusing
Speaker 1: to train, he fights in the arena just like out
Speaker 1: of necessity because he's fighting for his life. So he's
Speaker 1: won the respect of the other slave gladiators. They call
Speaker 1: him the Spaniard and it's in this fight, the first
Speaker 1: big arena fight that we see, where he kills all
Speaker 1: the other combatants. I believe this is the fight where
Speaker 1: he's chained to another gladiator, which is a Ridley Scott
Speaker 1: invention to my knowledge. He kills all the guys, throws
Speaker 1: the sword at the editor, at the guy putting on
Speaker 1: the games, and shouts the iconic line are you not entertained?
Speaker 1: Which is so funny. This line is meant to be
Speaker 1: critical of the blood sport of the human cockfighting. He
Speaker 1: has just ended all these lives. He's meant to be
Speaker 1: dripping with disdain when he says are you not entertained?
Speaker 1: At this? And it's become the iconic meme line of
Speaker 1: the movie that we all.
Speaker 3: Said, sincerely, yeah, true, Yeah. We have more on this later.
Speaker 1: So the guy running his little Ludus, his little gladiator school,
Speaker 1: is a former gladiator Proximo. He wants to take Maximus
Speaker 1: to Rome to fight in front of the Emperor in
Speaker 1: the Colisseum. And the thing, the little carrot that he
Speaker 1: dangles in front of him is that if you get
Speaker 1: good enough in Rome you could win your freedom. They
Speaker 1: give you the little wooden sword that means that you're free.
Speaker 3: So they get to Rome. It's cgi, but in two
Speaker 3: thousand it actually doesn't look that bad for something made
Speaker 3: in two thousand and you know he gets the rome
Speaker 3: prostitutes are throwing themselves at him. You know they got
Speaker 3: this part right. I guess about being a gladiator. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: Communists is coming onto his sister. He's a real freak guy.
Speaker 3: He's bad, he's into incests, and we get a little
Speaker 3: bit of like the showmanship of the Roman colisseum, right,
Speaker 3: they kind of play it up to be like, wwe
Speaker 3: like a little bit. They got the announcer, they're showing
Speaker 3: you how they're sort of like remaking historical battles for
Speaker 3: the crowd, right again, like part of that reinforcing of empire,
Speaker 3: Like would you love to see battles that we've won
Speaker 3: in the past against people dressed like the people we killed?
Speaker 1: And this is true. The Romans did do this reenact
Speaker 1: historical battles. The one thing that they get wrong. The
Speaker 1: Romans never ever reenacted a battle that Romans fought in
Speaker 1: because they didn't want what happened in this movie to
Speaker 1: happen where the Romans lose. They would do historical battles
Speaker 1: like the Persians versus the Athenians at Salamis, and if
Speaker 1: the Persians actually won who cares. Rome runs anything, everything matter.
Speaker 1: Like the message you're saying is like, we run the
Speaker 1: whole world, We control geography, We kind of controlled time
Speaker 1: because we're putting on these historic battles and actually it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter, you're all Roman. Fuck you.
Speaker 3: So Maximus is put in the middle of a chariot battle,
Speaker 3: and you know, he coaches people into beating the chariots.
Speaker 3: They're underdogs, and they win. They flip them over like
Speaker 3: they're in a car chase. There's a repeating crossbow in
Speaker 3: this scene. Even lady gladiators, which there apparently there were
Speaker 3: occasionally some, Yeah.
Speaker 1: There were, we have evidence for them, but it was
Speaker 1: extremely uncommon.
Speaker 3: Like a side show. They'd fight dwarves and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well dwarves would fight dwarfs, the women would fight women, but.
Speaker 3: I've heard women would fight dwarfs sometimes, like that's the
Speaker 3: side show part of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And also was there to be like titill eating,
Speaker 1: like in the same way that the women of the
Speaker 1: wwe are sexy babs fight each other, like that's part
Speaker 1: of the appeal. They also would dress them up like
Speaker 1: amazons from myths. So once again, Rum controls time and
Speaker 1: geography and space and everything. It is all encompassing, It
Speaker 1: is everything.
Speaker 3: So because Maximus is one, the Emperor goes into the
Speaker 3: middle of the arena, but he can't kill him. They
Speaker 3: can't kill each other. You know, Communists can't kill Maximus
Speaker 3: because he's in front of the crowd who loves him,
Speaker 3: who loves Maximus, And Maximus can't kill communists because you
Speaker 3: know there's a kid there who would be unsightly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the nephew. Commonist's nephew, is there. The holy
Speaker 1: bond between uncle and nephew must be respected. This is
Speaker 1: also where we get the second most famous line of
Speaker 1: the film.
Speaker 2: My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius. I'm Mondo of the
Speaker 2: Armies of the North, general with the Felix Legions, loyal
Speaker 2: servant to the true Emperor Marcus Aurelius, father to a
Speaker 2: murdered son, husband to a modered wife, and I will
Speaker 2: have my vengeance in this life for the next.
Speaker 3: So, I mean, the rest of this movie can drag
Speaker 3: a little bit. First sixty percent is much better than
Speaker 3: the last bit. But this is where we start to
Speaker 3: get a little bit of intrigue, where they're going to
Speaker 3: depose comedists and restore the Senate. The stuff that doesn't
Speaker 3: really work as well is just like the kind of
Speaker 3: Bearer Roman stuff.
Speaker 1: The mindless show of blood Sport. Yes, there's another one
Speaker 1: where we get the tigers.
Speaker 3: In it, which is pretty sick, right, something true to life.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of the shows in the coliseum
Speaker 3: were hunts, animal hunts, and so they've got these tigers,
Speaker 3: I don't know from India, I guess.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, this is their way of fixing the match.
Speaker 1: So like the intrigue is happening behind the scenes, commedist
Speaker 1: still wants to kill Maximus, so they get a big guy.
Speaker 1: This is where they get the guy with the historically
Speaker 1: accurate gladiator body. He says, don't worry, it's been arranged.
Speaker 3: He's undefeated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in like a doctor Evil style thing, where like,
Speaker 1: as these two guys are fighting, there's also going to
Speaker 1: be four tigers on chains who are going to maul them.
Speaker 1: And this is still fucking stupid because the tigers have
Speaker 1: just as much of an opportunity to get your guy
Speaker 1: as they do the guy you tried to kill.
Speaker 3: But yeah, Maximus kills the undefeated champion as well as
Speaker 3: the tigers. This was actually originally supposed to be a
Speaker 3: fight between Maximus and his handler Proximo, I believe, but
Speaker 3: because like I said, Proximo died, they had to change
Speaker 3: this to some champion. I watched the DVD featurettes of
Speaker 3: Like The Making of and Russell Crow is hamming it
Speaker 3: up so much in those. He's very funny. When they're
Speaker 3: shooting the scene with the tigers, he's doing like a
Speaker 3: stever Win impression to the camera, which isn't too hard
Speaker 3: for him considering he's Australia. And yeah, rest of the movie,
Speaker 3: Communist decides he's he's gonna kill Maximus himself in the arena,
Speaker 3: but stab him first to give him this like unfair advantage, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, and Commedists also discovers the Senate's plan to
Speaker 3: restore the Republic by sessing it out through his nephew
Speaker 3: and then holding his nephew hostage. And so even though
Speaker 3: Maximus is stabbed, he sort of uses all of his
Speaker 3: remaining will to kill Comedists in the arena. So in
Speaker 3: real life, Commedist was killed by a wrestler. He was
Speaker 3: also emperor for fifteen years, yes, first, so a little
Speaker 3: bit of a departure from reality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he was just like strangled in the bathroom,
Speaker 1: basically on his way to the Coliseo. It's such a shame.
Speaker 1: Like commedists, one of the things that makes him so
Speaker 1: interesting in so wacky is that he spent so much
Speaker 1: time in the arena. He was the gladiator Emperor. That
Speaker 1: was the defining trait of his reign. He couldn't stop
Speaker 1: going in there. And I'm like, I'm sure the numbers
Speaker 1: are exaggerated, and I'm sure the matches were rigged in
Speaker 1: fake and whatever, But isn't that also kind of interesting?
Speaker 1: The autocrat playing rig matches, you know, Kim Jong wun
Speaker 1: dunking a basketball or whatever. Isn't that kind of fun
Speaker 1: and wacky? Wish I could have seen more commedist gladiatoring.
Speaker 3: I wanted to quickly read Roger Ebert's review because I
Speaker 3: thought it was really funny. He did not like the movie,
Speaker 3: gave it two out of four stars. He says that
Speaker 3: the film just looked bad. It was too gray, all
Speaker 3: fuzzy and indistinct. Its colors are quote mud tones at
Speaker 3: the drab end of the palette. The characters bring no cheer.
Speaker 3: They're bitter, vengeful, depressed. He doesn't like these kinds of characters.
Speaker 3: By the end of this long film, I would have
Speaker 3: traded any given gladiatorial victory for just one shot of
Speaker 3: blue skies. Damn, I love this quote. The same story
Speaker 3: could have had rousing entertainment. I've just revisited The Wonderful
Speaker 3: Raiders of the Lost Art, which is just as dim
Speaker 3: witted but twelve times more fun. But Gladiator lacks joy.
Speaker 3: It employs depression as a substitute for personality and believes
Speaker 3: that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we
Speaker 3: won't notice how dull they are. So yeah, he wants
Speaker 3: them to be a little cheerier, a little more energetic.
Speaker 3: All the stoicism.
Speaker 1: I mean, the games were meant to be fun, I suppose,
Speaker 1: but I think it's hard for us as modern people
Speaker 1: to divorce the blood sport aspect.
Speaker 3: He also didn't like the WWE type stuff, he complains,
Speaker 3: and announcer literally addresses the crowd in these words, Caesar
Speaker 3: is pleased to bring you the only undefeated champion, And
Speaker 3: so yeah, he wasn't a big fan of that kind
Speaker 3: of modernization, and he had a lot of pedans corner
Speaker 3: issues with the movie. He says, when Maximus wins his
Speaker 3: first big fight. It's up to commonists to decide whether
Speaker 3: he will live or die. Live live, the fans chant,
Speaker 3: and commonists, bound to their will signals with a thumbs up.
Speaker 3: This demonstrates that Commonist was not paying attention in Caesar's school,
Speaker 3: since the practice of the coliseum at the time was
Speaker 3: to close the thumb in the fists to signal life
Speaker 3: and extend the thumb meant death. Luckily, no one else
Speaker 3: in the coliseum knows this either.
Speaker 1: I don't even think he's right on that, Like, nobody
Speaker 1: is sure what the direction of the thumb is because
Speaker 1: it just says to extend. In the book that I
Speaker 1: just read that came out last year and I finished today,
Speaker 1: there's no consistency. No one's absolutely certain. You can't be
Speaker 1: a pedant about the thumbs up the come down.
Speaker 3: Just crazy that he devoted that many words to the
Speaker 3: thumbs up or thumbs down historical inaccuracy when not one
Speaker 3: word is mentioned about the entire plot, which is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, invented whole cloth. There was no Maximus Meridius Decimus
Speaker 1: or whatever. It's like.
Speaker 3: Smells so highly of like a guy who knows one
Speaker 3: thing about ancient Rome and is like angry like trying
Speaker 3: to brag about it and apparently not even true to
Speaker 3: your point. Yeah, not a big fan. Soyway, let's talk
Speaker 3: about our themes. So, like we said, like we've been saying,
Speaker 3: a major theme of this movie is the decline of empire,
Speaker 3: specifically around cultural decay, and so this is wishcasting for
Speaker 3: an American empire that's about to enter a decline in
Speaker 3: the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: I think it's really such a shame that this movie
Speaker 1: isn't smarter, Like you could make a really interesting critique
Speaker 1: of American empire that's grounded in the Romans, because you know,
Speaker 1: the Romans are using foreign wars to acquire thousands of
Speaker 1: human beings as chattel slim and then throw them into
Speaker 1: a battle royale meat grinder for the entertainment of their
Speaker 1: poor and illiterate working classes, to whom we see them
Speaker 1: quite literally toss bread at the circus, and our hero,
Speaker 1: who serve this system with duty and honor, is betrayed
Speaker 1: by it. Right, This could be a great way of saying, like,
Speaker 1: you think the empire is good, but look at it
Speaker 1: with clear eyes for just a second. It could be
Speaker 1: a fiery fucking political statement if the film were better
Speaker 1: and smarter, but instead we get multiple characters having these
Speaker 1: circuitous fucking dialogues that goes something like this, what was
Speaker 1: the war for for Rome? What is Rome? Rome is
Speaker 1: an idea? Cool dude, very anti imperialist or maybe pro imperialists?
Speaker 1: Is the idea of Rome? Good?
Speaker 3: Unclear?
Speaker 1: Rome is a dream, It's a light, It's a fragile,
Speaker 1: little secret. But what are its qualities? Spoiler alert? Rome's America.
Speaker 1: They don't are particulated because they want you to think
Speaker 1: Rome is America. To the extent there's any kind of
Speaker 1: political message of this film, it seems to be number one,
Speaker 1: autocracy is bad, never mind that most of Rome's territorial
Speaker 1: expansion came during its republican quote unquote democratic phase. And
Speaker 1: two blood Sport is bad kind of but also it's
Speaker 1: cool and interesting and we watch it for money. Yeah.
Speaker 3: There's also some like meritocracy versus nepotism tied in this,
Speaker 3: like decline idea. I mean, one of the primary differences
Speaker 3: between the Empire and republic seems to just be like
Speaker 3: how we decide who the leader is. So you mentioned
Speaker 3: the High Empire is basically like until the end of
Speaker 3: it is the Flavian dynasty.
Speaker 1: Commodists is like the end of the High Empire. The
Speaker 1: five emperors leading up to Commtists are called the five
Speaker 1: Good Emperors, called the Antonine dynasty. I think it is
Speaker 1: hyphenated sometimes, but these are the five that Edward Gibbon
Speaker 1: called the five good emperors because they figured out the
Speaker 1: problem with succession. The Julio Claudians and the Flavians, they
Speaker 1: were just choosing their oldest son or whatever, or their
Speaker 1: son in law. They were doing that monarchy shit, and
Speaker 1: they ended up with some real duds in there. You know,
Speaker 1: your Caligula's, your Neros, your dimiticions, you're.
Speaker 3: Bad, okay.
Speaker 1: But these five guys, like Trajan, Hadrian, Nerva, Marcus Aurelius, whatever,
Speaker 1: they figured out that the smooth out the succession. You
Speaker 1: choose someone who's not a blood relative and you adopt
Speaker 1: them in your will posthumously, and like the succession is
Speaker 1: a lot cleaner. And then Marcus Aurelius breaks the cycle
Speaker 1: with comedists, and then he dies and there's a big
Speaker 1: as civil war.
Speaker 3: I see the movie's concern. I think is one of
Speaker 3: the forms of decline we're seeing is a more like
Speaker 3: inherited nepotistic society. One of the things I think that
Speaker 3: people sort of like held up about the Republic was
Speaker 3: at least it was kind of meritocratic, right, like whatever
Speaker 3: senator was power hungry enough to like grab the console
Speaker 3: ship would lead things, whereas like sometimes you end up
Speaker 3: with commedists just because he's like the son of the
Speaker 3: famous philosopher king and but he knows he's insane. Mm hm.
Speaker 3: He's a targarian style leader truly, which probably wasn't happening
Speaker 3: as much in the Republic period.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, next big theme that we got is I
Speaker 1: called it duty, honor, patriotism Rome. It's all kind of
Speaker 1: a fucking soup in there, right, Like our hero Marcus
Speaker 1: Meridius Decimus whatever, he's literally got the SBQR tattooed on
Speaker 1: his fucking bicep, and the ideas of patriotism would be
Speaker 1: so foreign to a Roman soldier. Hard to do this
Speaker 1: counting precisely, but maybe between a half to two thirds
Speaker 1: of Roman emperors were killed by members of the Roman military.
Speaker 1: They're putting up fucking numbers, let me tell you. And
Speaker 1: the closest this film gets to capturing the vibe of
Speaker 1: a Roman soldier is as they are doing this intrigue.
Speaker 1: In plot, Maximus is going from the coliseum in Chains
Speaker 1: back to his gladiator school and he's approached by one
Speaker 1: of his old Roman soldiers, and one of his subordinates
Speaker 1: finds him in Rome and says his old truths are
Speaker 1: staying in Ostia. That's Rome's port, and they are ready
Speaker 1: to overthrow the state at a moment's notice. They're loyal
Speaker 1: to him, not to Rome. And you know Maximus as
Speaker 1: this duty bound, honor bound guy. He has this character
Speaker 1: arc where he's a loyal servant of Rome who is
Speaker 1: betrayed and ends up as a slave at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the social hierarchy, and he hates it so much
Speaker 1: that he's cutting off his tattoo. Then he becomes a
Speaker 1: co conspirator in a coup to reinstall the republic. Right,
Speaker 1: he goes from like worshiping Rome to hating Rome to
Speaker 1: trying to save Rome. Put it all on the line
Speaker 1: for it, right, He's dedicated to this thing flawed warts
Speaker 1: and all.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about hedonism, sexless hedonism.
Speaker 1: How the fuck are you going to make a movie
Speaker 1: about ancient Rome? Turn out so sexless? HBO's Rome. We
Speaker 1: actually criticized it a little bit for being like so gratuitous.
Speaker 1: I think we were mostly saying they put sexual violence
Speaker 1: in theirs at some points where they didn't always need it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, ancient Rome is known for being lascivious and scandalizing.
Speaker 1: The gladiators were sex symbols. There's ancient graffiti that we
Speaker 1: have in POMPEII where the gladiators are boasting of their
Speaker 1: sexual conquest. There's misogynistic satires talking about whys running off
Speaker 1: with gladiators. Almost none of this makes it into the film.
Speaker 1: Maximus doesn't even have sex in the film. And part
Speaker 1: of what makes a bad emperor bad is their perversion
Speaker 1: and decadence and hedonism. That's all across the Roman sources.
Speaker 1: And you can quibble about the accuracy because all of
Speaker 1: our written sources were written by the senatorial elites who
Speaker 1: hated the emperors, and they made all the same types
Speaker 1: of accusation. But ancient Romans thought that their emperors were
Speaker 1: sex criminals. That would make Jeffrey Epstein blush. Okay, where
Speaker 1: is this shit communist's sister? Infatuation? That softcore Game of
Speaker 1: Thrones has more? And I want to tell you a
Speaker 1: little story about the Caligula biopic that came out Caligula, Emperor,
Speaker 1: who is said to have had sex with all three
Speaker 1: of his biological sisters in nineteen seventy nine. They wanted
Speaker 1: to make a sword and sandal film about the Emperor Caligula.
Speaker 1: Peep these stats, okay? Screen written by Gore Vidal, one
Speaker 1: of twentieth century America's greatest public intellectuals, stars Malcolm McDowell,
Speaker 1: Dame Helen Mirin Academy Award winner, Peter O'Toole Academy Award
Speaker 1: Lifetime winner. Directed by this avant garde Italian filmmaker named
Speaker 1: Tinto brass And this movie should have been excellent. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the production company ran out of money and was bailed
Speaker 1: out by Penthouse, who inserted a bunch of hardcore pornography
Speaker 1: into the film. And that is closer to the spirit
Speaker 1: of what we need for a mad Emperor style sword
Speaker 1: and sandal film. Like Jordano, you mentioned the Targierians, right,
Speaker 1: George R. Martin is cribbing all this shit from the
Speaker 1: lives of the Roman emperors as told by Suetonius or
Speaker 1: Tacitus or these other guys.
Speaker 3: Gotcha A theme I found really interesting in this movie
Speaker 3: is just like our relationship to violence as entertainment. You know,
Speaker 3: the most famous line from this movie, are you not entertained?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: We mentioned that he's being sarcastic. He's mocking the crowd
Speaker 3: for finding this entertaining to a certain extent. He's also
Speaker 3: breaking the fourth wall here, because we have this very
Speaker 3: schizophrenic nature in the way that we view violence, where
Speaker 3: it's like we all think it's bad, and we're all
Speaker 3: very entertained by watching it. And so there's like this
Speaker 3: hypocrisy they're playing with, right, if it's fictionalized, we want
Speaker 3: to see it, even if in real life we would
Speaker 3: frown upon it. And so like everybody that Maximus kills
Speaker 3: other than like comtists.
Speaker 1: Is a slave.
Speaker 3: Maximus spends this entire movie killing slaves, and we're like, yay,
Speaker 3: it was rewinded. I want to see that again. People
Speaker 3: who are forced to fight, So we constantly have to
Speaker 3: put these reinforcements in both movies, In this one and
Speaker 3: Gladiator too, there's always like, right before he kills someone
Speaker 3: at Paul mescal and Russell Crony to be like, I
Speaker 3: don't want to do it, don't make me do it.
Speaker 3: You know, and then he does it like in a
Speaker 3: very spectacular fashion.
Speaker 1: I can if I want to, but I don't want to.
Speaker 3: And I do think it's interesting because they don't often
Speaker 3: show animal hunts, even though these were very common, because
Speaker 3: I think there's something where because animal hunts are like
Speaker 3: recent enough in memory or like still happening, that like
Speaker 3: we don't want to see that. We don't want to
Speaker 3: see someone kill an animal. We would like to see
Speaker 3: someone kill a slave. Apparently it's a very strange thing
Speaker 3: about our psychology that is still present in our brains
Speaker 3: even if like we've outlawed it and wouldn't actually want
Speaker 3: to see it. But like, you know, the UFC's first
Speaker 3: creative director, and I'm stealing this from Danielli Billlli, he
Speaker 3: was a producer on HBO's Roam and UFC fights in
Speaker 3: this era, like when Gladiator came out used to feature
Speaker 3: a gladiator opening the fight and doing the sand thing
Speaker 3: like Maximus, like picking up the sand. We see them
Speaker 3: as modern day gladiators.
Speaker 1: JUDEO, Can I blow your mind for a second. Do
Speaker 1: you want to know what the Latin word for sand is?
Speaker 1: What's that? Arena? Ooh wow, damn? That is crazy?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there just is something, especially in the
Speaker 3: two thousands, which I think was like a very violent decade.
Speaker 3: I've heard Matt Chrisman talk about how like Limp Biscuit
Speaker 3: and like New Metal in general represents this kind of
Speaker 3: violent American ID at the turn of the millennium, Right,
Speaker 3: I want to break stuff, And I think the UFC
Speaker 3: becoming popular and the war in Iraq gets all sort
Speaker 3: of tied in with that. And I love the irony
Speaker 3: of this movie because these games are put on to
Speaker 3: people so that they don't ask for more political power.
Speaker 3: So like Maximus as a gladiator is both placating people
Speaker 3: into accepting a despotic emperor in the sense that he's
Speaker 3: providing them entertainment that will act as like a release
Speaker 3: valve for stress, but also on a surface level, he's
Speaker 3: trying to get rid of the emperor and like the
Speaker 3: institutions of having a king. And so I find that
Speaker 3: that juxtaposition is very interesting and fun to play with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of people quote the bread and Circus line,
Speaker 1: which is from the satirist Juvenal, but they don't quote
Speaker 1: the full context. It's a long poem, but if you
Speaker 1: look at the lines just before it. Juvenile writes that
Speaker 1: same crowd, in a moment, would have hailed their new Augustus.
Speaker 1: They shed their sense of responsibility long ago when they
Speaker 1: lost their votes and the bribes. Semi colon the mob
Speaker 1: that used to grant power high office, the legions, everything
Speaker 1: curtails its desires and reveals his anxiety for two things
Speaker 1: only bread and circuses. The mob used to be responsible
Speaker 1: for granting power, offices, legions, everything, giving something to these
Speaker 1: people who wanted it right, that was their power to give,
Speaker 1: and now all they have is the power to demand
Speaker 1: the entertainment and the bread. Wow.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's talk a little bit about the style of
Speaker 3: this movie. We've complained a lot about the plot and
Speaker 3: some of the themes, but I do think that where
Speaker 3: this movie really excels is the style.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, oh, please waiter. I couldn't eat another bite
Speaker 1: of steak, but I will take some sizzle. Give me
Speaker 1: all the sizzle that you have.
Speaker 3: This movie has masterful practical effects. You know, seven hundred
Speaker 3: and fifteen extras, one hundred and twenty horses, real siege equipment,
Speaker 3: two thousand weapons were created for the battles, and also
Speaker 3: ten thousand arrows. The Roman costumes look incredible. When they
Speaker 3: fucking wheel out the real ballastie, you're like, holy shit,
Speaker 3: this is not a CGI ballast I Ridley Scott like
Speaker 3: found a forest that we due for deforestation and was like,
Speaker 3: hold on, let me destroy it first. Germany is filmed
Speaker 3: in Britain. Rome is filmed in Malta. North Africa is
Speaker 3: filmed in Morocco. All on location. Hans Zimmer, who's better
Speaker 3: than him at doing the score and need Hans. He's
Speaker 3: doing basically the Pirates of the Caribbean theme, but played
Speaker 3: less loudly. They recreated the coliseum, like the first twenty
Speaker 3: five feet of it for the shots of Rome, so
Speaker 3: that it would like be in the background. They didn't
Speaker 3: do the whole thing, but like just the bottom twenty
Speaker 3: five feet, and so it's like, yeah, the plot itself,
Speaker 3: you know, revenge film, guy has his family killed. One
Speaker 3: of like the fucking hackiest moves in cinema, which is
Speaker 3: like they killed some guy's family. Imagine how pissed off
Speaker 3: he'd be. Imagine how much revenge she'd want. Like you know,
Speaker 3: the classic movie complained that like anytime you see a woman,
Speaker 3: it's like, oh yeah, she's gonna be killed to motivate
Speaker 3: the man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is she happy in Loyal Death?
Speaker 3: Sen, Yes, I watched the beginning of Gladiator too, and
Speaker 3: it's like the second you see his wife like hanging laundry,
Speaker 3: You're like, that's the deadest woman of all time. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And this like political plot that is like more about
Speaker 3: our modern insecurities than it is Romans. But it doesn't
Speaker 3: matter in some ways. You know, it's not a great movie,
Speaker 3: but it's like a B movie because the style is
Speaker 3: so great. Apparently, how they pitched it to Ridley Scott
Speaker 3: is like they showed him that like nineteenth century painting.
Speaker 3: It's like Gladiator looking up at an emperor who's like
Speaker 3: doing the thumbs down. And before the guy even like
Speaker 3: got into it, Ridley Scott was like, I'll do it.
Speaker 3: You know, we've heard about turning a video game into
Speaker 3: a movie. We've heard about turning a comic book into
Speaker 3: a movie. What if they turned a painting into a movie.
Speaker 3: That's basically what this is, and stylistically it succeeded quite
Speaker 3: a bit. It is just really good to watch to
Speaker 3: look at. Sorry, rather speaking of this just being all
Speaker 3: style and like no substance. One of the ways in
Speaker 3: which this manifests itself, is that there was never really
Speaker 3: like a script. None of the original script really made it.
Speaker 3: A lot of the lines were improvised. A lot of
Speaker 3: like the big one, Russell Crowe improvised the line's strength
Speaker 3: and honor, not something that Roman said. By the way,
Speaker 3: it's like this sounds right, Joaquin Phoenix improvised, am I
Speaker 3: not merciful? When Crow had to like recount details of
Speaker 3: his fictional home in Spain to Marcus Aurelius, really, Scott
Speaker 3: was like, just tell me about how you think about Australia,
Speaker 3: and he started going off on it.
Speaker 1: Because you didn't mention kangaroos, drop bears.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Foster's balla Bay's.
Speaker 1: This movie cost one hundred million dollars to make that.
Speaker 1: They improvised the fucking lines so sick.
Speaker 3: You know, they hire like seven hundred and fifty extras.
Speaker 3: They build the bottom twenty five feet of the coliseum
Speaker 3: and they're like, yeah, script, we'll figure it out. You know,
Speaker 3: we'll figure it out.
Speaker 1: As we go. I know, I'm forgetting something. What did
Speaker 1: oh god, the words?
Speaker 3: But I mean somehow they pulled it off. But I
Speaker 3: mean it's like kind of what separates this movie from
Speaker 3: being like an a movie. Is that like, yeah, they
Speaker 3: may wanted to figure out the plot a bit more
Speaker 3: and the dialogue they're like, uh, this part just says
Speaker 3: the idea of Rome. What did you mean by that?
Speaker 3: Don't worry might We'll figure it out.
Speaker 1: The idea of Rome was actually a placeholder that somebody
Speaker 1: forgot to keep writing and.
Speaker 3: Then Russell Crowe just read it out loud, all right,
Speaker 3: echoes in the culture. Sure, like we set up top.
Speaker 3: All of our two thousand Sword and Sandal movies are
Speaker 3: because of this movie. We've talked about Troy on our podcast.
Speaker 3: I rewatched Alexander for this episode. That movie sucks ass.
Speaker 3: I mean there's like probably two or three intervals of greatness,
Speaker 3: like ten to fifteen minutes where you're like, wow, this
Speaker 3: actually is a phenomenal story about like a man who
Speaker 3: Alexander went to fucking India.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 3: He conquered Punjab in like three hundred BC on like
Speaker 3: one expedition, and it's just like how far do you
Speaker 3: want to go? Like you can just keep conquering, but
Speaker 3: it's like when will you stop?
Speaker 1: To what end?
Speaker 3: To what end? And like why and as soon as
Speaker 3: he's forced to turn around and go home. He dies,
Speaker 3: But I just think that, like, there are so many
Speaker 3: long stretches of this movie that are absolute snooze fests.
Speaker 3: Val kilm are awful as Philip the Second. His mommy
Speaker 3: issues in this movie are so disconnected from the entire
Speaker 3: plot they don't really make a lot of sense. Also,
Speaker 3: Oliver Stone like has the courage to make Alexander like
Speaker 3: very gay, but not to actually show him kiss a
Speaker 3: man in any moment. And it's like, bro, just commit,
Speaker 3: you know, if this is the story you want to
Speaker 3: tell King Arthur, remember that. We probably should watch that
Speaker 3: at some point see if there's anything there. But Russell
Speaker 3: Crowe kind of the other echo in the culture. He's
Speaker 3: echoed an eternity in his rules because of this movie.
Speaker 3: He won Best Actor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was so sure this is going to be
Speaker 1: an unconsonable choice. But it seems to have been a
Speaker 1: slow year for movies. You know, the remember shuffle rule.
Speaker 1: They should be given out ten years. It should have
Speaker 1: been given out twenty ten. He beat out Tom Hanks
Speaker 1: for Castaway, Javier Bardam for Before Night Falls, which is
Speaker 1: a biopick.
Speaker 3: A guy who was considered for the role of Maximus.
Speaker 1: By the way, nice Ed Harris for Pollock a biopick,
Speaker 1: and Jeffrey Rush for Quills a biopick. Big year for biopicks.
Speaker 1: It's also won Best Picture, beating out Aaron Brockovich Schokola, Croaching, Tiger, Hitten, Dragon,
Speaker 1: and Traffic. So yeah, maybe just a slow year two thousand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's better movie than Traffic. I'd have to rewatch
Speaker 3: the other ones, that know.
Speaker 1: And it was nominated for a bunch of others. It
Speaker 1: got like nine nominations and it won a bunch of
Speaker 1: the technical ones, costume Design, visual effects. Despite the fact
Speaker 1: that we've spent all this time talking about how mid
Speaker 1: it is, this was not only commercially but critically successful film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it won the Sizzle Awards Best Visual Effects,
Speaker 3: Best Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Sizzle. I wanted to
Speaker 3: give a quick shout out to the Sopranos episode. We
Speaker 3: talked about University on this show, but the idea that
Speaker 3: they would watch this movie and feel like they were
Speaker 3: sort of modern day gladiators, a very funny idea that
Speaker 3: like they saw Maximus and they were like, that's freaking memm.
Speaker 1: Bro, Now you don't have a murdered wife and children.
Speaker 1: You are murdering wives and children.
Speaker 3: Yes, subtle difference, Yeah, you're comets. And another little funny
Speaker 3: echo in the culture. I think definitely is that. Okay,
Speaker 3: So this movie comes out in May of two thousand.
Speaker 3: George Lucas is writing the script for Attack of the
Speaker 3: Clones from March to June of two thousand.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 3: Now, low and behold, we get an extended scene in
Speaker 3: an alien colosseum in that movie. He absolutely was like, Hm,
Speaker 3: this would be very interesting. What if we had the
Speaker 3: Jedi colosseum? And of course the sequel Gladiator two.
Speaker 1: Yikes.
Speaker 3: I couldn't finish this one. In the DVD featurette, I
Speaker 3: did think it was funny that there's a line where
Speaker 3: Russell Crowe is mocking the idea of a sequel. He's like,
Speaker 3: thankfully I die in this movie, so there can't be
Speaker 3: a sequel.
Speaker 1: Wrong, it's unwatchable, all right.
Speaker 3: Closing thoughts, I think we are showing great courage today
Speaker 3: by saying that this is a decent movie, pretty good,
Speaker 3: you know, if you're in the mood, you know, I'd
Speaker 3: watch it. It's three and a half stars. By the way,
Speaker 3: a lot of people I follow in letterboxed. They just
Speaker 3: logged it as having watched it without giving it a rating,
Speaker 3: which is a coward's move. I plaive be courageous enough
Speaker 3: to say it was pretty good.
Speaker 1: It is truly so fine. The plot is bad, like
Speaker 1: so fucking bad. The characters are flat, the writing is mid,
Speaker 1: but the action sequence in the visuals are actually good
Speaker 1: enough to bring it up to a solid B minus movie.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna even give it a be okay, but yeah,
Speaker 3: if you guys really got the Roman Empire on the mind,
Speaker 3: you can't do much better than this.
Speaker 1: But I would like to have some elaborated closing thoughts
Speaker 1: with a second pedance corner, the pediasque corner. No no,
Speaker 1: So I want to talk about what might have been right.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to go through and point out
Speaker 1: historical inaccuracies. We'd be here for hours. It'd be fucking boring.
Speaker 1: Suffice it to say, there's nothing historically accurate about this film.
Speaker 1: We talked in our Master and Commander episode about the
Speaker 1: difference between accurate and authentic, because that film is completely fictionalized,
Speaker 1: but it's very authentic in this world in details. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Gladiator isn't authentic ether. But in this Pettis corner, I
Speaker 1: just want to point out what an awesome, weird, hilarious
Speaker 1: movie we could have gotten if Ridley Scott and the
Speaker 1: crew had stuck a little closer to one particular source
Speaker 1: from the ancient world source background. Okay, the Historia Augusta
Speaker 1: the History of the Caesars. One of the main sources
Speaker 1: for the later Roman empires is this weird text called
Speaker 1: the Historia Augusta. And the reason it's weird is that
Speaker 1: it is basically a forgery, as in, it isn't what
Speaker 1: it claims to be. Because it claims to be this
Speaker 1: collection of biographies written on all these different Roman emperors
Speaker 1: that ruled from one seventeen to two eighty four. They're emperors,
Speaker 1: co emperors and their heirs, and it claims to be
Speaker 1: written by a bunch of different guys, written close ish
Speaker 1: to the reins it describes, and it claims to be
Speaker 1: real history. But in reality it's written way later, like
Speaker 1: in the late three hundreds or maybe even early four hundreds,
Speaker 1: and is also clearly one guy pretending to be lots
Speaker 1: of guys, as all these documents and decrees that it
Speaker 1: presents that are completely unattested anywhere. It's trying to look
Speaker 1: like history, but it's probably basically closer to a novel.
Speaker 1: And for some of these later emperors, this is our
Speaker 1: only historical source. So even though it's so deeply flawed,
Speaker 1: historians can't throw it away. They need to be like
Speaker 1: just very careful with how they use it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you were telling me that, like when it comes
Speaker 3: to Roman history. You know, obviously there was lots of
Speaker 3: stuff like written down, but a huge bottleneck in terms
Speaker 3: of like what survived was based on whatever the Christian
Speaker 3: monks would have recreated in the Dark Ages or whatever,
Speaker 3: and a lot of the stuff that they chose to
Speaker 3: recreate was like during the Christian period or during the
Speaker 3: period closest to Jesus's life, right, And so there's this gap,
Speaker 3: I think you said, in like the third century essentially right,
Speaker 3: where we know almost nothing, like very very little.
Speaker 1: The third century also features this like crisis where like
Speaker 1: Rome almost falls and almost breaks up. I don't want
Speaker 1: to throw the Christian monks who were doing all that
Speaker 1: recopying under the bus entirely, but they have limited paper.
Speaker 1: They're making these judgment decisions. They prioritize Christian stuff and
Speaker 1: then they prioritize authors that they could plausibly claim were
Speaker 1: secret Christians, Like they said Seneca was a secret Christian,
Speaker 1: and they said Virgil was a secret Christian, even though
Speaker 1: he died before the birth of Christ, Like is not
Speaker 1: the only thing that factored into what you recopy, Like
Speaker 1: generally you prioritize things that are shorter than things that
Speaker 1: are longer. Where like, yeah, Livy wrote one hundred and
Speaker 1: forty something books on the history of Rome, and like
Speaker 1: under forty of them survive or whatever. Just like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of fucking Livy to recopy. You know, let's
Speaker 1: just let's just take the best bits. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of factors at play, but we need the historia Augusta.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna read you some choice quotes about what
Speaker 1: our wacky source says about the historical events of this film.
Speaker 1: From the first page of the biography, it says of
Speaker 1: commedists for straight from his earliest boyhood, he was base, shameless, cruel, lecherous,
Speaker 1: defiled of mouth too and debauched, already adept at those
Speaker 1: arts which do not accord with the position of emperor,
Speaker 1: in that he could mold cups, dance, sing, whistle even
Speaker 1: play the buffoon and the Gladiator to perfection. You knew
Speaker 1: he's a bad guy. He was molding cups out here, Jordano,
Speaker 1: he was arts and crafting. He was not made for
Speaker 1: the purple. But basically the entire life can be summed
Speaker 1: up with one line that the anonymous author wrote, everything
Speaker 1: Commodist did was worse than what he had done before.
Speaker 1: It starts bad and it just keeps getting worse. So
Speaker 1: here are some of his sex crimes, which are fun.
Speaker 1: When he came back to Rome, he celebrated a triumph
Speaker 1: with Saotorus, his debaucherer, and placed him behind him in
Speaker 1: the chariot. In the course of the triumphle perception Commdists
Speaker 1: several times turned his head and kissed him quite openly.
Speaker 1: He even did this in the orchestra. So right off
Speaker 1: the bat, I want gay Waquin Phoenix in this film.
Speaker 1: I want him planning a kiss on his debaucherer. Another one.
Speaker 1: He had three hundred concubines whom he assembled together for
Speaker 1: the beauty of their person, recruiting both married women and
Speaker 1: whoores together with us of ripe age. Also three hundred
Speaker 1: in number, whom he had collected with beauty as the
Speaker 1: criterion equally from the commons and the nobility, by force
Speaker 1: and by payment. He is said to have killed his
Speaker 1: sister Lucilla. That's the one that we see him have
Speaker 1: the incestuous crush on in this film. The source says
Speaker 1: a he kills her, and then having debauched his other sisters,
Speaker 1: as it is said, and being joined in embraces with
Speaker 1: a cousin of his father. He even gave one of
Speaker 1: the concubines the name of his mother. Give me this
Speaker 1: wacky shit, Phil Ridley Scott have the courage.
Speaker 3: Damn. He's the villain of this movie, and he's made
Speaker 3: to be so much less insane than in real life,
Speaker 3: or at least in this like third century hit piece
Speaker 3: that was published about him.
Speaker 1: Oh, here's some of his sex shit. He used to
Speaker 1: order the concubines themselves to be debauched before his own eyes.
Speaker 1: He's a cock guy, and he was not free from
Speaker 1: this disgrace of submitting sexually to young men, being defiled
Speaker 1: in every part of his body, even his mouth, with
Speaker 1: both sexests. God damn, who is the supposed author of
Speaker 1: this book. It's like a made up name.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, but it's supposed to be a historian or
Speaker 3: is it like the Perez Hilton of the day or something.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be a historian, a real history Okay, gotcha?
Speaker 1: I mean significantly for our story. It says he fought
Speaker 1: in the arena and he did it with points uncovered.
Speaker 1: He killed animals in the amphitheater because it was his
Speaker 1: practice to kill wild animals at home.
Speaker 3: Just to clarify, moving on to his sports related crimes. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he's defiling the beautiful game.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yes. He purchased chariot horses for himself and drove
Speaker 1: chariots in the dress of a charioteer. And I just
Speaker 1: love that this source is so uptight that the fact
Speaker 1: that he's driving chariots as bad as the sex crimes
Speaker 1: if you really think about it, because he's.
Speaker 3: Debasing himself right in the Infamia mm hm.
Speaker 1: In the meanwhile, in the dress of a victim slayer.
Speaker 1: He slaughtered a sacrificial victim, and he fought in the
Speaker 1: arena with foyles as a gladiator among the chamberlains, with
Speaker 1: his swords points uncovered. He was called Amazonius because of
Speaker 1: his passion for his concubine, Marcia, whom he loved to
Speaker 1: have depicted as an Amazon, and for whose sake he
Speaker 1: even wished to enter the Roman arena in Amazon's dress.
Speaker 1: So now we also get some cross dressing in here.
Speaker 1: He also engaged in gladiatorial combat and accepted a gladiator's
Speaker 1: name with pleasure, as if he were accepting triumphal honors.
Speaker 1: He always entered the public shows, and as often as
Speaker 1: he did so, he ordered it to be inscribed in
Speaker 1: the public records. He is in fact said to have
Speaker 1: fought seven hundred and thirty five times. He's the gladiator
Speaker 1: in the meantime is recorded he fought three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty five times under his father, and further, he subsequently
Speaker 1: achieved so many gladiatorial crowns by defeating or killing net
Speaker 1: fighters that he reached a thousand. Moreover, he killed with
Speaker 1: his own hand many thousands of wild animals, even elephants.
Speaker 1: Frequently it was before the eyes of the Roman peace
Speaker 1: people that he did this thing. Remember when you think
Speaker 1: of a gladiator helmet, you think of the one that
Speaker 1: covers your entire face. That wasn't just practical, that was
Speaker 1: to hide your face from the infamia of selling your
Speaker 1: thing for money. And he's out there fighting hundreds, maybe
Speaker 1: thousands of times in front of the entire people as
Speaker 1: the emperor, as the guy at the top of the hierarchy.
Speaker 3: He mentions the net fighters Retiarius. A lot of the
Speaker 3: gladiator types were based on like conquered peoples, the Samaritan
Speaker 3: or whatever. But one of my favorites, I think, like
Speaker 3: the most iconic imagery wise, is the fisherman type with
Speaker 3: the trident. He's got a trident and a net, and
Speaker 3: on his left arm he has armor, and that is
Speaker 3: just supposed to represent the fishermen. Apparently that type loses
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 1: They're also considered the most effeminate because they got a
Speaker 1: net in a lasso and they appairly spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time running away from people.
Speaker 3: But like coolest imagery and I think probably found its
Speaker 3: way into the most like nineteenth century painting or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, moving on from his sports crime just to the
Speaker 1: general hedonism and perversion, Right, this is what I really
Speaker 1: really wanted in the movie. He had among his minions
Speaker 1: men called after their private parts of either sex, and
Speaker 1: on them he used to bestow his kisses with particular pleasure.
Speaker 1: He had too, a man whose penis projected further than
Speaker 1: does that of animals. He called him onos that's the
Speaker 1: Greek word for ass passes in donkey, and was very
Speaker 1: fond of him. He even enriched him and appointed him
Speaker 1: to the priesthood of Rural Hercules. Right, this guy has
Speaker 1: got an entourage style gang of sex guys. He's my boys, balls, ass,
Speaker 1: cock and clitteris.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is my boys, balls, ass and Johnny Drama.
Speaker 1: He is said often to have mixed human excrement with
Speaker 1: the most expensive foods and did not refrain from tasting it,
Speaker 1: making a fool of other people as he thought or
Speaker 1: like this was, he displayed on a silver dish two
Speaker 1: misshapen hunchbacks covered with mustard, and straight away he gave
Speaker 1: them advancement and riches. It's so good, it's so weird,
Speaker 1: it's so wacky. Like that's part of why we love
Speaker 1: the Roman world so much as we love it because
Speaker 1: it is alien to us. It is foreign to us,
Speaker 1: and I think you see that with the fucking blood
Speaker 1: Sport Gladiator show that we centered an entire film on.
Speaker 1: This is something that's hard for us to wrap our
Speaker 1: heads around watching people fight to the death for entertainment,
Speaker 1: and so I just wanted a little bit more, is
Speaker 1: all I'm saying.
Speaker 3: This has got to be where that story comes from,
Speaker 3: of him taking like all of the legless men in
Speaker 3: Rome and dressing them up like snakes and beating them
Speaker 3: to death.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3: All these podcasts will mention that story as if it's true,
Speaker 3: as if this isn't coming from this like insane text.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Such was his lack of propriety that he very
Speaker 1: often drank in public, sitting in the Amphitheater, a theater
Speaker 1: in women's clothing. I read that. I'd be like, let's
Speaker 1: be real, ancient Romans, aren't you all wearing dresses? Okay?
Speaker 1: Last couple things miscellaneous weird and wacky stuff. We did
Speaker 1: the sex crimes, politics crimes, and sports crimes. Commonists. We
Speaker 1: had a sense of humor. He's a man of the
Speaker 1: people right in his jokes too. He was destructive. For example,
Speaker 1: he put a starling on the head of a man
Speaker 1: who he had seen had some hairs that were going
Speaker 1: white among the black ones like worms. The bird thought
Speaker 1: it was chasing worms and made the man's head fester
Speaker 1: with the striking of its beak. He was out. He
Speaker 1: were doing bird crimes in the text sets and more
Speaker 1: examples of his jokes. He cut open a fat man
Speaker 1: in the middle of the stomach so that his inurns
Speaker 1: suddenly poured out, one of communists's classic bits.
Speaker 3: You know, Lamar, I find out about this communist un
Speaker 3: less I like him.
Speaker 1: He used to name men one footed or one eyed
Speaker 1: when he had removed one of their eyes or snapped
Speaker 1: off one of their feet. Out here given nicknames after
Speaker 1: maiming people. Is all of this true? Most definitely not?
Speaker 1: But also who cares? Could you imagine a world in
Speaker 1: which we lean into the wild and wacky nature of
Speaker 1: how the Romans viewed one of their own bad emperors.
Speaker 1: This movie is so sexless that the worst we get
Speaker 1: is the peck on the lips incests from commedists and
Speaker 1: you know, orders Maximus to be killed is the only
Speaker 1: thing that we see him do.
Speaker 3: He kills his father, oh and that yeah yeah, and.
Speaker 1: The killing of his father are the only like cruelties
Speaker 1: that we see. But I want to see walking Phoenix
Speaker 1: and drag. I want to see walking Phoenix blowing a guy.
Speaker 1: I want to see woking Phoenix decapitate an ostrich and
Speaker 1: fight a giraffe. Give me a banquet scene in which
Speaker 1: Walking Phoenix literally eat shit and tells people they're missing
Speaker 1: out before he lifts the fucking silver plate to show
Speaker 1: the hunchbacks covered in mustard. Man, get weird with it,
Speaker 1: Get weird with it. So those are my closing thoughts.
Speaker 1: Is Gladiator B minus the Gladiator we could have gotten
Speaker 1: with a little bit more courage.
Speaker 3: Motherfucking a sweet. Another great pedance corner on one of
Speaker 3: our classical history movies.
Speaker 1: I know this is a vein that will be running
Speaker 1: dry very soon, my friends.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've only got a few left of these Yeah, but.
Speaker 1: That's all we got for you today. As always, thank
Speaker 1: you for listening. Please like, subscribe, writ as a comment.
Speaker 1: Do all that engagement. It really helps the show out.
Speaker 1: And we will see in two weeks for our next
Speaker 1: global financial crisis episode.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yes, excellent. But we'll be returning to Italy,
Speaker 3: it's true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to be back old euro Away. Actually,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be visiting a lot of countries that were
Speaker 1: part of the Roman Empire. Portugal, Greece, Sane, Greece, Italy.
Speaker 3: All right, well a Rivederci chow chout