Article

Culture

Film & TV

21 February 2025

5 min read

A tale of two Romes

The Gladiator sequel’s dream of equality is baloney but telling.

Matt Lewis

Matt is a songwriter and musician, currently completing an MA in theology at Trinity College, Bristol.

Chariots thunder into a Roman amphitheatre.

Scott Free Productions.

I left the theatre quite disappointed by what I had witnessed. The original Gladiator, the Ridley Scott masterpiece, remains one of the most captivating historical epics in cinema. Every time I watch it, I feel I am stepping into another time. The sequel, by contrast, baffled me by how out of time it was, jarring me out of the action by its historical inaccuracies.

Whether it was the sharks in the Coliseum or newspapers a thousand years or so before their invention, these moments reminded me I was not witnessing an entirely truthful representation of Roman society. Perhaps I am asking too much - a movie is after all, a representation, and may tell us more about ourselves than the era it portrays.

But Gladiator II’s biggest anachronism isn’t newspapers or sharks, but the presence of Christian values in a pre-Christianised Rome.

The backdrop for the film is that the evil and insane twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla, have spread chaos across the world, relentlessly conquering foreign lands, imposing their will on others - in other words, doing what Romans usually do.

Against the emperors are a group of Romans who are tired with all this conquering and violence and want to build a new Rome. Throughout the film, they remind the audience constantly of Marcus Aurelius, the historic Roman emperor from the first film, who had a dream - ‘the dream that was Rome’. Rome would be a republic. But not just any republic.

Lucius, the hero of the sequel, in his final speech to the Roman army, sets forth what this dream could look like: ‘A city for the many, and refuge to those in need.’ The entire legion lay down their arms and cheer triumphantly for the dawn of this new Rome.

All of this is starting to sound rather close to home. Perhaps Lucius should march to the US border next.

We can imagine offscreen, Lucius walks into the Roman equivalent of the World Humanist Congress, to write a charter to declare the worth and dignity of every individual, and their right to freedom.

Anyone watching who didn’t know their history might be forgiven for assuming that this would mean an end to all the conquering, and the beginning of a just and equal society for all, regardless of gender, social status and nationality.

Unfortunately, this was not the dream of the Roman republic, even before ‘tyrannical’ emperors started ruling. Many of Rome’s biggest conquests happened during the era of the Republic. Likewise, democracy in Rome did not extend to all people. Slavery was rife. The dream that was Rome, was to have a group of men subjugate the world, rather than just one or two.

To be fair to Ridley Scott, his Rome has a little bit more nuance than I give him credit. Denzel Washington’s character Macrinus, the gladiator master, stands as a reminder of the hypocrisy of Marcus Aurelius’ ‘dream’. Macrinus was made a slave under Aurelius’ rule, bearing the brand of Aurelius’ visage on his chest, a reminder that he was Roman property.

The only real equality Rome has – Macrinus points out – is that a slave can violently overthrow an emperor. If equality is going to happen in Rome, it won’t be through reasonable persuasion, but violent revolution. And even then, equality won’t have the final say, but rather the oppressed simply becomes the next oppressor. This is the true spirit of Rome: the survival of the strongest.

Gladiator II reminds us that the values we find self-evident today, that Ridley puts into the mouth of Lucius and the other protagonists, were not self-evident to Rome. The dream that was Rome is a dream that we have. But how did we come to have this dream?

We have been shaped by this history in more ways than we know.

There was another revolution, that Gladiator II does not portray (at least not explicitly). This revolution explains why we look back on history wanting to see ideals of equality and justice. The German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, atheist and nihilist, writes about it in his work The Genealogy of Morality.

Nietzsche describes a war that happened between Judea and Rome. Rome was undoubtedly defeated, Nietzsche claims. Now, before we might accuse Nietzsche of further anachronism (the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD70 come to mind), Nietzsche is in fact speaking of a revolution in values.

He saw that the Roman ideal of ‘the prerogative of the few’: a small group of strong men imposing their will and subjugating others as the master race, was overthrown by the ‘prerogative of the many’ in the ‘slave revolution’. This revolution was brought about by a Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth, followed by his group of unlikely revolutionaries.

At the centre of this movement was one central image: a man dying on a Roman cross, a punishment meant for slaves and criminals.

God in human flesh dying as a victim of oppression, was an image that gave power to the powerless.

Nobility was no longer be found in inflicting suffering, but in enduring it for the sake of others.

Historian Tom Holland writes in his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind:

‘The spectacle of Christ being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had persuaded them … that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth’.

Holland traces this revolution and the ways in which this counter-narrative slowly seeped into Western culture, implanting a concern for the powerless. The welfare state, universal human rights, movements like #MeToo all find their source in this world-rupturing event.

Holland writes elsewhere: ‘The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.’

We have been shaped by this history in more ways than we know.

Our generation suffers from cultural amnesia. We forget the reason for how we reason today. Our desire to see Rome (and our own nation, for that matter) become a home for the many and refuge to those in need, is a desire that has been shaped by Christian values.

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Article

Attention

Culture

14 February 2025

5 min read

Dispatches from the battlefield of imagination

The Age of Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A collage image shows a person holding their head, with a wash of warm colours over the scene.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Twenty years ago today, I crossed the threshold of the Christian faith. It was a baptism of fire in a more literal and mystical sense than I care to describe (or indeed would be able to). And unlike many, I really can point to a day and a time and a place.

That night, perhaps unlike CS Lewis, I was not quite “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” But I was certainly the most bewildered. ‘What have I let myself in for?’ I wondered as I walked away from that church on a dark, wet January night. I was certain that in crossing that threshold I had entered a new world. Even if it was true, as I believed – or as I now knew - I sensed that it was dangerous too. There was a wildness to what I had just witnessed that was both thrilling and disconcerting. And yet, after that encounter, I could no more have turned away from what I had discovered than stop the world turning. As the mathematician Blaise Pascal discovered in his own ‘night of fire’ – “certitude, certitude!” is a very precious gift, and one worth holding on to.

Twenty years later, the landscape of faith in this country looks very different to the one in which I stumbled my way over the line. (Or through the back of the wardrobe might be a better metaphor.)

Back then, in 2005, the War on Terror was raging. If religion was discussed at all, it was generally reckoned a pretty rotten sort of institution. A regrettable historical hangover, an inheritance bequeathed to us by our more credulous ancestors of which we were doing well to divest ourselves, albeit too slowly for some. In this brave, new secular world, it was an increasingly commonplace view that religion ruined everything; beside which, it wasn’t true anyway.

These were the days when a certain form of atheism was ebullient and on the march. The Four Horsemen of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris held the cultural conch for a time, and they weren’t letting go. The God Delusion came out in October 2006, quickly followed by God Is Not Great in early 2007. Religion (not sin) was the root of all evil. Reason^TMwas the exclusive intellectual property of the unreligious mind, untainted as it was by visions of that laughably silly Sky-Fairy in the heavens. The battlefield of apologetics was a much-contested landscape at the time. Truth was the prize - which both sides could at least agree upon - and many a debating hall was filled to bursting to watch each side’s sharpest minds slug it out.

God only knows how in such an intellectual atmosphere, I survived the shelling and carried through to the other side. But it’s telling that I had as my guide through the intellectual carnage, not voices of that age, but rather voices from further back in time. My old friend, CS Lewis, but also GK Chesterton, St Augustine, Dostoyevksy, and the potent words of the gospels to which they led me. Like wily old corporals, they saw me safe across No Man’s Land.

Even if I made it through, there’s no doubt it was the secularists who gained the cultural ground back then. That their intellectual case was unsound, it didn’t matter. Their propaganda was better – it was what people wanted to hear – and so Christianity was shoved out of the public square.

And now, two decades on, the war has moved into a very different theatre of operations. The Age of the Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination as, unwittingly, the dry vacuum of secularism has sucked in contending spirits of another kind.

These days proponents and adversaries of the Christian faith jostle not in the dusty debating halls of our great universities, but on the battlefield of cultural consumption. Its topography formed of the movies we watch, the streaming channels we look at, the podcasts, music and media we endlessly gulp down.

Truth itself is no longer the prize, since the logical outworking of atheism’s ascendancy was to get what perhaps its proponents never bargained for: a post-truth age. What matters now is not so much what you believe, as what you attend to. The words and images which you consume. (Or which consume you.)

Walk the streets of any city and witness every passer-by glued to the screen nestled in their hand. Earphones clamped over their head. Distraction, saturation, enchantment: a cacophony of sound, a barrage of images overrunning the imagination to the point of madness. Until we have forgotten what it is like to sit patiently in silence with a still and empty mind. What it’s like to observe the world around us, to be available for the people around us.

But with what do we fill our imaginations now – that is the question? There lies the battle.

And so we find ourselves now moving through a world in which our capacity to create and consume is loaded with inestimably high stakes. It harkens back to Dostoyevsky’s famous line in The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

He’s right. Although the heart, the mind, the imagination cannot in any true sense be de-coupled from one another. (Is ‘soul’ a more encompassing word?)

And yet, of the two, the truly subversive combatant is God and not the devil. (Consider the Cross: the most subversive act in all reality.) It is God who is the invader here after all. He is the one taking back ground. His weapons are Truth, Beauty and Goodness. On the face of it, these are mild, even benign, abstractions. And yet in each is wrapped a potency as explosive as dynamite. Because with them, the spells that hold our imaginations captive can be broken. In an unguarded moment, He can slip through the enemy lines.

Witness the ear of culture’s recent harkening to the ancient truths and wisdom of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Nick Cave sings of a “Wild God” and to everyone’s surprise, people are starting to listen again. But he’s not the only one.

The inescapable wildness of God is that He cannot be contained; if His will is to break through, then He cannot be held back. As Mr. Beaver said of the lion Aslan, in answer to the fear: “Is he safe?”

“Who said anything about safe? ’Course, he isn’t safe. But he is good.”

As little image-bearers of this Creator, indeed as little creators in our turn, our creativity teeters on a knife-edge – it always has. An edge sharp enough to cleave heaven from hell. We’d do well to remember that. And that, being image-bearers of this wild God, no wonder we have a wildness of our own.