After grossing almost $400 million, Gladiator II will become available to streaming audiences on Christmas Eve. This sequel to Ridley Scott’s 2000 epic substitutes the brother emperors Caracalla and Geta for the original’s Commodus, modeling them not only on him, but on a host of Rome’s other reputedly bloodthirsty despots like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.
These emperors’ grandiosity and disregard for social norms may resonate with audiences in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, but so do their appeals to the common people and the hostility they aroused in Rome’s educated elite. Although both movies capture the image of tyranny described by hostile intellectuals, only the new one holds another clue about important social changes driving politics then and now: the film includes characters of different races.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Whatever the reasons for the casting decisions, the Roman empire really did house people of innumerable ethnicities in provinces ranging from Scotland to Arabia. Indeed, Gladiator II accurately shows that by the movie’s day (211 A.D.) the Roman ruling class had become multi-ethnic, a transformation that—perhaps surprisingly for today’s audiences—would usher in more conservative politics. Thus the movie is set in a world resembling the modern United States, as a multi-racial, populist, conservative coalition began to sideline the ruling elite. The Roman empire in the century after Caracalla also offers valuable insights—and warnings—about what Americans can expect from the beginning of a new political era.
When the first emperor Augustus ended the Roman Republic at the turn of the first century A.D., nearly all senators, governors, and the like hailed from Italy. By A.D. 97, about a century before the Gladiator movies take place, Trajan from Spain became the first non-Italian emperor. A series of fellow Spaniards, Gauls (Frenchmen), North Africans, and Syrians soon followed. This was not the result of bottom-up social change, but rather reflected how provincial elites assimilated into the ruling class. For example, in A.D. 48 when the emperor Claudius took pains to justify including a small number of prominent Gallic Romans in the senate, he emphasized the Gauls’ longstanding support for the empire and how well they already had integrated into its elite.
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Even wealthy provincials who didn’t reach the senate could enter the small bureaucracy created by the early emperors, but needed to find established mentors who often (but not always) came from the same city or region. Thus Trajan’s father enjoyed the patronage of the emperor Vespasian, an Italian, but also followed in the footsteps of prominent Spaniards like the philosopher and courtier Seneca. His ready adaptation to elite values meant posh Roman authors would not brand Trajan a tyrant but later proclaim him the “best emperor.”
Though initially smooth, by the third century A.D. when the Gladiator movies take place, this assimilation gave way to a breakdown of social class barriers. Commodus, villain of the first Gladiator, was succeeded as emperor by Pertinax, the son of a former slave. When Pertinax abandoned a career as a teacher and joined the army, frontier wars had hollowed out the ranks, allowing his exceptional talent to catch his superiors’ attention. While broadly accepted at the time, Pertinax’s rise was a harbinger of sharper tensions that accompanied the collapse of social barriers, which would erupt under Gladiator II’s co-villain Caracalla.
Though a product of the empire’s integrated elite—his parents, the emperor and empress, came from prominent families in North Africa and Syria respectively—Caracalla loathed the old aristocracy and favored working-class constituencies like the army, even granting Roman citizenship to all the empire’s free inhabitants. This removed one of the last obstacles preventing poor provincials from governing the empire. By the late third century, most emperors and many of their top officials rose from the rural peasantry through the ranks of the army.
They soon confronted spiraling crises. Constant civil wars and reigns that sometimes lasted only months made it difficult to defeat foreign invaders. By the middle of the century, the Goths killed the emperor Decius, the Persians captured his near-successor Valerian, and the empire broke into three parts.
The new elite rose to the occasion. By the early fourth century, they had reunited the empire, restored the frontiers, and slowed the rapid turnover of emperors. The government accomplished this by a mass increase in army personnel and a fortification program, funded by raising taxes and expanding the bureaucracy to support the larger state apparatus. The number of salaried imperial officials increased from a few hundred in the early empire to more than 30,000.
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Meanwhile, Romans came to favor socially conservative values that emphasized personal austerity, perhaps partly due to the democratization of political culture. Many experimented with fasting, sleep deprivation, and vegetarian diets while frequently taking vows of celibacy. By A.D. 450, an emperor and empress even contracted a chaste marriage. Showing little patience for their predecessors’ rumored sexual depravity left most of Caracalla’s successors to prioritize repelling constant invasions. Their efforts put off the fall of the western empire for centuries.
Although the values that overtook ancient Rome brought much needed seriousness, Romans still paid a severe price.
While early imperial aristocrats saw provincials as subject nations with their own cultures, their working-class replacements considered Romans a single people and expected all to share the same values. These demands fell hard on minorities, particularly Christians. While pagan Romans always technically prohibited Christianity, Trajan makes clear in a famous exchange of letters that the Roman elite of his day remained content to leave the Christians mostly unbothered. The empire’s third century ruling class felt otherwise, and thrice authorized pogroms of the empire’s largest religious minority. Fragments of the debates about authorizing the persecutions show courtiers much more concerned with policing ordinary life than their predecessors. The emperor Decius even required all Romans to show a certificate as proof they had sacrificed to the pagan gods.
And while Romans might have needed to expand the army, expanding state intervention in the economy brought serious consequences. A law meant to stop inflation by fixing prices for everything sold in the empire failed in spectacular fashion. The expansion of the bureaucracy bankrupted small cities when the scions of elite families left for prized government jobs in the imperial capitals.
In a moment resembling the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, the end of Gladiator II captures the beginning of this process, when cheering soldiers outside Rome celebrate their overthrow of the old ruling class. This would mark the onset of a more conservative political consensus, one that helped the empire confront its challenges, but ultimately came at the cost of freedom.
Jeffrey E. Schulman is a Ph.D. student at Groningen University, working on the political history of the Roman Empire.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
