Gladiator II and Ancient North Africa

By Owain Williams

So, I have finally gotten around to watching Gladiator II. I have mentioned the film in a previous blog post, noting that I thought it would be a good film, albeit closer to historical fantasy than historical fiction. I was very wrong – about the film’s quality, at least.

Gladiator II, in my opinion, is a terrible film. It felt rushed, needlessly so, and relied too heavily on the original Gladiator, often repeating lines from the first film. Characters were given no time to develop. Hanno, the protagonist of the film, for instance, feels like a copy and paste of Maximus, the protagonist of the original (as much of the film feels like a copy and paste of the original), becoming a leader of the gladiators in Rome and an enemy of the corrupt Roman imperial system. Yet unlike Maximus, Hanno is thrust into the position of leader of the gladiators seemingly on a whim – we are not shown him earning the respect of his fellow gladiators in the same way Maximus does. Similarly, Geta and Caracalla have none of the depth or nuance of Commodus, reduced to crazed, shrieking caricatures, with Caracalla implied to suffer from syphilis. The film is populated by highly regarded actors, and while they had little to work with, their performances felt similarly exaggerated. Gladiator is, by far, the superior film.

As for the film being a historical fantasy, I was absolutely correct. Little of the film resembles what we actually know about Roman history, both concerning the period supposedly depicted in the film and what we know about ancient Roman culture and society more generally. I won’t belabour this point, as there are more than enough articles on the internet summing up Gladiator II’s many mistakes – you can listen to Ancient Warfare team's thoughts here – but I wanted to point out one consistent element throughout the film that bothered me – the representation of North Africa in the Roman Empire.

In true Ridley Scott fashion, his attention to historical detail is utterly lacking. The film begins with a Roman naval attack on a city in Numidia, which is led by a man called Jugurtha. There was a war in North Africa during this period of Roman history, when Septimius Severus – himself born in Lepcis Magna, a Roman city in North Africa – fought against the Garamantes, even supposedly capturing their capital Garama (modern Germa or Jerma). However, this conflict took place far from the sea, the Garamantes being a pastoralist society with settlements clustering around the many oases in the desert. Instead, it seems like Ridley Scott simply transported the Jugurthine War, fought between the Roman Republic and Jugurtha, king of Numidia, in the late second century BC, into the third century AD. This representation of Africa as being beyond the borders of the Roman Empire is the start of an idea that North Africa in antiquity was uncivilised, almost playing into a kind of ‘noble savage’ origin for Hanno, thereby explaining, in part, his resistance to Roman decadence.

For starters, Numidia, like all of Mediterranean-adjacent North Africa in this period, was thoroughly part of the Roman Empire, and had been since the first century AD, when Mauretania was incorporated into the empire after the execution of Ptolemy, its king, by Caligula (other parts of North Africa had been part of the Roman Empire for far longer). Prior to this, the North African coast had been settled by Phoenicians, who dwelt alongside pre-existing inhabitants, creating Libyphoenician communities – the protagonist’s name, Hanno, actually works in this regard. The emperor Septimius Severus, who I have already mentioned, came from the Libyphoenician community of Lepcis Magna! Once the region had become part of the Roman Empire, Romans and other Italics had begun settling the region, bringing their own cultures into the mix. Additionally, Pertinax, Commodus’ immediate successor, was proconsul of Africa, as was Didius Julianus, Pertinax's successor, and Clodius Albinus, another of the claimants during the Year of Five Emperors, came from North Africa. By the third century AD, North Africa was hardly beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. 

In the film, North Africa, presented as it is, is also suggested to have been a cultural backwater, from the Romans’ perspective. When Hanno quotes several lines from Virgil, one of the emperors remarks something along the lines of ‘You wouldn’t have learned that in Africa’. Why wouldn’t he? Fronto, the tutor of one of the most intellectual Roman Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, was from Cirta, the old capital of the Kingdom of Numidia. Marcus Aurelius even tells us that Fronto was responsible for teaching him about tyranny (Meditations 1.11), something the Gladiator series, with its ahistorical emphasis on the so-called ‘dream of Rome’, would surely have appreciated. Moreover, one of the oldest – if not the oldest – depictions of Virgil comes from Hadrumetum, near Carthage, in North Africa, and is dated to roughly the same period that Gladiator II is set. Roman centurions at Gholaia, a fort on the North African frontier, even composed their own poetry.

For all the film claims to stand against imperialism and tyranny, in so blatantly misrepresenting North Africa in this period, Gladiator II ultimately perpetuates modern colonialist perceptions of North Africa, presenting the region as inhabited by barbarians and only partially Romanised Africans – perceptions which were used to justify modern European imperial control of the region. Given how nonsensical and flaccid the film felt to me, I am hardly surprised.

If you want to learn more about North Africa and its period of Roman history, we have covered Roman North Africa in Ancient History 52 and my best book of year for 2024 was David Mattingly’s Between Sahara and Sea.