For a modern audience, it’s tempting to valorize the Roman gladiator — strong, brave, fierce — as a masculine ideal. Indeed, Ancient Rome has become for many young men an exemplar of a “lost” masculinity, as evidenced by the social media accounts and TikTok posts celebrating Roman culture. For that crowd, “Gladiator II,” the blockbuster movie that arrived on Friday, with its arena battles and bloody clashes between sword-wielding warriors (and occasional live sharks), will be a welcome moment to celebrate a Roman notion of manly individualism. There’s just one catch: To ancient Romans, gladiators were not ideals of masculinity, or of heroism.
In ancient Rome, gladiators served as entertainers, albeit on stages with very high stakes. They performed a spectacle of masculine bravery and were praised for their fighting; spectators were often watching as much for the expertise on display as for the blood. Bravery and skill in combat were certainly a significant part of the Roman conception of masculinity. But they weren’t the only parts, or even the most important ones.
According to the historians, philosophers and poets whose writings we can study today, elite Roman men were supposed to exhibit a wide variety of virtues: Courage in warfare, leadership in the military and political realm, harmony in their family life and sociability in their wide networks of friends and clients. They were to contribute generously to their communities’ well-being and responsibly manage their properties. They were, in short, meant to be well-rounded citizens: brave, but disciplined; strong, but dutiful; and always aware of their responsibilities to others and to society.
On some of those fronts — courage, valor, strength — the gladiator might rightly be celebrated. But to Romans, the gladiator provided an entertaining but ultimately empty spectacle of hyper-masculinity. He was afforded little social status and his brand of masculinity lacked self-determination, self-control, personal responsibility and civic duty. When we celebrate the gladiator, we’re falling prey to that same empty, version of manliness that the Romans themselves seemed to find detestably shallow. In studying the full Roman sense of manliness, we can see it’s not just a series of cliché traits but a web of complex, even contradictory, virtues — and understanding that will better inform our own ideas of what masculinity entails.
For Romans, bravery, even on the battlefield, was generally a virtue only if it was guided by discipline, based in self-control. Valuing discipline had purely practical reasons — Roman soldiers fought as units, not as individuals, and undisciplined bravery could lead to disaster for the army as a whole and undermine the glory of Rome. The masculinity of an individual was typically considered positive only if its virtues were harnessed for the good of the larger community. A gladiator could never fully embody masculinity, in that he had no community — he fought to provide a spectacle for the crowd.
There are other reasons gladiators were held in low regard — they were mostly enslaved people, which meant they did not have control over how their bodies were used. For Romans, this was the most important right possessed by freeborn men: the right to bodily inviolability. Gladiators were in a legal category called infamis, which meant that, even for those who were free, they lost some of their citizen rights. They couldn’t hold public office, since their lack of control over themselves barred them from leadership over others. Gladiators, actors and sex workers were infames because of their professions: their work meant that they used their bodies to entertain others and therefore ceded self-control. Indeed, when the Roman orator Cicero wanted to denigrate those who used their strength and bravery in antisocial ways to undercut the stability of their society and its institutions, he would insult them by comparing them to gladiators.
Because we view gladiators from a modern perspective, we’re prone to overpraising their most visual, cinematic virtues. Hollywood movies celebrating gladiators often glorify rogue figures who rose up heroically against oppression, harnessing the violence they’d been taught in an effort to overthrow their masters.
In both “Gladiator” and “Gladiator II,” the hero is a figure who’s unfairly been stripped of his social stature and who, through brute force, must fight his way toward redemption. This narrative is compelling to a modern audience that values individual freedom and action over social responsibility and civic duty. But to Roman elites, such a narrative would have been a horror story. In the ancient histories, gladiators who fight outside of the artificial world of the arena aren’t valorized, they’re considered villains and a danger to society. The qualities of duty and citizenship superseded a sense of individual justice or redemption, and those less-glamorous virtues are perhaps not surprisingly the ones we’ve largely sacrificed in our modern retelling of gladiators’ feats.
Romans had legendary heroes from their early history who could be held up as models of masculine virtue, but they weren’t gladiators. They were men like the farmer-statesman Cincinnatus, who left his fields to take up absolute power over the state during a military crisis. He resolved the problem in 16 days, abdicated his newfound power, and returned to the plow where he’d left it in his field. This story was told to celebrate his self-discipline — a man rooted in hard, unglamorous work on the land, who knew when to accept and when to give up power. Or consider the story of Agricola: a governor of Britain under the tyrannical emperor Domitian. Agricola was celebrated as a capable general and administrator and a responsible husband and father who used his moderation and self-control to carefully balance his own successes against the needs of the insecure, selfish man who, as emperor, embodied Rome.
If you go to see “Gladiator II” this weekend, you may enjoy the action and the opulence on display. You may even be entertained, as the Romans once were. But in terms of what Rome has to teach us about the virtues of manhood, we’re better off regarding the movie as a reminder that the Roman ideal is often more complicated than tales of gladiator heroes. The real lesson of the arena is that what constitutes masculinity is more nuanced than we want to acknowledge.
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