Arve, and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me as always is Dr.

Riana Nevins, a senior lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode LXI.

Gladiator Brackets 2000.

And by that I mean the Ridley Scott movie. Today we'll be looking at a work of

cinematic history to see how accurate Ridley and

Rusty got the story of Maximus the Gladiator and Commodus the Emperor.

Here's Rianna Evans.

I watched Gladiator I think four times now. I went to see it when it came out in the

cinema. I did not enjoy it the first time around. But the last time I watched it was with

my class one month ago, my Gladiators and Emperor's class, and I really enjoyed it.

I watched it once when I was much younger, back around the time it came out, and I think the only other time that I've watched it is on the weekend just passed.

So I was surprised at how much I forgot about it during that intervening time and the only

thing that I really remembered was Maximus running his hand through the grass.

It does happen a lot. Yeah I thought it happened a lot more than what it did actually in the film.

I think Ridley Scott would be pleased that you remembered that because he's a very visual director and that was a clearly an important theme because it shows Maximus kind of on the

point between life and death yes it's the spiritual element of the film yeah that there will be

more than he's has out of this very corrupt life that's being lived at Rome.

All right, so let's go through the plot a bit and we'll pick apart the movie as we go through it.

So Gladiator was a movie that came out in 2000, so years ago topical yeah in a couple of years time

your students in first year are going to be younger than the movie it's scary yeah

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