Warning: Full spoilers follow for Gladiator II as well as ancient Roman history circa 200 CE. Ridley Scott’s historical action film Gladiator II has arrived, and as with the 2000 original starring Russell Crowe, the “historical” part of the new movie leads to a lot of questions – amid the sword fights and weird monkey attacks and Colosseum shark-tanking and so on. Look, I only got a B-minus in my History of the Roman Empire class in college (or was it a C-minus?), but I do have Google.
I’m also a big Derek Jacobi fan (even if this movie is not). So I’m gonna do my best to get to the bottom of how historically accurate, or not, Gladiator II is. Paul Mescal stars as Lucius Verus, the former heir to the throne.
Lucius was played by Spencer Treat Clark in the first film, where he was depicted as maybe being the love child of Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius and Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla. This parentage is confirmed in Gladiator II, where we also learn that the character was forced to go into hiding after the death of Maximus at the end of the first movie. As the grandson of the late Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), nephew of Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), and son of Lucilla, Lucius is a prince of Rome.
In the new film he returns to Rome all grown up and now a gladiator, just like Maximus, eventually playing a key role in freeing the Empire from the unjust rule of not one, not two, but three villainous emperors and/or usurpers. Like his grandfather, and his fa.