Games and Thrones
The real history of the era portrayed in Gladiator II is much more interesting, tumultuous, and murderous than Scott’s simpleminded yarn.
While watching Gladiator II, I was mesmerised by... no, not Paul Mescal’s legs. Although did anyone besides me notice that his protagonist, Lucius, wears his Roman tunics about 24 inches shorter than his fictional father, Maximus (Russell Crowe), did in the original Gladiator (2000)? Maximus went for just above the knees, in a style that seemed to be based on actual portrait-statues of Roman luminaries such as Julius Caesar and the emperor Trajan. A generation later, Lucius and his fellow fighters to the death wear garments that barely skirt their buttocks, displaying massive chunks of thigh. Perhaps director Ridley Scott meant this to symbolise the Roman Empire’s ever-increasing decadence over twenty years, or perhaps he thought the bulked-out Mescal looked sexier than Crowe—who knows?
But what really fascinated me, to the point that I started compulsively scanning the backgrounds in Gladiator II’s crowd scenes—the orgies, the imperial audiences, the seats at the Colosseum—to the exclusion of the movie’s predictable plot and dorky CGI, were the hairstyles. Especially the women’s hairstyles. Until not long ago, scholars believed that the almost impossibly elaborate concoctions of braids and curls that show up in marble and coin portraits of Roman empresses and other highly placed ladies depicted wigs, not actual hair arrangements.
Then, a Baltimore hair-salon owner, Janet Stephens, did some research and figured out how to recreate the ’dos on live models by sewing braids and other parts of tresses together (the Latin noun acus in connection with hair had been thought to mean a mere hairpin, but it also translates as sewing needle). In 2008, Stephens wrote up her findings in the Journal of Roman Archaeology as one of the few non-academics ever to have a byline in that prestigious publication. She now has YouTube tutorials demonstrating how to transform your female friends into empresses and Vestal Virgins. The Gladiator II credits don’t name her as a consultant, but her fingerprints are all over the cast’s hair. The styles are glorious in their intricacy and variety—and they are indisputably accurate.
In fact, those hairstyles may well be the only historically accurate thing in Gladiator II’s entire two hours and 28 minutes. Ridley Scott is famous for directing historical films that play fast and loose with history. His Napoleon (2023) featured French troops firing cannonballs at the Pyramids and a personal meeting at Waterloo between the Corsican and the Duke of Wellington that never took place. His Crusader movie, Kingdom of Heaven (2005), portrayed the medieval Mideast as a multiculti paradise disrupted by Western warmongers with crosses on their tunics. As for Gladiator II, critics have complained about every anachronistic detail, from the CGI sharks swimming in a flooded Colosseum during a staged sea-battle between gladiators, to a newspaper said to be on display at a Roman cafe—an early version of Starbucks, apparently—centuries before the invention of the printing press. Mescal’s Lucius quotes Virgil’s Aeneid, in a translation by Dryden that wouldn’t appear for another 1,400 years.
