The Movie "Gladiator" in Historical Perspective
by Allen Ward, University of Connecticut
In real life, Commodus’ eldest living sister, Lucilla, did plot with a number of senators to kill him within the first two years of his reign. As the movie indicates, she had been married to Marcus’ former co-emperor, Lucius Verus. After that, however, specific historical details and the movie part company. Only fourteen when she married Verus in 164, Lucilla had borne him three children before she was widowed in 169. Obviously, the character identified as their eight-year-old son named Lucius Verus in the movie is unhistorical. In fact, their only son and one of their two daughters had died as infants. Their other daughter (of unknown name) survived to be engaged to Claudius Pompeianus Quintianus, either a nephew or son by a previous marriage of Lucilla’s second husband, Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus. Both this daughter and Quintianus participated in the plot of 182 but appear nowhere in the movie.
Interestingly, Lucilla did have a young son by Pompeianus at the time in which the movie takes place. About six years old in 182, he was Aurelius Commodus Pompeianus, who lived to become a consul in 209. He had survived because his father had never opposed Commodus.
Lucilla had nothing in common with her son’s father. Both she and her mother, the Empress Faustina, bitterly resented the marriage that Marcus had hastily arranged between her and Claudius Pompeianus. It had taken place only nine or ten months after Verus’ death, before the proper mourning period had ended. Lucilla was unhappy with the extreme difference in their ages: She was only nineteen and a half, and he may have been over fifty. Both she and her mother found him socially beneath their dignity. He was the son of a provincial Equestrian from Antioch in Syria. This marriage was the source of the cold relations between Lucilla and Marcus that the movie never adequately explains.
Having been an Augusta as the wife of Verus, Lucilla undoubtedly wanted to be one again. Marcus, however, had chosen Pompeianus as her second husband precisely because he was a loyal and valuable military officer who could protect the Imperial family but whose social station foreclosed any ambitions of his own for the throne. Even though his son or nephew Quintianus, his wife, and his stepdaughter were at the center of the plot in 182, he was completely uninvolved. That was fortunate for him. Unlike in the movie, the unsuccessful conspirators were executed, even Lucilla after she was briefly exiled on the Isle of Capri.
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