Race and Rome

Men like thinking about the Roman Empire.

So, should Sir Ridley Scott have cast Denzel Washington as the bisexual bad guy in his new movie Gladiator II? Is it historically accurate to cast a black villain in the Roman Empire?

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Without having seen Gladiator II yet, I’d respond that casting Denzel is fine:

First, it’s the Gladiator franchise, which doesn’t pretend to have a track record of meticulous historical accuracy. As you probably recall (if not: spoiler alert), the 2000 Gladiator with Russell Crowe ends with the Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) being overthrown in A.D. 192 and…the Roman Republic being restored.

In actuality, the Roman Empire survived for another 284 years.

Second, he’s Denzel Washington, one of the great movie stars of his generation. (Check him out in 2012’s Flight for an example.)

Third, due to pro-black racial favoritism, black actors don’t get hired as often as they should to play antagonists. By most accounts, Denzel has a grand old time for himself in Gladiator II in his rare role as a miscreant. In contrast, white actors can make a living specializing as defective or dumb characters, like Phoenix in Joker, The Master, and the original Gladiator. (Unfortunately, Scott’s casting of Phoenix in last year’s Napoleon as Bonaparte, a legendarily competent man, proved a disaster.)

Fourth, there indeed were some sub-Saharans in the classical Mediterranean world; not many, but some, enough to justify casting Denzel in a popcorn movie.

For example, one of the more prestigious early converts to Christianity in The Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:26–40) is the “Ethiopian eunuch,” treasurer to Queen Candace of Kush, whom Philip the Evangelist encounters in his chariot on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. He was probably not from modern Ethiopia, but instead was a brownish Nubian from modern Sudan up the Nile River from Egypt.

The existence of the Nile made north-south travel in northeast Africa easier than crossing the Sahara in parched northwest Africa. This was especially true in Roman times before camel caravans began regularly connecting West Africa with the Mediterranean during the post-Gladiator late Roman Empire. (However, the impenetrable Sudd swamp on the upper Nile effectively blocked Mediterraneans from reaching the blackest parts of Africa by river.)

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Roman sailors similarly shied away from venturing far south in the Atlantic. {snip}

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Hence, there was a trickle of blacks into the classical Mediterranean world, mostly from east Africa.

But not many.

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