The 'Gladiator Effect': How a passion for ancient Rome drove the global far right crazy

Just hours after it was taken, the importance of that snapshot grew when one of its subjects, Alex Fields Jr., plowed a car into a crowd of civil rights activists, killing a young woman and injuring 19 others.

This is just one extreme example of how the international far-right exploits ancient Rome, perverting its history and symbols to their advantage. The problem is that this exploitation isn't exclusive to the until-2017 anonymous Alex Fields Jr., but also involves far-right leaders around the world, from Trump to Santiago Abascal, Elon Musk, and Javier Milei.

Sara E. Bond, a historian at the University of Iowa, was the one who put us on the trail of the Charlottesville photos in her article " Fasces, Fascism, and How the Alt-Right Continues to Appropriate Ancient Roman Symbols ." She acknowledges that, while in the specific case of those riots the fasces were used as a symbol legitimizing violence in favor of an idea, Roman symbols have been used for centuries for all kinds of purposes. Thus, in certain countries, Rome has encouraged republican systems tending toward democracy, and in others, fascism. Generally, the use of Rome today has become the exclusive preserve of extremists who simplify and pervert its history. And that's partly Russell Crowe's fault.

The actor starred in Gladiator in 2000, playing Maximus Decimus Meridius, a charismatic Roman general who ends up fighting as a gladiator in the Colosseum. As historian Oskar Aguado Cantabrana argues, this generated a "Gladiator effect": the film's success sparked a renewed fascination with all things Roman, which ultimately translated into a succession of memes that were transferred to politics.

And this is where the problem lies, because Rome and its history, interpreted and presented in these memes in a "very essentialist" way, as historian Francisco Machuca notes in his article " Make Rome Great Again ," has contributed to "social polarization." And, as luck would have it, the first to jump on this wave were our old acquaintances from across the pond. Let's start by quoting Hulk Hogan .

In July 2024, the wrestler addresses a crowd a few days after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump . Trump, his ear secured behind a strip of tape, proudly responds to Hogan's compliments: "My hero. My gladiator!" The crowd bursts into applause, but this identification of Trump with a gladiator fighting for the United States was nothing new.

In 2016, a social media user popularized a video meme depicting Trump fighting his political enemies in the film Gladiator . In the background, people can be heard chanting “USA, USA, USA!” before a victorious Trump ends the footage by saying, “We’re going to take our country back from these people… They’re bad. Bad people.”

But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Trumpism's use of the Roman is the recent inauguration of the so-called Third Term Project , an initiative that seeks to change the law so that Trump can run for a third term and that is promoted with a recreation of the president as a Roman emperor, something that, despite the apparently pleasant nature of the matter, has an undeniable authoritarian undertone.

This flirtation between Trumpism and the Roman Empire can also be found in some of Trump's well-known strategists, such as Steve Bannon, a renowned Romanophile, but above all in a figure who has the perfect tool to spread Roman history, conveniently perverted to serve his purposes. We're talking about Elon Musk .

It's common to come across billionaire X's social media platform, where he dresses as a gladiator or a Roman soldier, with futuristic-sounding uniforms and nicknames like "Emperor of Mars." But Musk often allows himself to lecture about Rome in his tweets, discussing historical matters he either ignores or manipulates, always using them to support his political thesis.

A telling case is that of Sulla, the dictator of Rome who promoted a series of murders and robberies, known as proscriptions, against all those outside his party. Musk has often cited this figure as an example, stating that "perhaps what we need is a new Sulla" to put things right.

Musk also uses Roman themes outside of his social media channels, as has happened in some of his interviews. In one, he argued that Rome fell because they stopped having children, thus justifying the need to increase birth rates in the United States, one of the country's biggest problems, in his view.

But there's more, because Musk also leads his followers to believe that Rome's destruction has to do with migrants when he tweets: "Shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire, the army also relied increasingly on non-citizens." A simplistic view of a fall that, as any reader of History and Life knows, was far more complex and multifaceted. Not to mention the fact that it's been proven beyond all doubt that if Rome survived for centuries, it was also due to migration.

As a final note on Musk, let's recall how at the beginning of 2025 the tycoon replaced his name on X with that of Kekius Maximus . Beyond its Roman echoes and the motivations for this change (it was even suspected that he was manipulating the price of a cryptocurrency of the same name), Musk also replaced his profile picture with that of Pepe the Frog, an internet personality that has ended up being appropriated by the far right and who, in the case of Musk's profile, appeared equipped with a Roman uniform.

In Europe, ultras also make extensive use of the Roman style. In the Spanish case, and reviving the idea of ​​the "Gladiator effect," in 2016, a still-inconspicuous Vox published a video in which Abascal appeared emulating the scene from the Russell Crowe film in which he caresses the ears of wheat in a field. A few years later, with Vox gaining popularity, a social media user emulated the Trump gladiator video by casting Abascal in the role of a tough fighter in the arena.

We find the gladiator fighting for his country again in André Ventura, Portuguese leader of the far-right party Chega!, who posted on social media an artificial intelligence-edited image of himself dressed as a Roman general, with the Portuguese flag towering over the Colosseum. We don't know if this pleased Italian Giorgia Meloni, who, for her part, is a strong advocate for Europe's capital to be relocated to Rome, because, in her view, ancient Rome is the birthplace of the European Union.