“What We Do in Life, Echoes in Eternity”: An Ecocritical Reading of the Scenery and Landscapes in Gladiator

This chapter discusses how the film’s scenery and its representation of the natural world allow for reflecting on Gladiator as an environmental narratives twenty years after its release, especially since ecocriticism has grown since then. By considering the set design through the lens of the picturesque and the pastoral, this chapter first reexamines the significance of the rural world in the film, thus moving beyond the centrality of the Roman urban environment that appears in other scholarship. Then, through a more ethical perspective, this essay discusses how the movie scenery not only fosters a sense of connectedness between the human and the nonhuman by taking into account the strict bond between Maximus, the soil, and animals, but it also has several trajectories that suggest how the movie engages spectators by promoting a sense of ethical relationality between the human and the environment.