Colossi of Pharaoh Ramses II

Source: Bigstock

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?

Conversely, should New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art be hosting an exhibit titled “Flight Into Egypt” celebrating African-Americans’ dubious assertion that blacks are responsible for ancient Egypt’s artistic glories?

My view on ethnic casting is that different art forms need different norms. In opera, for instance, singing ability is far more important than visual authenticity, so anything goes. In big-budget movies, however, actors need to be cast so as to maintain suspension of disbelief during close-ups.

Theater, in contrast, falls in between opera and film. I sympathize with low-budget acting troupes who just want to put on a show with whomever they’ve got on hand.

In contrast, the Metropolitan is America’s foremost museum, so it should be expected to mount a scholarly exhibit that calls more skeptical attention to bogus claims such as the common assertion that blacks built Egypt.

My view doesn’t mean that a film actor’s family tree has to resemble the genealogy of his character, just that he should look like it does. For example, New Zealand Maori character actor Cliff Curtis can plausibly play Arabs and Mexicans. (Presumably, there are also Mexicans and Arabs who likewise can get by credibly as Maoris.)

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.)

It was, however, not impossible for Romans to get across the Western Sahara before well-organized camel caravans. We have records of a number of legionary expeditions across the Sahara, at least one of which brought back a rhinoceros to fight in the Colosseum (as depicted in Gladiator II).

But there wasn’t much profit in the arduous overland trip. After all, Romans had no compunctions about enslaving anybody from their own part of the world, so they hardly had to cross the Sahara to find slaves.

Roman sailors similarly shied away from venturing far south in the Atlantic. Unlike the Portuguese and Spaniards in the 15th century, who were blocked from trading profitably with the Indies by Muslim control of Middle Eastern choke points, the Roman Empire controlled the easy sea route to India: sail down the Red Sea, then have the steady monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean blow you directly to the Malabar Coast of India. So, to get to the rich Indies, the Romans had no need to go around Africa or around the world as the audacious Iberians did 1,500 years later.

While sailing about in the Indian Ocean, Romans and Greeks also occasionally traded with sub-Saharan ports on the east coast of Africa. But there was less to trade for in Africa than in India.

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

But not many.

Harvard ancient DNA geneticist David Reich estimated in 2017 that among Egyptians around the time of Christ there was 6 to 15 percent sub-Saharan ancestry. That’s not a large fraction, but it’s not tiny, either. Likewise, the appealing Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt depict a certain number of Egyptians who resemble the new generation of mixed-race NFL quarterbacks, such as Patrick Mahomes.

On the other hand, the black share of Egyptian ancestry appears to have been climbing over the millennia. When the superb traditional Egyptian aesthetic, such as hieroglyphics, first emerged about 5,000 years ago, the population was largely descended from Caucasian farmers of the Fertile Crescent.

Hence, the Met Museum’s current show about African-American infatuation with ancient Egypt is embarrassing because it lacks the guts to mention that blacks didn’t have much to do with Egypt’s artistic accomplishments.