ABSTRACT
Gladiator is a revival of the Roman epic with many references to the glorious past of the genre. Despite this, the music by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard departs from the musical conventions established in the ancient epics of the 1950s and ’60s. Even though there was not one single style for music in the old epics, Stephen Meyer points out that these films established “a new repertoire of musical topoi for the representations of the ancient world.”4 As Meyer shows, Miklós Rózsa’s score for Quo Vadis (1951) was of crucial importance in this process, with the composer doing meticulous research in his striving for authenticity.5 In the end, though, as Meyer notes, it was not the historically authentic music that proved to be the most important legacy of Quo Vadis but Rózsa’s own pseudo-archaic music, which became “the archetypal sound of the ancient world for postwar American cinematic audiences.”6
