The Prince of medicine, by Susan P. Mattern – review

In the first draft of the screenplay for the film Gladiator, the character to be played by Russell Crowe (‘father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife’, etc) was named not Maximus, but Narcissus. Which might have made for a slightly different movie. One can imagine the emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) telling the beefy hero, ‘I’m entrusting the empire to you, Narcissus, because you’re loved by the soldiers, more gifted than my son Commodus, and also because you take better care of your skin than any general I’ve ever known.’

The reason for the original choice of praenomen was that the character was loosely based on a real-life athlete named Narcissus, believed to have killed Commodus in 192 AD. The emphasis here is on ‘loosely’. The historical veracity of the film is practically nil, which doesn’t make much difference unless you happen to be a historian of the period, like Susan P.