I just saw Gladiator on video last night, and one scene has me confused. Toward the end, when Commodus realizes that his sister is betraying him, he takes his nephew Lucius on his knee and tells him the story of Anthony and Cleopatra, about how women can sometimes do silly, inexplicable things, such as pressing a poisonous snake to her chest. Seemed to me he was intentionally trying to foreshadow what he intended to be his sister’s fate, and trying to make Lucius not suspect him when she’d wake up one morning dead of a snakebite.
A little while later, we see a scene of a snake slithering over a sleeping person. Aha, I think, he’s killing her.
But then, the following day, she turns up alive at the arena (during Maximus’s final battle)! Lucius is also alive, and so are the members of the senate…so who the heck was the snake for? Was it just a “mood” scene, to bring to mind what a slimy creep Commodus is? Or did the snake kill someone who I didn’t realize?