The opening sequence of Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" shows Rome from the air as if seen from a passing helicopter. The city is made to look like Manhattan, a forest of towers and canyon streets. The subliminal message is clear enough: If Rome was the Manhattan of the ancients, then we naturally enough are the Romans of today. Americans have always modeled themselves on the Romans. And the Romans -- pragmatic, ruthless, patriotic, engineering-obsessed -- certainly look like the Americans of antiquity, a comparison made only the more alluring by what we perceive to be their pathological violence, their taste for lurid spectacle and their imperial overreach.
