How movie Gladiator showed the rise and fall of the Roman Empire?

Please can you explain from the start to end because i have some problems with history|||The movie starts out at the apex of the Roman Empire. It isn't really a linear history. It is a movie about a few different stories all crammed into one simple storyline. There really was an emperor named Commodus, and he really was a punk. He actually changed the name of Rome to Campus Commodus, or in modern English: Commodus town. What balls!


So anyway, the good Emperor Marcus Aurelius had conquered the world, and now he was getting ready to turn the Empire into a democracy, though technically a republic since it would be governed by elected officials in the Senate. But I digress.


When Commodus took over, he ruled horribly, and couldn't solve any of the problems the people were facing because he'd always lived in a palace where problems were merely imagined in the abstract the way we imagine algebra problems in our heads. He knew all about being fed, nothing about being hungry. He debased the common people by giving them gladiator tournaments and performances in the Coliseum. The people were not ennobled by these things, they were made more savage and less refined. There is a legend of a slave who became a gladiator who slew the emperor, but I don't think the emperor was Commodus. And I don't thing the slave was the former General of the Roman Army. But it makes for a nice Hollywood story, some truth patched together with a lot of dramatized fiction. I don't know if this helps at all, but Rome certainly wasn't built in a day or burned in a day.|||I wouldn't say that it really showed the rise of the roman empire, but it briefly showed rome during the reign of caesar augustus and then mostly concentrated on the reign of Commodus. I am pretty sure that the script is partly fiction. If you have problems with history i would concentrate mainly on the core storyline which is maximus being wronged by commodus and his efforts to get vengeance for the death of his family.|||Gladiator is a historically inaccurate depiction of Roman history.