Grave of the Gladiator

His name was Marcus Nonius Macrinus, he was general of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and was present on the battlefield in 169 AD. as legatus et comes in first German campaign against Quadi and Marcomanni; in his cursus honorum there are important both political and religious assignments from pro consulate in Asia and Africa to participation in the collegium XVviri sacris faciundis in charge of consulting the Sibillini books.
In 2008 his tomb was found along Via Flaminia; it was a funerary monument in shape of a Temple in the center of a garden protected by a wall placed between the consular road and bank of Tiber. Discovery of some parts of a great epigraph allowed its attribution to Macrinus, whose cursus honorum is also reported which, for some analogies with the story of the protagonist of movie "The gladiator", provided the media with opportunity of resounding titles on the discovery of the gladiator's tomb.
The analogy that most struck the public's imagination lies in the fact that both characters, the real one and the cinematographic one, were comes of Marcus Aurelius in the battles against the Quades and the Marcomanes and that both were "provincials", but the analogies end here.
If the general of the cult movie was a general who rejected the logic of the power of Rome in the second century, an anachronistic refusal that could only destroy it, general Marcus Nonius Macrinus was a leading figure in the Rome of the Antonines with whom he was also related having married Flavia Arria, belonging to the same family as Arria Fadilla, the mother of Antoninus Pius.
Macrinus was born in 111 AD. in Brixia (today's Brescia), an important and rich city of Cisalpine Gaul assigned from 89 BC. to the Fabii tribe and therefore of full Roman law; he belonged to the Marci Nonii family, who during the II and III century. A.D. had its own representatives in the Senate and Macrinus was certainly the most important exponent of these, so much so that the city chose him as its patron.
The city of Brixia gained importance after the second battle of Bedriacum when its population sided with Vespasian in the year of the four emperors. Vespasian compensated the city by having new and important public buildings built including the Capitolium where numerous statues were erected including the splendid Winged Victory, a bronze statue in which on a Hellenistic statue of Aphrodite of the III BC, were applied in the first century AD of the wings transforming it into the representation of Victory.
Nonius Macrinus was very young when he left Brixia to complete his training in Rome, almost certainly welcomed into the Aurelii family according to a widespread custom among senatorial families who favored close friendships in juventude between boys destined for leadership positions.
Nonius Macrinus thus became one of the friends of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, adopted children of the emperor Antoninus Pius. The strong bond of friendship was later confirmed when in 161 AD. Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus wanted sodales ex amicissimis Aurelianos creavere and Nonius Macrinus entered by right among Sodales Antoniniani.
Macrinus was a man of the Roman state and served under three emperors, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius and with increasingly important positions. One of his first important positions was X vir stilitibus iudicandis, or the magistrates who dealt with hereditary matters, then he was military tribune at the VII Gemina also known as Galbiana, a legion stationed in the hispanica province, and later at the X Fretensis in Jerusalem.
Back in Rome he became, in the early years of the empire of Antoninus Pius, first tribune of the plebs and then praetor. After the praetorship, he was entrusted with two of the tasks assigned to the former praetors: the command of the legion XIV Gemina, stationed at Carnuntum in Upper Pannonia, and then the administration of the neighboring province of Lower Pannonia, a position for which he remained in Aquincum from 151. to 153 AD.
His name then appears in the Fasti Ostienses which indicate him as a suffect consule of 154 AD. The following year he became curator for the control of the riverbed and the banks of the Tiber and then Antoninus Pius sent him as legatus Augusti pro praetore to govern the Pannonia Superior, a strategic province for the defense of the borders of the empire and remained there until 161, the year in which Antoninus died and was succeeded by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus ...