Historian Michael Taylor rates depictions of ancient Rome in movies and TV shows.
He reviews the depiction of gladiator fights in "Gladiator," starring Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix. He discusses the siege warfare seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Antonio Banderas. He breaks down the Roman naval warfare tactics in "Cleopatra," starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He explains the dangers of chariot racing in "Ben-Hur," starring Charlton Heston. He compares the unique military formations portrayed in "Spartacus," starring Kirk Douglas; "The Eagle," starring Channing Tatum, Donald Sutherland, and Jamie Bell; and HBO's "Rome," starring Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, and Ciarán Hinds. Finally, he analyzes the visual depictions of Roman armor and weapons in "King Arthur," starring Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, and Mads Mikkelsen; "Risen," starring Joseph Fiennes and Tom Felton; and Netflix's "Barbarians."
Michael Taylor is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany. He focuses on ancient military history, especially of the Roman army.
Michael's book, "Soldiers & Silver: Mobilizing Resources in the Age of Roman Conquest," can be found here:
https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477330777/
Follow Michael:
https://twitter.com/DrMichaelJTayl1
He reviews the depiction of gladiator fights in "Gladiator," starring Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix. He discusses the siege warfare seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Antonio Banderas. He breaks down the Roman naval warfare tactics in "Cleopatra," starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He explains the dangers of chariot racing in "Ben-Hur," starring Charlton Heston. He compares the unique military formations portrayed in "Spartacus," starring Kirk Douglas; "The Eagle," starring Channing Tatum, Donald Sutherland, and Jamie Bell; and HBO's "Rome," starring Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, and Ciarán Hinds. Finally, he analyzes the visual depictions of Roman armor and weapons in "King Arthur," starring Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, and Mads Mikkelsen; "Risen," starring Joseph Fiennes and Tom Felton; and Netflix's "Barbarians."
Michael Taylor is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany. He focuses on ancient military history, especially of the Roman army.
Michael's book, "Soldiers & Silver: Mobilizing Resources in the Age of Roman Conquest," can be found here:
https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477330777/
Follow Michael:
https://twitter.com/DrMichaelJTayl1
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FunTranscript
00:00Roman generals almost never charge with the cavalry. He loses his ability to
00:09command the battle. He's out there wrestling with a German and it's his
00:13subordinate who's in the center with the infantry. My name is Michael Taylor. I'm
00:17an associate professor of history at the University at Albany. I am an expert in
00:22ancient military history, particularly focused on the military history of the
00:26Roman Republic and the Roman army. Today we're going to look at ancient Rome
00:31battles in movies and TV shows and judge how real they are.
00:40So we have here a time-travel scenario where Indiana Jones has been transported
00:46back to the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, a plane flying over this siege where the
00:54Romans are trying to capture the Greek city of Syracuse during the Second
00:58Punic War. One thing that Indy gets wrong is Harrison Ford calls these ships
01:03triremes. At this point the Romans are almost certainly deploying quinquerimes.
01:08A bigger ship has more rowers, more power, and as a result more deck space
01:13since you can actually put bigger catapults. So if you're doing a naval
01:17siege, which is a aspect of the siege of Syracuse, you're going to want
01:22quinquerimes. The sort of giant bolts penetrating the plane, that's not
01:32necessarily unrealistic. I would be very surprised if any Roman catapult or
01:38ballista could range as far as they're shown in that scene, trying to, you know,
01:42shooting a plane out of the air.
01:46So famously the Syracusan defense in the siege of Syracuse was overseen by
01:54Archimedes, the scientist and engineer. He also has set up a, rigged up a series
02:01of cranes, and some of these cranes have a chain and a grappling hook.
02:05Archimedes' cranes are supposedly quite effective at swinging around, getting
02:11this grappling hook at the end of the chain onto a ship, and in some instances
02:14capsizing the ship. That story, of course, also over time improved the telling,
02:19including the fanciful notion that he rigged up a series of mirrors or
02:23reflective shields to set Roman ships on fire. That seems to be physically
02:27impossible. The whole scene is fanciful and doesn't strike me as terribly
02:32historical, so I give it a three.
02:39A sling can actually be reasonably effective. You certainly can absolutely
02:43kill someone. The one downside is a shield, or a shield wall, as those
02:48soldiers are making, is very likely going to repel those slings. So slings are used
02:53for skirmishing, but if you have a really disciplined infantry formation, you're
02:57not going to be able to break it apart just with slings and arrows.
03:06We do have at least one instance of one line throwing it, followed by another
03:11line, followed by another, so a kind of rolling volley. That is attested in our
03:15sources. In Hollywood films, they very rarely show the Romans hurling their
03:19javelins. Every Roman legionary carries two heavy javelins. They're called
03:24singular pilum, plural pila, and they are very, very lethal weapons. They have a
03:30long iron shank that goes through an enemy's shield. It keeps going to
03:35what's ever behind that shield. So a pilum volley is a really devastating
03:40event. Here, they're fighting light infantry, but it's actually a way to even
03:43the odds when you're facing a lot of missile troops. You have things you can
03:47throw to make them run away.
03:56A testudo formation is just a very close, compact formation where not only are the
04:00shields in the front of the formation locked together, but the
04:05soldiers in the rear ranks lift their shields over their heads, the soldiers on
04:09their sides hold their shields to the sides, and basically it creates a kind of box-like
04:14formation protecting the soldiers as they move forward. It is primarily
04:20attested in sieges.
04:24The guys actually walking up on the testudo is also something that we hear
04:30of. It's a way of getting guys over a low wall and is something that is even
04:35practiced in the amphitheater sometimes as a kind of show of military
04:40agility. I'm going to give it an 8. I liked an attempt to show how tactics
04:45might work.
04:49They again form a testudo there, but they don't need to. You form a testudo if
04:55there's some kind of overhead threat of missile weapons. There, it seemed, that
05:01actually might be a disadvantageous formation because, as they kind of show,
05:07if you're in that dense formation and guys are coming at you, it's hard for you
05:11to use your own weapons against them. If I were a halfway sensible British warrior,
05:16I wouldn't jump on top of a Roman shield because I know that there's a Gladius
05:19coming right behind it.
05:27So we do hear of a formation that you use when you are, unfortunately, like
05:33these Romans, surrounded by enemy. It's called an orbis, basically a circle,
05:38as a formation that you use if you need to form a perimeter on all sides.
05:44So whether or not it looked exactly like that, obviously we can't say, but that
05:49is actually a real formation.
05:56When we hear of chariots getting taken out, the advice is send someone with a
06:00missile weapon, an archer or a slinger, or in this instance a guy with a
06:03pilum, and kill the driver. And then that disables the chariot.
06:07That's probably one reason why chariots do go away. It is easy to
06:13kill one guy and then the whole system is sort of broken, whereas with the
06:18cavalrymen, you might kill one cavalryman, but there's others on those
06:21horses. Overall, this clip, I think, is pretty good. I'd be tempted to give it a
06:26nine.
06:31This sort of giant stone-throwing catapults, what the Romans might call an
06:35onager, because it kicks like a wild donkey, called an onager. These huge
06:39catapults would probably not be deployed in a field battle. The Romans
06:43might use catapults like that. You would use them in a siege scenario, because
06:47when you're fighting a battle, you want artillery that you can really easily
06:50reposition as your forces move across the battlefield. So the Romans do have
06:54field artillery that is tactical, can be used in a battle, but it's
06:59smaller. It can be carried on a cart.
07:03Flaming arrows might be used, again, in a siege scenario if you want to shoot them
07:11to light the roof of a tower on fire or light buildings, say, behind a wall on
07:15fire. They don't do you any good, again, in a pitched battle. If you hit a
07:20guy with an arrow, his problem is that he has an arrow sticking out of it, not that
07:23the shaft is on fire.
07:25Hollywood needs light, and flaming arrows provide that for the kind of spectacle
07:30of the scene. If you plan to advance over a battlefield, you don't necessarily want
07:35to set it on fire before your own forces move into it.
07:43In terms of what incendiary devices are available to the Romans, they have things
07:48like just putting charcoal in a pot, and then those burning embers sort of pop
07:53out when the pot breaks upon impact. They do seem to use a variety of petroleum
07:58products that might burn. One thing I would note, incendiary devices get really
08:06good in the Middle Ages, and the secret ingredient there is gunpowder. They don't
08:10have that in the ancient world, so all of their incendiary devices are a bit subpar.
08:21One thing that is inauthentic is Maximus leading the charge himself. Roman
08:27generals almost never charge with the cavalry. They tend to position themselves
08:31right in the center of the battle, where they can kind of control things and have
08:35the maximum situational awareness. So for Maximus to charge with the cavalry, note
08:40that he loses his ability to command the battle. He's out there wrestling with a
08:44German, and it's his subordinate who's in the center with the infantry who is
08:48actually in the best position to actually exert any kind of command and
08:51control over that situation.
08:53Roman generals like to stay in the middle, and they usually stay with the
08:56infantry, in part also because the infantry tends to be the decisive point
09:00in Roman battle.
09:05The Romans basically do not use chariots in any kind of tactical way, aside from
09:10the ceremonial chariot. So there would have been no scythe chariots.
09:20I would say that is a decent formation, but if you're under any kind of cavalry
09:25attack or chariot attack, it seems one of the best things you can do is present a
09:29relatively dense, massed formation that prevents any one or two people from
09:34getting picked off. I'd say I'd be inclined to give it around a seven.
09:41This is a very rare clip that actually attempts to show a legion maneuvering over
09:47a battlefield. In the triplex acies, the threefold battle lines that the Romans
09:53have, where their cohorts, their individual units, are arrayed in this
09:58kind of checkerboard formation.
10:04So the Romans don't like to form a single, dense, massed formation, because
10:10that single, dense, massed formation can be brittle, it can be broken up by an
10:14obstacle. If it gets disordered, everything gets disordered.
10:19Each cohort fights somewhat independently of the other cohorts, and that actually
10:23gives the overall legion a lot of tactical flexibility on the battlefield.
10:34If I'm the Romans in the front rank and I see these guys rolling the fire logs, I'm
10:41just going to kill the guys rolling the fire logs and then the problem is solved.
10:45Also, my guess is those logs are kept on fire because they've put a lot of
10:48gasoline on them. The ancients are not going to have any kind of incendiary
10:54materials as effective, which means probably the logs are just going to burn
10:58out as they're rolled forward.
11:05So the swords approximate the Roman gladius that is in use at this time. And
11:14one thing that is inauthentic is you do not use a gladius to sort of fence with
11:20the way they're fencing in this clip. But a gladius is always used with a scutum.
11:24The sword is too short and chunky to effectively parry with. Essentially, if
11:30you're confronting an opponent, you absorb and parry his blows with your scutum,
11:34and then you strike with your gladius. The scutum and the gladius are together a
11:38kind of weapon system. I would give this a seven. The classic legion moving across
11:43the field, I've got to say I've got a soft spot for it. Once everything
11:48degenerates into the scrum, it gets a lot worse.
11:56Chariot racing is particularly popular throughout the Roman Empire as a
12:00centerpiece of games that are put on. It's a dangerous profession, maybe not quite
12:06as dangerous as being a gladiator, but it certainly is a very hazardous performance
12:11that you're putting on. Charioteers sometimes wear safety gear, but it's
12:15padded. It's specifically designed for what happens if I fall off this horse. We
12:19do know that they would carry some kind of knife to cut the reins. They could
12:23kind of bail out of their chariot before things truly spun out of control.
12:34Piracy at this point exists, but no pirate is going to be in a position to
12:40have a huge fleet and engage in a fleet-style action against the Roman
12:44Navy. These guys are going to be probably much more similar to the kind of Somali
12:48pirates that we've seen in the Red Sea. Fishermen with boats or people who are
12:54sometimes merchants, sometimes raiders, but not with the military capacity of
12:59even trying to engage any kind of Roman force.
13:11Yes, it's great to break their oars, but it's even better if you can just get
13:14your ram in the hull of their ship, and then that sinks it. We absolutely know
13:20that ships are sunk because of ramming. They found off the coast of Sicily a
13:25series of rams left over from a naval battle between the Romans and the
13:30Carthaginians, and where every ram is picked up off the seafloor, that's where
13:35a ship got rammed, sank to the bottom, the timbers rotted away, and now there's a
13:39ram on the on the floor of the Mediterranean. As much as the chariot
13:43scene is classic, the naval battle is just awful. So I'm going to say five.
13:58So this is based on the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald. This took place in 9 AD
14:02and was an ambush by a Germanic confederacy of three Roman legions that
14:09were moving through the Teutoburg forest. It's one of the heaviest losses
14:13that the Romans suffer during the imperial period. Three legions wiped out
14:17over the course of three days.
14:25So the Romans don't necessarily typically march in a huge square.
14:32Varus and his soldiers are vulnerable simply because they're moving over
14:35narrow, more poorly developed roads in a forest. That's going to require them a
14:41relatively long snaking column, which those three legions were supposedly, yes,
14:45drawn out into.
14:49Soldiers fighting back-to-back here certainly would not be ideal. It's
14:54something you only do if you're caught sort of unprepared in an ambush.
14:58The kind of formation that you might want to break into if there's
15:01Germans on all sides might be something like an orbis formation or, you know,
15:07some kind of square perimeter. I'm going to give it an eight. The military
15:12equipment actually looks quite good. The Rika-Segmentata armor is actually first
15:17attested at this battlefield. It's the first time we've recovered it
15:20archaeologically. That kind of cool face mask we see the officer wearing also
15:24reflects a find that we found at the Kalkriese site.
15:31I am not aware of any whistles being used. We certainly know that trumpets are used to,
15:37usually at a grander level, to signal troops to move in a certain way. Here
15:44probably the centurion's most effective sort of equipment is just going to be
15:48his own voice. Centurions are, I think, to use a cliche, they're the backbone of the
15:53Roman army. They are a very important officer in the Roman army. There's 60
15:59centurions in each legion and that means there's actually a lot of people
16:02who can control troops at a kind of very local level. So even if the general
16:07doesn't know what's going on, centurions can make decisions.
16:15Now we do know that Caesar's army, which like the army in Spartacus, usually
16:21fights in three lines and one reason for doing that is if the people in the front
16:27line become exhausted, you can bring up cohorts from the rear ranks to replace
16:32them. Now that being said, we do not have evidence of any kind of extremely
16:37coordinated system of rotating men within an individual century or cohort.
16:42That's something they've kind of made up. The system that they show
16:47honestly seems clumsy and impractical to me. You don't want that many men cycling
16:52around a formation when you're trying to maintain its coherence and like the
16:56Gauls are rushing against you. We also do have a textual passage which
17:02describes a battle fought shortly after Caesar's death as part of the Roman
17:07Civil War that simply says men stayed in the front rank until they were killed
17:10and then they were replaced. So that probably is the simplest way to do it.
17:19Polo and Veranus are based on actual centurions in Caesar's army who fight
17:25valiantly for Caesar in Gaul. Polo in this series is portrayed as this total
17:30screw-up. The actual historical Polo is a very, very effective centurion just like
17:35Veranus and is a professional military man. Some things that I like
17:41include the fact that all of the Roman soldiers are wearing male armor. That is
17:45authentic. I do like the idea of Roman soldiers fighting in coherent formations.
17:50I'm gonna give it an 8.
17:56The Romans are employing a type of heavily armored cavalry called
18:03clebinarii or cataphracti. These are developed in the east. They're initially
18:09developed probably in Iran but the Romans learn of their effectiveness and
18:13copy them. These are actually kind of the forerunners of in some ways medieval
18:17knights. Most of these units are still in the east but it's not impossible that
18:20you would have cataphracts fighting in the late Roman West with both heavy
18:27armor for the rider, heavy armor for the horses, and using a lance as kind of the
18:30primary weapon. Horse archers in general can be extremely accurate. The most
18:40accurate horse archers are going to be those who are raised usually on a kind
18:43of steppe or plains environment and kind of grow up doing horse archery. That's
18:48where the Romans will try to recruit their horse archers if they can. They can
18:51actually shoot, time their shot for when the, you know, in between the horse's
18:56hooves hitting the ground so they actually have a pause to take an
18:58accurate shot before the pump. This film imagines that Arthur is a late Roman
19:05commander and he's given the same name as a historical Lucius Artorius Castus.
19:12He spent part of his career in Britain. He probably lived in either the 2nd or
19:16the 3rd century AD. Many hundreds of years before this film is set I'm gonna
19:20have to give it a one. The simple fact that there are Romans in Britain in in
19:24the 5th century is is itself probably the most ridiculous thing.
19:32Octavian's ships are so much faster than our Egyptian tubs. The Battle of Actium
19:37is the last great battle of the Civil War between Octavian, the adopted son of
19:44Julius Caesar, and Marc Antony, who had been one of Caesar's most loyal
19:48lieutenants. They soon come to blows and at the Battle of Actium Octavian beats
19:54Marc Antony. Marc Antony is allied with Cleopatra. Cleopatra has inherited the
20:00Ptolemaic fleet and the Ptolemies have traditionally had a fleet of very, very
20:05heavy warships. That's actually one of the more accurate things they say in the
20:09film. Those ships are primarily designed, it seems, to do naval sieges, kind of like
20:13the Siege of Syracuse we saw, where you want big ships that can have a lot of
20:18artillery pieces. This is one of the rare naval battles where it does seem that
20:22incendiary devices are useful, possibly because the smaller ships that Octavian
20:28are using, they're not going to be able to necessarily effectively ram all of
20:32Antony's, you know, big ships.
20:38Throwing javelins is not going to stop you from getting rammed. Now, it may
20:46prevent you from getting boarded. That could be a consideration of if you
20:50think that ship is coming alongside you to board you, you're going to want to try
20:55to kill as many soldiers on the deck of the enemy ship to prevent a boarding.
21:01Ironically, the one advantage of doing that is if they've successfully rammed
21:05you and your ship is stricken, you might try to get onto their boat and
21:10board them. There are some rams that are fitted above the waterline as kind of
21:18secondary rams, and those do tend to be a bit narrower. It seems the idea is to
21:23cause kind of secondary damage compared to the main ram. The sort of big,
21:28pointy, pencil-like rams above water, not super accurate, although, again, we do
21:34have some narrower, above-water rams.
21:42You don't do that with a Gladius. If you're boarding an enemy ship, you're
21:45going to have your scutum, and it's going to be messy and nasty and slippery and
21:49difficult, but you're going to fight as best you can, protecting
21:53yourself with your shield, you know, striking with your sword. I think this
21:56scene is just overall terrible. I'm going to give it a 2. I'm surprised to say, but
22:02my favorite scene, in terms of military accuracy, was from Risen. I thought Risen
22:09did the best job at actually showing kind of the range of actions that Roman
22:15soldiers can undertake. If you enjoyed this video, why not click on the next one?