Roman historian rates 10 ancient Rome battles in movies and TV
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
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00 [SOLDIERS YELLING]
00:05 Roman generals almost never charge with the cavalry.
00:08 He loses his ability to command the battle.
00:10 He's out there wrestling with a German,
00:13 and it's his subordinate who's in the center
00:15 with the infantry.
00:16 My name is Michael Taylor.
00:17 I'm an associate professor of history
00:19 at the University at Albany.
00:20 I am an expert in ancient military history,
00:23 particularly focused on the military history
00:26 of the Roman Republic and the Roman army.
00:29 Today, we're going to look at ancient Rome
00:31 battles in movies and TV shows and judge how real they are.
00:35 [ENGINE ROARING]
00:36 Those are Roman triremes.
00:37 [ENGINE ROARING]
00:41 So we have here a time travel scenario
00:44 where Indiana Jones has been transported back
00:47 to the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC,
00:51 a plane flying over this siege where the Romans are trying
00:55 to capture the Greek city of Syracuse
00:57 during the Second Punic War.
00:59 One thing that Indy gets wrong is--
01:01 Harrison Ford calls these ships triremes.
01:04 At this point, the Romans are almost certainly
01:06 deploying quinquerremes.
01:08 A bigger ship has more rowers, more power,
01:11 and as a result, more deck space,
01:13 since you can actually put bigger catapults.
01:16 So if you're doing a naval siege, which
01:18 is an aspect of the siege of Syracuse,
01:20 you're going to want quinquerremes.
01:23 [ENGINE ROARING]
01:28 The sort of giant bolts penetrating the plane,
01:32 that's not necessarily unrealistic.
01:34 I would be very surprised if any Roman catapult or ballista
01:39 could range as far as they're shown in that scene,
01:42 shooting a plane out of the air.
01:43 [ENGINE ROARING]
01:49 So famously, the Syracusan defense
01:51 in the siege of Syracuse was overseen
01:54 by Archimedes, the scientist and engineer.
01:58 He also has set up a--
02:00 or rigged up a series of cranes.
02:02 And some of these cranes have a chain and a grappling hook.
02:05 Archimedes' cranes are supposedly quite effective
02:08 at swinging around, getting this grappling hook
02:12 at the end of the chain onto a ship,
02:13 and in some instances, capsizing the ship.
02:16 That story, of course, also over time
02:18 improved the telling, including the fanciful notion
02:20 that he rigged up a series of mirrors or reflective shields
02:24 to set Roman ships on fire.
02:26 That seems to be physically impossible.
02:28 The whole scene is fanciful and doesn't strike
02:32 me as terribly historical.
02:33 So I'd give it a three.
02:35 [ENGINE ROARING]
02:39 A sling can actually be reasonably effective.
02:41 You certainly can absolutely kill someone.
02:43 The one downside is a shield or a shield wall,
02:48 as those soldiers are making, is very likely
02:50 going to repel those slings.
02:51 So slings are used for skirmishing.
02:54 But if you have a really disciplined infantry formation,
02:57 you're not going to be able to break it apart just
02:59 with slings and arrows.
03:01 [YELLING]
03:06 We do have at least one instance of one line throwing it,
03:10 followed by another line, followed by another.
03:12 So a kind of rolling volley.
03:14 That is attested in our sources.
03:16 In Hollywood films, they very rarely show the Romans
03:19 hurling their javelins.
03:21 Every Roman legionary carries two heavy javelins.
03:24 They're called singular pilum, plural pila.
03:27 And they are very, very lethal weapons.
03:29 They have a long iron shank that goes through an enemy shield.
03:34 It keeps going to what's ever behind that shield.
03:37 So a pilum volley is a really devastating event.
03:41 Here, they're fighting light infantry,
03:42 but it's actually a way to even the odds when you're facing
03:45 a lot of missile troops.
03:46 You have things you can throw to make them run away.
03:49 [YELLING]
03:54 [GUNFIRE]
03:56 A testudo formation is just a very close, compact formation
03:59 where not only are the shields in the front of the formation
04:03 locked together, but the soldiers in the rear ranks
04:07 lift their shields over their heads.
04:09 The soldiers on their sides hold their shields to the sides.
04:11 And basically, it creates a kind of box-like formation,
04:15 protecting the soldiers as they move forward.
04:19 It is primarily attested in sieges.
04:22 [YELLING]
04:27 The guys actually walking up on the testudo
04:29 is also something that we hear of.
04:30 It's a way of getting guys over a low wall.
04:34 And it's something that is even practiced in the amphitheater
04:37 sometimes as a kind of show of military agility.
04:41 I'm going to give it an 8.
04:42 I liked an attempt to show how tactics might work.
04:45 [YELLING]
04:50 They, again, form a testudo there.
04:53 But they don't need to.
04:54 Form a testudo if there's some kind of overhead threat
04:57 of missile weapons.
05:00 There, it seemed that actually might
05:02 be a disadvantageous formation.
05:05 Because as they kind of show, if you're in that dense formation
05:09 and guys are coming at you, it's hard for you
05:11 to use your own weapons against them.
05:13 If I were a halfway sensible British warrior,
05:16 I wouldn't jump on top of a Roman shield,
05:18 because I know that there's a Gladius coming right behind it.
05:21 [YELLING]
05:28 So we do hear of a formation that you
05:31 use when you are, unfortunately, like these Romans,
05:34 surrounded by enemy.
05:36 And it's called an orbis, basically a circle,
05:38 as a formation that you use if you need to form
05:41 a perimeter on all sides.
05:44 So whether or not it looked exactly like that,
05:46 obviously, we can't say.
05:48 But that is actually a real formation.
05:51 [YELLING]
05:56 When we hear of chariots getting taken out,
05:58 the advice is send someone with a missile weapon, an archer
06:01 or a slinger, or in this instance, a guy with a pilum,
06:04 and kill the driver.
06:06 And then that disables the chariot.
06:07 That's probably one reason why chariots do go away,
06:10 is it is easy to kind of-- you kill one guy,
06:14 and then the whole system is sort of broken.
06:16 Whereas with the cavalrymen, you might kill one cavalryman,
06:20 but there's others on those horses.
06:22 Overall, this clip, I think, is pretty good.
06:24 I'm tempted to give it a nine.
06:26 [YELLING]
06:31 This sort of giant stone throwing catapults,
06:33 what the Romans might call an onager,
06:35 because it kicks like a wild donkey called an onager.
06:38 These huge catapults would probably not
06:40 be deployed in a field battle.
06:42 The Romans might use catapults like that.
06:45 You would use them in a siege scenario,
06:47 because when you're fighting a battle,
06:48 you want artillery that you can really easily reposition
06:51 as your forces move across the battlefield.
06:53 So the Romans do have field artillery that is tactical,
06:58 can be used in a battle, but it's smaller.
07:00 It can be carried on a cart.
07:02 [YELLING]
07:07 Flaming arrows might be used, again, in a siege scenario,
07:10 if you want to shoot them to light
07:12 the roof of a tower on fire, or light buildings,
07:14 say, behind a wall on fire.
07:17 They don't do you any good, again, in a pitched battle.
07:19 If you hit a guy with an arrow, his problem
07:21 is that he has an arrow sticking out of it,
07:23 not that the shaft is on fire.
07:25 Hollywood needs light, and flaming arrows
07:28 provide that for the kind of spectacle of the scene.
07:31 If you plan to advance over a battlefield,
07:34 you don't necessarily want to set it on fire
07:36 before your own forces move into it.
07:37 [YELLING]
07:43 In terms of what incendiary devices
07:45 are available to the Romans, they
07:48 have things like just putting charcoal in a pot,
07:51 and then those burning embers sort of pop out
07:53 when the pot breaks upon impact.
07:55 They do seem to use a variety of petroleum products
07:59 that might burn.
08:01 One thing I would note, incendiary devices
08:06 get really good in the Middle Ages,
08:08 and the secret ingredient there is gunpowder.
08:10 They don't have that in the ancient world.
08:12 So all of their incendiary devices are a bit subpar.
08:14 [YELLING]
08:21 One thing that is inauthentic is Maximus
08:25 leading the charge himself.
08:26 Roman generals almost never charge with the cavalry.
08:30 They tend to position themselves right
08:32 in the center of the battle, where they can kind of control
08:34 things and have the maximum situational awareness.
08:38 So for Maximus to charge with the cavalry,
08:40 note that he loses his ability to command the battle.
08:42 He's out there wrestling with a German,
08:45 and it's his subordinate who's in the center
08:47 with the infantry who's actually in the best position
08:49 to actually exert any kind of command and control
08:52 over that situation.
08:53 Roman generals like to stay in the middle,
08:55 and they usually stay with the infantry, in part
08:57 also because the infantry tends to be the decisive point
09:00 in Roman battle.
09:01 [YELLING]
09:05 The Romans basically do not use chariots
09:07 in any kind of tactical way, aside
09:10 from the ceremonial chariot.
09:11 So there would have been no scythe chariots.
09:14 [YELLING]
09:20 I would say that is a decent formation.
09:23 But if you're under any kind of cavalry attack or chariot
09:25 attack, it seems one of the best things you can do
09:28 is present a relatively dense, massed formation that
09:31 prevents any one or two people from getting picked off.
09:35 I'd say I'd be inclined to give it around a seven.
09:37 [MUSIC PLAYING]
09:41 This is a very rare clip that actually
09:44 attempts to show a legion maneuvering over a battlefield.
09:48 In the triplex occeas, the threefold battle lines
09:52 that the Romans have, where their cohorts,
09:55 their individual units, are right in this kind
09:58 of checkerboard formation.
10:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
10:05 So the Romans don't like to form a single, dense, massed
10:08 formation, because that single, dense, massed formation
10:11 can be brittle.
10:13 It can be broken up by an obstacle.
10:16 If it gets disordered, everything gets disordered.
10:19 Each cohort fights somewhat independently
10:21 of the other cohorts.
10:22 And that actually gives the overall legion
10:25 a lot of tactical flexibility on the battlefield.
10:27 [MUSIC PLAYING]
10:34 If I'm the Romans in the front rank,
10:37 and I see these guys rolling the fire logs,
10:40 I'm just going to kill the guys rolling the fire logs,
10:43 and then the problem is solved.
10:45 Also, my guess is those logs are kept on fire
10:47 because they've put a lot of gasoline on them.
10:50 The ancients are not going to have
10:51 any kind of incendiary materials as effective, which
10:55 means probably the logs are just going to burn out
10:59 as they're rolled forward.
11:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
11:05 So the swords approximate the Roman gladius
11:10 that is in use at this time.
11:13 And one thing that is inauthentic
11:17 is you do not use a gladius to sort of fence with,
11:20 the way they're fencing in this clip.
11:22 But a gladius is always used with a scutum.
11:24 The sword is too short and chunky
11:26 to effectively parry with.
11:29 Essentially, if you were confronting an opponent,
11:31 you absorb and parry his blows with your scutum,
11:34 and then you strike with your gladius.
11:36 It's the scutum and the gladius are together
11:38 a kind of weapons system.
11:39 I would give this a seven.
11:41 The classic legion moving across the field,
11:44 I've got to say I've got a soft spot for it.
11:47 Once everything degenerates into the scrum,
11:49 it gets a lot worse.
11:50 [HORSES NEIGHING]
11:56 Chariot racing is particularly popular
11:59 throughout the Roman Empire as a centerpiece
12:01 of games that are put on.
12:04 It's a dangerous profession.
12:05 Maybe not quite as dangerous as being a gladiator,
12:08 but it certainly is a very hazardous performance
12:11 that you're putting on.
12:12 Charioteers sometimes wear safety gear, but it's padded.
12:15 It's specifically designed for what
12:17 happens if I fall off this horse.
12:19 We do know that they would carry some kind of knife
12:22 to cut the reins.
12:23 They could kind of bail out of their chariot before things
12:27 truly spun out of control.
12:28 [HORSES NEIGHING]
12:29 Fire!
12:30 [MUSIC PLAYING]
12:34 Piracy at this point exists, but no pirate
12:39 is going to be in a position to have a huge fleet
12:41 and engage in a fleet style action against the Roman Navy.
12:45 These guys are going to be probably much more
12:47 similar to the kind of Somali pirates
12:49 that we've seen in the Red Sea.
12:52 Fishermen with boats or people who are sometimes merchants,
12:56 sometimes raiders, but not with the military capacity
12:59 of even trying to engage any kind of Roman force.
13:02 [HORSES NEIGHING]
13:06 Ramming speed!
13:06 [MUSIC PLAYING]
13:12 Yes, it's great to break their oars,
13:13 but it's even better if you can just
13:14 get your ram in the hull of their ship,
13:16 and then that sinks it.
13:18 We absolutely know that ships are sunk because of ramming.
13:23 They found off the coast of Sicily a series of rams
13:27 left over from a naval battle between the Romans
13:30 and the Carthaginians.
13:32 And where every ram is picked up off the seafloor,
13:34 that's where a ship got rammed, sank to the bottom,
13:37 the timbers rotted away, and now there's
13:39 a ram on the floor of the Mediterranean.
13:41 As much as the chariot scene is classic,
13:44 the naval battle is just awful.
13:48 So I'm going to say five.
13:50 [HORSES NEIGHING]
13:58 So this is based on the Battle of the Teutoburg Revolts.
14:01 Took place in 9 AD and was an ambush
14:04 by a Germanic confederacy of three Roman legions
14:08 that were moving through the Teutoburg Forest.
14:11 It's one of the heaviest losses that the Romans
14:14 suffer during the imperial period.
14:16 Three legions wiped out over the course of three days.
14:20 [THUNDER RUMBLING]
14:23 And this is the Roman army amid our forests and swamps.
14:28 So the Romans don't necessarily typically
14:30 march in a huge square.
14:32 Varus and his soldiers are vulnerable simply
14:34 because they're moving over narrow, more poorly developed
14:38 roads in a forest.
14:40 That's going to require them a relatively long snaking
14:42 column, which those three legions were supposedly, yes,
14:45 drawn out into.
14:46 [HORSES NEIGHING]
14:50 Soldiers fighting back to back here
14:52 certainly would not be ideal.
14:54 It's something you only do if you're caught
14:57 sort of unprepared in an ambush.
14:58 And the kind of formation that you might want to break into
15:01 if there's Germans on all sides might be something
15:04 like an orbis formation or some kind of square perimeter.
15:10 I'm going to give it an eight.
15:11 The military equipment actually looks quite good.
15:14 The rica segmentata armor is actually first
15:17 attested at this battlefield.
15:19 It's the first time we've recovered it archaeologically.
15:21 That kind of cool face mask we see the officer wearing
15:24 also reflects a find that we found at the Calcrisi site.
15:27 [HORSES NEIGHING]
15:32 I am not aware of any whistles being used.
15:34 We certainly know that trumpets are used to--
15:38 usually at a grander level to signal
15:41 troops to move in a certain way.
15:44 Here, probably the centurion's most effective sort of equipment
15:48 is just going to be his own voice.
15:50 Centurions are, I think, to use the cliche,
15:52 they're the backbone of the Roman army.
15:53 They are a very important officer in the Roman army.
15:58 There is 60 centurions in each legion.
16:01 And that means there's actually a lot of people
16:03 who can control troops at a kind of very local level.
16:06 So even if the general doesn't know what's going on,
16:08 centurions can make decisions.
16:10 [HORSES NEIGHING]
16:16 Now, we do know that Caesar's army, which
16:19 like the army in Spartacus, usually fights in three lines.
16:24 And one reason for doing that is if the people in the front line
16:28 become exhausted, you can bring up cohorts
16:31 from the rear ranks to replace them.
16:33 Now, that being said, we do not have evidence
16:35 of any kind of extremely coordinated system
16:38 of rotating men within an individual century or cohort.
16:42 That's something they've kind of made up.
16:46 The system that they show honestly
16:48 seems clumsy and impractical to me.
16:50 You don't want that many men cycling around a formation
16:54 when you're trying to maintain its coherence
16:56 and the goals are rushing against you.
16:59 We also do have a textual passage,
17:02 which describes a battle fought shortly after Caesar's death
17:06 as part of the Roman Civil War that simply says men
17:09 stayed in the front rank until they were killed
17:11 and then they were replaced.
17:12 So that probably is the simplest way to do it.
17:14 Get back in formation, you drunken fool.
17:17 [GRUNTING]
17:19 Polo and Varenus are based on actual centurions
17:23 in Caesar's army who fight valiantly for Caesar in Gaul.
17:28 Polo in this series is portrayed as this total screw up.
17:30 The actual historical Polo is a very, very effective centurion
17:35 just like Varenus and is a professional military man.
17:40 Some things that I like include the fact
17:42 that all of the Roman soldiers are wearing male armor.
17:45 That is authentic.
17:46 I do like the idea of Roman soldiers fighting
17:49 in coherent formations.
17:50 I'm going to give it an eight.
17:52 [GRUNTING]
17:57 The Romans are employing a type of heavily armored cavalry
18:03 called clebenarii or cataphracti.
18:06 These are developed in the east.
18:08 They're initially developed probably in Iran.
18:11 But the Romans learn of their effectiveness and copy them.
18:14 These are actually kind of the forerunners of, in some ways,
18:16 medieval knights.
18:17 Most of these units are still in the east,
18:19 but it's not impossible that you would have cataphracts fighting
18:24 in the late Roman West with both heavy armor
18:27 for the rider, heavy armor for the horses,
18:29 and using a lance as kind of the primary weapon.
18:31 [GRUNTING]
18:34 Horse archers, in general, can be extremely accurate.
18:39 The most accurate horse archers are
18:41 going to be those who are raised usually
18:43 on a kind of steppe or plains environment
18:46 and kind of grow up doing horse archery.
18:47 That's where the Romans will try to recruit their horse archers
18:50 if they can.
18:51 They can actually shoot, time their shot
18:54 for when in between the horse's hooves hitting the ground
18:57 so they actually have a pause to take an accurate shot
18:59 before they're pumped.
19:00 This film imagines that Arthur is a late Roman commander,
19:06 and he's given the same name as a historical Lucius
19:10 Artorius Castus.
19:12 He spent part of his career in Britain.
19:14 He probably lived in either the second or the third century AD.
19:18 Many hundreds of years before this film is set,
19:20 I'm going to have to give it a one.
19:22 The simple fact that there are Romans in Britain
19:24 in the fifth century is itself probably
19:26 the most ridiculous thing.
19:27 [EXPLOSIONS]
19:29 [SCREAMING]
19:33 Octavian's ships are so much faster than our Egyptian tubs.
19:36 The Battle of Actium is the last great battle
19:39 of the Civil War between Octavian,
19:42 the adopted son of Julius Caesar,
19:45 and Mark Antony, who had been one of Caesar's
19:47 most loyal lieutenants.
19:49 They soon come to blows.
19:50 And at the Battle of Actium, Octavian beats Mark Antony.
19:55 Mark Antony is allied with Cleopatra.
19:57 Cleopatra has inherited the Ptolemaic fleet,
20:02 and the Ptolemies have traditionally
20:03 had a fleet of very, very heavy warships.
20:06 That's actually one of the more accurate things
20:08 they say in the film.
20:09 Those ships are primarily designed,
20:10 it seems, to do naval sieges, kind of like the siege
20:14 of Syracuse we saw, where you want big ships that can
20:16 have a lot of artillery pieces.
20:19 This is one of the rare naval battles
20:21 where it does seem that incendiary devices are useful.
20:25 Possibly because the smaller ships that Octavian are using,
20:29 they're not gonna be able to necessarily effectively ram
20:32 all of Antony's big ships.
20:35 [ships whirring]
20:38 Throwing javelins is not going to stop you
20:43 from getting rammed.
20:45 Now, it may prevent you from getting boarded.
20:47 That could be a consideration of if you think
20:50 that ship is coming alongside you to board you,
20:55 you're gonna wanna try to kill as many soldiers
20:57 on the deck of the enemy ship to prevent a boarding.
21:00 Ironically, the one advantage of doing that
21:04 is if they've successfully rammed you
21:06 and your ship is stricken, you might try to get
21:09 onto their boat and board them.
21:11 There are some rams that are fitted above the waterline
21:16 as kind of secondary rams.
21:19 And those do tend to be a bit narrower.
21:22 It seems the idea is to cause kind of secondary damage
21:25 compared to the main ram.
21:27 The sort of big, pointy, pencil-like rams above water,
21:31 not super accurate, although again,
21:34 we do have some narrower above-water rams.
21:38 [ships whirring]
21:41 You don't do that with a Gladius.
21:44 If you're boarding an enemy ship,
21:45 you're gonna have your scutum,
21:47 and it's gonna be messy and nasty
21:48 and slippery and difficult,
21:50 but you're gonna fight as best you can,
21:53 protecting yourself with your shield,
21:55 striking with your sword.
21:56 I think this scene is just overall terrible.
21:58 I'm gonna give it a two.
22:01 I'm surprised to say, but my favorite scene
22:04 in terms of military accuracy was from "Risen."
22:07 I thought "Risen" did the best job
22:11 at actually showing kind of the range of actions
22:14 that Roman soldiers can undertake.
22:17 If you enjoyed this video, why not click on the next one?
22:20 [dramatic music]
22:23 [upbeat music]
22:26 [dramatic music]
22:29 (upbeat music)