You know that the Partial Historians can’t resist talking about Ancient Rome on film, so we were thrilled to chat to Dr Jeremiah McCall about his book, Swords and Cinema.
The cover of Swords and Cinema by Dr Jeremiah McCall
Who is our special guest?
Dr Jeremiah McCall (or DMac as his students call him) is a teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School in Ohio with a PhD in Ancient History.
Along with an interest in Roman military and political systems in the Republic, he has done a lot of work on pedagogy of using video games to learn about history, publishing Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History in 2022.
He divides his research time between historical game studies and Roman history. Dr McCall’s other publications include The Cavalry of the Roman Republic (2002); the Sword of Rome (2012), Clan Fabius: Defenders of Rome (2018) and Rivalries that Destroyed the Roman Republic (2022).
Manly Men
We will touch on the battle scenes and depiction of the Roman military in all your favourite Roman movies and TV shows.
Things to Look Out For:
- The defeat of Spartacus – Spartacus vs. Rome: The Last Battle
- The battle of Alessia (52 BCE) in HBO’s Rome – Rome Fighting with Gauls HD
- The battle of Philippi in HBO’s Rome – HBO Rome – Battle of Philippi (Battle only)
- The opening battle sequence in Gladiator (2000) – Gladiator 2000 Opening Battle
- And a bit on Centurion (2010) and The Eagle (2011) to finish!
- The Eagle | Channing Tatum Fends Off A Midnight Sneak Attack
- The Eagle | Channing Tatum Leads Roman Centurions Into Battle
- Centurion 2010 Best movie Scene HD
- Plus some things that get set on fire!
You will need your popcorn for this special episode!
Sound Credits
Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.
Automated Transcript
Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to the partial historians.
Speaker 1 0:19
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,
Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battle’s waged, and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad
Speaker 1 0:33
And I’m Dr G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.
Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.
Dr Rad 0:54
Hello and welcome to a special episode of the partial historians. I am one of your hosts. Dr rad,
Dr G 1:02
and I am Dr G,
Dr Rad 1:05
Dr G, we are joined by somebody who shares a passionate interest of mine, actually a couple, I think, probably as well as yours. We are very lucky to be joined by Dr Jeremiah McCall, or DMac, as his students call him, which I think makes him very much at home on this particular show. He is a teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School in Ohio, and he has a PhD in ancient history, along with an interest in Roman military and political systems in the Republic. He has done a lot of work on pedagogy, of using video games to learn about history, publishing Gaming the Past: Using video games to teach secondary history in 2022. He divides his research time between historical game studies and Roman history. Dr McCall’s other publications include The Cavalry of the Roman Republic in 2002, The Sword of Rome in 2012, Clan Fabius: Defenders of Rome in 2018 and Rivalries that destroyed the Roman Republic in 2022 but today we are here to talk all things, movies and the military. Welcome. D Mac, thanks.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 2:21
It’s great to be here. I’m really excited to talk about this.
Dr Rad 2:24
Oh, we are very excited. I always cannot turn down an opportunity to talk about Rome on film.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 2:32
It’s interesting the book, I gather the book did well enough, right? Like I didn’t make a fortune. Buy me a coffee, coffee, and that’s better than buying a book, but I gather it did well enough that they put it into a paperback, but it’s one that really I haven’t gotten to talk to you about a lot, and I certainly thought it was kind of a fun idea, so I’m glad to be here. So
Dr Rad 2:53
can you please maybe start by giving us a bit of an overview of the development of the Roman army, because your interest in this book is all about the military and the Roman army and how they appear on screen as well as the Greeks, but we’re just going to ignore that part for today. So maybe knowing a little bit about the Roman military would help our listeners sort of get situated.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 3:12
Sure, absolutely. I guess one of the things I should say about the book is there are lots of different ways one can approach film and history, and I was absolutely not approaching it as a trained scholar of film in history. I was approaching it as a bunch of years sitting around on a couch having a beer or something like that, and you’re watching the movie, and somebody’s like, Oh, that’s so fake. Or yeah, that’s how it really was. And, you know, writing a book for that just sort of like, okay, they’re films, and some of them are really great films. But you know, are they depicting battle? Are they depicting armies and soldiers and fighting in ways that kind of fit the evidence? So the Roman army of the Republic, if you go back, so I was, I was saying to Dr G A little earlier that I had just listened to part of your we’re too episode. So if listeners are kind of in the fourth century with you about to attack, they at that point, sort of in the late three hundreds. We think that Rome had a military that was essentially like most of the Greek city states. So it was called a phalanx. I’m not sure if your readers are familiar with it, but basically the idea is you got your citizen soldiers together, and they had big, round shields and stabby spears and maybe a helmet or something else like that, but they lined up in these sort of large formations, with the idea being that it’s kind of like a shield wall. Everybody covered themselves and the people next to them, and phalanxes don’t turn well, and they don’t go on rough ground well. And the only thing they’re really, really good at is kind of moving forward and going stabby, stabby, at anything that they see in front of them. So that seems to be. Earliest Roman military system, and like the Greeks, they divided it up so that your wealth determined whether you would fight in the Phalanx, or whether you might be a slinger or something like that. But eventually, and we don’t know why, right? I mean, the thing about the Roman Republic is our evidence is so bad for most things that we’re looking at. Amen, yeah, right, exactly. Well, you two are so courageously going through, you know, military tribunes with consular powers and all that stuff. And I’m like, oh my goodness, yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if we really knew about that? I think that’s our conclusion most episodes, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it’s important, right? I was, I was saying, before we started recording, you know, I took notes for this, and, and, and you both know, as you’re, you know, with your own PhDs in the field, it’s not about instant recall or memorizing facts, right? It’s about being able to look at the evidence and ask the questions and, and sort of go from there, you know, point of fact, I had to review to make sure that I had my Roman army talk in good shape. Anyways, going back to the Phalanx, somewhere in the late three hundreds, three elevens, often given as a date, the Romans seem to have shifted their military away from the Phalanx, and they adopted this system that persisted through most of the Republic, which was called the manipular army, Plutarch and Livy are sources for this. They don’t agree on most of the major points. They’ve got different names, they’ve got different types of units. They’ve got different numbers involved. Bless all the philologists out there that can figure out, you know, who’s got the better source, or something like that. That is beyond me, but this seems to be the basic deal. Basically, you had four legions under the command, each under the command of a council by 311 they had passed a law to do that, apparently. And each of those legions was divided up into maniples. And maniples, I think the word means handful, I believe, or something like that, is where it comes from. But basically we’re a group of soldiers, 120 normally, and then 60 and the smallest side. And so if you had 120 soldiers, I believe, you had 10 maniples of what they called the Hastati. So these were the guys with the big spears that kind of charged forward and stab. Sometimes. They had a pilum, which we’re going to talk a lot about pilam pila today, because they’re not in any of the movies, and I don’t understand why. So the Hastati were the heavy infantry who would start the battle. The principes were behind them, and they were sort of the men in their prime, and they would kind of continue on the battle. And then after them were the triarii, who were probably armed like hoplites, and their job was just, if everything hit the fan, they could sort of form a defensive group. So the idea seems to be that these maniples were arranged in, sort of think about like the five spots on a die. So you have a gap in between each line that’s being filled by a manifold behind it, and we kind of think they fought that way with gaps in their lines, but we don’t really understand how they did. But the thing that the sources seem to agree upon is somehow the back lines were able to relieve the front lines, maybe even in the middle of battle. We’re not entirely sure about that, and that’s something that shows up in the sources, too. Anyway, the manipular army was flexible. It had small units that could go around and do important things on the battlefield. And right, the Romans ended up winning lots and lots and lots and lots of battles.
Dr Rad 8:34
What they did, oh, my god, everybody,
Dr Jeremiah McCall 8:41
it’s so true. Well, it was so funny, because, like, on a certain level, right? The movies all depict the the opponents of the Romans as not being as effective. And I guess that must be true, right? I mean, on some
Speaker 1 8:52
level, on a practical level, it seems like that might be the case. So you mentioned a couple of written sources like Livy and Plutarch when we’re talking about the ways that we start to understand the Roman army is the written source material, the kind of material we’re able to use when we’re evaluating depictions of battles and Roman soldiers on screen. Or are there other sources we should be interested in, and what things do we know very little about?
Dr Jeremiah McCall 9:22
Sure, fantastic. So we’ve got the literary sources right. Livy Polybius, little bit of Plutarch when we start, when we get to the end of the Republic, Caesar, becomes invaluable with his civil war and his and his Gallic Wars. When we get into the Empire, we have tastus talks about military things, and Ammianus Marcellinus on the late end of those things. In all of that, there are no soldiers accounts. We do not have anything that’s coming from people that actually fought in battle, other than as a general, or certainly, at least didn’t fight in the battles they were describing. If you think about the Greeks as a difference, right? We have poetry fragments. We have. Have a historical account written by people who actually did fight in some of their battles. So that’s kind of one of our big things, is we have all these sources, some of them right when you get to Livy, he never participated in a battle in his life, as far as we know. So we have a lot of unexpert people talking about something that they didn’t directly experience. And then there’s all of us, thankfully. So right, not fighting with each other, with with, well, I’m not fighting with anybody with anything but, but certainly not with stab stabby spears and swords and things like that. And so, you know, one of the things that happens is trying to figure out, well, what was this actually like when the stakes were real and people, you know, people were trying to kill each other. Archeological sources almost non existent for the Republic. We would love to have a depiction of what the soldiers, different soldiers in the maniples, look like. There is an altar to demius, ahenobarbus, Bronzebeard in first century, I think early first century, that seems to show a Roman infantry soldier and a Roman cavalry person, but that’s kind of it. When we get to the Empire, we have all of those victory columns, right? And the triumphal arches are like Titus triumphal arch, and it’s Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, right? I think that have the columns. I think Trajan
Speaker 1 11:19
has a column, doesn’t? He doesn’t. Marcus. Marcus Aurelius has a column as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the spiraling sort of reliefs, yep.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 11:27
And so they show soldiers in battle, and that helps us a little bit too. So those are kind of our big things, as far as what we have for sources. Now, what don’t we know as a result of that? Well, everything.
Dr Rad 11:39
Damn, let’s just end this podcast right now.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 11:46
Much like Socrates, we are wise and that we know, we know nothing. No, that’s actually, that’s
Dr Rad 11:50
actually wild when you think about it, because the Roman army is obviously such a big part of what people think about when they think of Rome, and generally when we do obviously see Rome appear in the cinema. It is focusing around moments of conflict where there are going to be the spectacular battle scenes. So it is wild to think about how little we actually know.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 12:10
Yeah, so you got to fill in a lot of imagination. And I guess, you know, we’ll talk about that more, but I guess that’s where I kind of come down on these movies, is you’ve got to have some imagination. You can’t, you know, you’ve got to picture this somehow in your head if you’re really going to kind of bring it to life. So what? What do you do when you know nothing other than these, you know, carved in stone figures, absolutely.
Dr Rad 12:30
Well, maybe we should start talking about a real example. And listeners of the show will not be surprised to hear that. We’re going to start with my personal favorite, Spartacus, 1960 now, this is a bit of an unusual one, in the sense that it is set in the late Republic. We don’t have a ton of movies that are set in the Republic, and this obviously details the uprising of the gladiator Spartacus and his war against Rome. However, one of the weird things about this film is that there is a bit of a lack of battle scenes. You know, you might expect, given that this is about a war between a gladiator and Rome, that there’s a lot of battle scenes, but there aren’t a ton. But can you talk us through the way that that final battle scene between the slave army and Crassus Roman forces was represented because that’s perhaps one of the more spectacular sequences. Yeah, absolutely.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 13:23
And I really had fun kind of going back. I don’t think I had all the video clips when I wrote the book originally, so it was great going back. And so when you look at Spartacus, yeah, and I think I remember reading about this somewhere, I’m pretty sure they had more battle scenes that they had to cut along the way that.
Dr Rad 13:40
Yeah, it’s part of the very troubled production history of this film. There was a lot of talk about what they were going to film, when they were going to film it. The battle scenes were certainly something that they were going to add some in at the end, because they realized that they hadn’t really shown Spartacus winning and so the Romans being afraid of him didn’t entirely make sense in the way that the film came together. They’re like, Wait, why are they afraid of him? You don’t really see him winning terribly much, but it became part of the incredibly chaotic later production of this film that they didn’t end up getting a ton of them back into the movie. The one that you do see, of course, is Spartacus defeat, which is this battle that we’re talking about, which not everybody in the film was thrilled about. That. That was the big spectacular sequence, because they were trying to build up a Spartacus who was a very impressive military figure in the equal of the Romans. And they felt that by giving all this screen time to his defeat, it again, didn’t quite match up with the portrayal that they were going for.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 14:43
Do I understand correctly? I swear I came across this recently, that there’s also that, you know, sort of cold war mentality, that there was a fear that Spartacus could represent, sort of the proletariat forces, kind of triumphing over the good imperialist America. I’m sorry, Romans, no.
Speaker 1 14:59
Yeah, we can’t have that happening under no circumstances.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 15:03
Oh, I’m going to be so good and not talk about politics today.
Dr Rad 15:08
Oh, no, look, I think there definitely could have been a bit of that going on. But of course, one of the things that’s interesting about Spartacus is the fact that so many people who were working on this film were communists or ex communists. So Dalton Trumbo, obviously was one of the people fighting to show Spartacus as an impressive military figure. And Howard Fast, whose novel The movie was based on, had very deliberately set up Spartacus and the slaves as a kind of proto communist society, where it was very ideal and utopian. In his novel, that was a very clear message, if you read the book that this is based on, so they’re probably actually not wrong, isn’t it?
Dr Jeremiah McCall 15:50
It’s fascinating how it’s all a playground. I, you know, I I came into reception studies, really long way around that wasn’t my training. And then I got into video games and history. But as you both know, as teachers, as high school educators, you’re both high school educators, right? I thought, I thought I got that right. Reception studies is everything we do, right? What’s a student? But you know, you know, learning with you and studying with you, and then you have this interesting example of, well, how do they take this, this evidence? How do they take their readings and their discussion and their video games and stuff like that? So, yeah, it’s all reception studies sort of on a certain level. Okay, so last battle scene, right? Spartacus and his army are up at the top of the hill. Crassus and his army, his army has sort of paraded by as he’s sort of sitting on the side watching, and that’s probably reasonably accurate, since the generals wouldn’t necessarily be in the front as they were doing that. But basically, you’ve got this mash up. There’s a scholar in Manchester, I think Manchester in Britain, Richard Cole, who’s been doing some work on video games as historical video games as mashups and Spartacus, the battle is definitely a mash up. You’ve got, first of all, the classic, you’ve got the sculpted body armor made out of leather with all the muscles. Not ever do we have any evidence that any average soldier was wearing these. They’re probably expensive. They may not even have been that comfortable. So they’re wearing those they’ve got the Taru gaze right the letter, leather flaps going down to guard their abdomen, and that’s all mash up. The shields are mostly straight instead of curved, and so their helmets are kind of okay, but otherwise, it’s a little Greek, it’s a little Etruscan. It’s a little Roman as they’re going on. And leather armor seems to be a fascination for lots of filmmakers, and they just didn’t wear it for good reason. It doesn’t stop a spear or a sword or anything like that. Don’t you think it must be about what props they had, you know, like what they had on set, what they were able to kind of get?
Dr Rad 17:59
Oh, they like reusing things. They
Dr G 18:02
definitely like reusing things. Yeah. So they’ve
Dr Jeremiah McCall 18:05
got, they’ve got their Gladius looking swords, um, so that’s okay, um, but the spears that they have are clearly thrusting spears. Now here is nerd 101, on spears. Okay, if, if the diameter of the spear shaft is like an inch and a half or two inches, and it is straight the long way, and you have kind of like a broad shade, broad tip on it. Then it is a spear, and you’re using it to stab somebody and keep in your hands. But the Romans used the pilum, which was this kind of specialized javelin, where you throw it, and it was made of a wooden shaft and socket, and then it had kind of like a really thin spit of metal, and then a really kind of fine tip. And the idea was they would throw it before they went into battle, as far as our sources can tell us, and it did a devastating job, demoralizing enemies. And sometimes, if it went through shields, it bent very easily. And we don’t know whether they plan for it to bend or it was just was just luck on their part, but it goes through the shields and bends, and then you’ve got this six to 10 pound weight holding down your shield as well, so it makes it harder to defend yourself. And listeners will have to report into you, and you’ll have to get back to me. I don’t think there’s a single movie that’s tried to represent
Dr Rad 19:19
this. I can’t think of one. No,
Dr G 19:22
I’m keen for details. Get in touch listeners.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 19:26
I think it must be really well. See today though, they have all the special effects, but it must be really hard to represent a bunch of javelins, like going through the air and people. So usually what they end up doing is sort of just a shield smash instead. So they don’t, so they have stabby spears, they don’t have pila as they’re going in the part that kind of fascinated me as I was looking at it. There’s some promotional materials that talk about how the Roman was organized. A Roman army was organized in the in the first century, and they had shifted. The short version is they shifted from maniples to. Cohorts. The cohorts were uniform soldiers. They were all heavy infantry, equipped and armed the same, but they still seem to have that gap system where the rear lines could kind of support the front lines. Kubrick goes for this. He has 10 units, as you should have a Roman legion should have 10 cohorts, and he’s got 10 units, and there’s a gap between them, they look like the five sided dice, except for there’s actually four rows of them, which no source ever attests to, but he’s got four rows of them. And they march up, and then when they get to the bottom of the hill, the front line extends so the two cohorts are in front extend so that they become a solid line of soldiers. And then they march up the hill, and the rest sit back. And I don’t know if they’re taking tea or having a holiday or something like that, but they’re not doing the thing that you would expect them to do, which is support the front lines. So I love the fact that they tried to do something with these gaps in the mandibles, and they tried to do something with formation. And I think when it comes to sort of the grandeur of the Roman army. They did a really cool job. But this is not how it happened. This is clearly not how it happened, but that’s actually one of the areas we don’t know a lot about. We don’t know how it happened, but it doesn’t seem to be this. Suppose you were a soldier going up a hill, and you saw some people at the top of the hill, and they had these logs, and they were standing there, and they lit the logs on fire. Okay, so you’ve got the flaming logs and you’re at the bottom of the hill, and they’re at the top of the hill, and they’re still holding the flaming logs, and they seem to have two people on each side to drag them. What
Speaker 1 21:31
do you do? Well, I wouldn’t be woken up that hill. And I was
Dr Jeremiah McCall 21:36
trying to think about because on the one hand, it’s like, right, why are you? It’s like, No, I think I’ll just wait down
Speaker 1 21:42
here. Yeah. Like, I can wait it out. Those logs will eventually burn through. It will take days, but I can wait to the logs are gone, and then I’ll go up the hill Exactly.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 21:52
So then, then it’s like, well, maybe the commander made them go up. Now, I don’t know we actually, I think we have, like, maybe one reference to incendiary items being used in any of these battles. And believe it or not, I thought this was I thought this was absolutely false. I couldn’t believe it, but I was researching a Roman video game, Rome, total war once. And apparently there is a testimony, I think Appian says it at once, a flaming pig. Yes, I’m a vegetarian. I’m not a big fan of lighting pigs on fire. Yeah, me too, yeah. So anyway, so, yeah. So they’re going up that hill, and the Rolling Rock logs come down, and much as you would expect, they burn people. And some of the soldiers jump over the logs, and some of them get rolled over by the logs. Logs done damage, done. Front row not supported. Then you basically have the troops all run down the hill, getting to each other, and you have a brawl. Military History, Roman, military, well, any ancient military history for at least the past 140 years, it’s been seriously questioned whether armies, when they got into battle, kind of broke up into these groups that you see, pretty much you see it all over Spartacus, right? There is all doing duels, this little clump, that little clump, right? And so on. And the argument was made a long time ago, in the 1870s by a French artillery officer. I think that if all you did was have the two sides kind of mix it up and Brawl, then the larger force would always win, because there’d always be more people right in in the bar fight as it were, not, not that I have any experience with bar fights,
Speaker 1 23:27
but I think that’s one of these things where our inability as modern people, living in very lush lifestyles, where we’re Not conscripted into armed forces, but we study history is, how do we understand these things? And I think this is where people who have been in military settings and do military history become highly valuable, because they do see how it works and how it doesn’t work and what would immediately make sense and not make sense in these contexts.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 24:02
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s really stretching your mind into something, into an area that most of us just have no experience with, gratefully, certainly. So they’re all brawling. We’ll get into it a little more in some of the other films about how they deal with that idea of combat. But Spartacus, they’re all, they’re all duking it out. And then you have the aristeia, right? You have the courageous individual Spartacus going through, and he’s lopping off. He’s stabbing people. I forgot the part where he chops off somebody’s arm and they show and I was like, oh, that’s 1960 special effects. That’s good stuff, right there. So he cuts off somebody’s arm, and he stabs somebody, and he’s he takes them all out. And there’s a lot of focus on that, and there’s a lot of room. There’s so much room to just sort of wander around with your horse and stuff like that. It’s like, how did you get these 10s of 1000s of soldiers to come together and fight? But there’s all this room. It all stays very. Open. It’s all very much a brawl. It’s not really going to help us visualize first century battles very well at all. I love that they tried it. I think that kudos goes to anybody who tries it. I think one of the limitations that we often don’t think about with with movies is everything’s on screen, so you’ve got to have an answer to everything. How did they fight? How did they march? What did they wear? What were they wearing? Because you like, I mean, we get away with writing, right? We can write a sentence and leave 1000s of details out and nobody necessarily notices because the sentence is so self contained. You can’t just have like a big blank screen with just like a Roman standing there and nothing else you got to fill it in,
Speaker 1 25:43
awaiting historians details come back. Right, exactly. No.
Dr Rad 25:48
I mean, I think, I think that raises such a good point, because we’ve been talking a lot about gladiator movies, obviously with Gladiator two coming out recently, and one of the things that we often talk about is the fact that, obviously in modern retellings of gladiator movies, particularly like, think about the Russell Crowe ones. I should have called them the Ridley Scott ones. Sorry, sorry, Australian loyalty. Exactly. We do tend to see gladiators fighting without a helmet, particularly if they’re the star of the movie, and that’s because they’re being paid millions of dollars as an actor, for us to actually see them, and we want to see the emotion, you want to see the terror. We want to see them scowling at each other and all of that kind of stuff. But that obviously, genuinely rarely happened. If you were Gladiator, you generally had some sort of head covering on because, you know, protecting the head that seems to be a priority. I feel like it’s the same thing sometimes with these battle sequences, with the brawling in that the person who’s shooting the film wants to be able to get in there, close and see, you know, some of the main characters duking it out with each other, because they don’t necessarily really care about what else is happening around them. They’re focusing in on the main characters, you know, Crassus versus Spartacus, and that’s what we as the audience also kind of want to see. So I feel like cinematically, that’s probably more a reflection of what they want to deliver to us emotionally, and that’s perhaps why they don’t really think about the accuracy of what’s going on around these people.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 27:15
I think that that’s a really good take. I hadn’t, I hadn’t quite thought about that way, but you must be right, certainly about the helmets, but I think you must be right too about the having the space to be able to maneuver the cameras and things like that. You know what it is the ultimate effect in Spartacus gets you very much at something that. Okay, quick disclaimer, everything I say is based on 25 years old research and occasionally writing new books. So anything I say can be, I’m sure, contradicted and countered and told that I’m silly by whoever the current crop of historians is on this that being said least 20 years ago, conventional wisdom was that Homeric fighting might have been like this, where you have the heroes. I mean, obviously the Iliad depicts it as the heroes fighting and the soldiers mobbing around. But apparently there’s some scholarship that suggests that there is something like that going on that you have these sort of Battle Plan leaders who are better equipped and more focused on and a bunch of supporting soldiers. Spartacus, really kind of does that sort of that Homeric fighting, and he’s not as cool as Diomedes because he doesn’t stab a god. But, you know,
Dr Rad 28:29
yeah, I also like to think that with Spartacus, I feel like the reason why some stories tend to make it into TV and film multiple times is partly because the source material that it’s drawing from is naturally more cinematic in the way that it’s described than others. So for example, I feel like Herodotus, the way that he writes, you can literally lift dialog out of that and put it on the screen, and that’s been done in 300 and I feel like it’s the same thing with Spartacus, because of the way that Plutarch writes, there are these inherently cinematic moments, and one of them is Spartacus supposed death scene. We do have this description of him in that final battle, heroically trying to cut his way. You know, through to Crassus. You know him being protected by some of his most loyal adherents. And gradually they’re cut down one by one, until finally, Spartacus is dealt a death blow. I mean, that is screaming out for Hollywood, and that’s, I think, what we’re kind of seeing on the screen here. Now, did Plutarch know what he was talking about? Probably not.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 29:34
I know. I know you both have found this to be the case because I’ve listened enough. And you know, as far as like looking at the reconstructions that these ancient sources give and how little they’re based upon. And I, I think at the end of the day, it’s one of the things that makes somebody like me think that video game and movie adaptations and scholars like you two as well are reasonable because we’re doing everything from. Secondary sources from people who had not a clue and were at least 500 years after the fact, and not always. I mean, sometimes they were only 100 years after the fact. It doesn’t seem so strange to take, you know? I mean, I think the battle scene in Spartacus is at least as is least as likely to be authentic as Plutarch version of what’s going on there. Neither of them is really giving you much of a version of what the mechanics are. Wow.
Dr G 30:26
Okay, so turning away from Spartacus, because I know Dr Rad could stay here for a whole hour, if not longer, I want to sort of switch focus to a much more recent adaptation. HBO is Rome, which I still love after all of this time. So I think the first season aired in like 2005 which is probably showing its age at this point. But it’s a very different time period for bringing a Roman army onto the screen. It’s post dating Gladiator, which it obviously sort of kicked off in everybody’s minds. Oh, we need to think about Rome and Rome on screen. But how does HBO is Rome fair when depicting Roman soldiers?
Dr Jeremiah McCall 31:09
Yeah, it’s a really great question. Yeah, that was such a fantastic series and and they stopped.
Dr G 31:15
I was so sad. Yeah
Dr Rad 31:17
Capitalism ruins the party again.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 31:22
Okay, so when you, when you get, when you get to HBO, is wrong. I think there are some problems, I think, with what they do, but, and I know nothing about who was behind the filming or the directing, or the or anything like that, but you really start to see a vision of a Roman battle that I think becomes useful. You know, we talk sometimes about, can you learn from this movie, or what can you learn from that movie, or stuff like that? And I guess I’m always reminded, right, that, and I think this is a Plutarch quote, but it’s the you’re not a vessel to be filled with education, right? You’re, you’re a set of logs that are supposed to be sparked and, you know, and lighting a fire. And so I wouldn’t want my students to be passively learning something ever if I can avoid it, I would want to be actively engaged in it. And so I think the interesting question is, do these films allow us, if we’re interested in either because we’re professional historians, or we’re nerding out, or whatever it is that gives us joy, do they help us visualize what it might have been like, so that we can then compare it to our sources and talk with people on podcasts and things like that. So I think HBO Rome does it. I think that the battle of Alessia, I don’t think it says Alessia. I think it says Alessia. I think it just says Gaul. So this was in, I believe, 52 BC, and Caesar was up in Gaul right on his 10 year campaign. Again, if you guys ever make it to the third and second and first century, I am so ready to come on back and talk about those books we intend to I will be old. I will be significantly older then, but still excited to talk about Roman things. So the Battle of Alessia, Caesar’s there. He’s conquering Gauls. That’s a siege. It’s an interesting siege of the town of Alessia, because a Gallic army comes up, and so Caesar’s soldiers are in fortifications where they’re both fencing in the city that they’re besieging and fencing out the other army that’s coming to support them. HBO is Rome. Does nothing with that. It’s Gauls. There’s no reason for them all to be standing in this woody area. But they don’t care. They’re just going for it. So what exactly this is supposed to be, I’m not quite sure, but that’s but that’s not to detract, I think, from from the achievement. So you look at it and you really see that they’re trying to make this idea of the organized Romans versus the semi organized or disorganized goals. Interestingly, as far as we can tell, the goals weren’t that disorganized. By the first century BC, the Romans had taken a lot of techniques and a lot of equipment from the Gauls. And so as Roman historians, we always love a good, you know, barbarian joke here or there. But the reality is that it wasn’t quite that distinct. And yet, clearly the Romans put a lot of energy into maintaining a training system and a formation system and an officer system that could hold up the stresses. So they’re standing there the soldiers under Vorenus is centurion. It must be because he’s a centurion, and you can see an optimally equipped legionnaire, almost. They’ve got scale armor. They got ring chain mail, which is absolutely what was being worn at the time by the wealthiest. But by the first century, most were being supplied with that. They have their Scutum, they have their they have their shields, probably a little too early, they have these shields that are rectangular and curved, and that seems to be early empire. But it’s okay. They look good. They’ve got their helmets. They’ve got their Gallic helmet, actually, and they’re looking good. And they. Got their Gladius, and they don’t have pila. They do not have a single
Dr G 35:06
missing an opportunity. Again,
Dr Jeremiah McCall 35:08
I know, and you’re thinking to yourself as an armchair general, right? You’re like a throw of some pila could be really useful here. I would think, I reckon, I wonder if
Dr Rad 35:18
it’s a health and safety thing that you know, just hurling these gigantic javelins is just too risky. But then again, there are so many scenes where they love having the rain of arrows.
Speaker 1 35:28
I was gonna say, why don’t they sub out the rain of arrows, which we know is historically inaccurate, and put in some throwing javelins. Come on. Yeah, I
Speaker 2 35:38
know. I know. So, okay, so Okay, so they don’t have that great vision here, you know, we’ll forgive them those things again. I do wonder about equipment costs and how much they were trying to borrow and whatever. So they’re waiting there, and there’s tension, and soldiers are all gritty and dirty looking, as you would expect them to, and this is some pretty serious business. And so they clash, and it looks really good. They’re smashing shields into shields. They’re trying to knock each other down. The Romans are using their stabbing motion. The Gladius was supposed to be good for both a cut and a stab. They seem to be doing a good job with that. And the Gauls are a bit more disorganized, and they’re not having an easy time of it. So the first part is where Vorenus is mad at pulley Pullo because he’s broken ranks. So that happens first. So, so pull over at the headstrong one breaks ranks and he’s off fighting his own personal battle. And and again, this fits what we know personal battles were not being fought by Romans in the middle of battles before the battle, quite possibly, maybe with the cavalry off on the side of a battle, but they weren’t doing it in the middle of the battle, because that’s when you have to keep your formations and everything. So there’s this wonderful scene where Vorenus is, and I just love it. He’s like, formation pull though, and you just, you’re like, you can, you can feel it. You go, okay, yeah, I would assume a century and had to grunt like that. I mean, because it’s battle, it’s serious business. Pullo goes ahead, doesn’t listen to anybody. Kill some balls. And Vorenus says on me. And he gets a group of loyal soldiers to come with him, and they go out into this little group. And suddenly, as you were saying, Dr Rad, you have all this space for the camera. Suddenly, there’s space for varenus to punch Pullo, have people grab him, force him back into line as he’s turning and talking and calling him a drunken fool, and then have him walk back to the front lines without any of the calls hitting them. Okay, so that’s drama. The idea of emphasizing military discipline definitely over aggrandized. And I almost, I almost feel like we have to make a moral note here, by the way, a side note, which you are welcome to cut if you’d like. But let’s remember that there are horrific white supremacists in the world that over state Roman order and fascism and all these things, and they do it for evil purposes. So I don’t want to, I don’t want to overstate the Roman order thing, but clearly our sources say that that was part of it, that they were trained and disciplined. So the Varanus and polo episode, that makes sense. So I’m stoked I’m watching it. This is great. It’s only been two minutes, and then I see it, and I said, What the hell was that? Do you know what I’m talking about? Okay, so what the hell was that? Okay? So he blows his whistle. Cool a whistle for command. Sure. Why not? I don’t know that we have evidence for that, but they had to do this. Somehow. He blows his whistle, varenus, and then the front line, the front line, dudes in the Roman army all turn sideways and sidle their way down between the tight rows of infantry on their side. And when you look from the top, they’re sidling down and going to the back. The next person in line goes to the front. What they don’t show you it well, they show you in the in the clip on the overhead shot is each of those soldiers has their left hand with their Scutum, with their shield and their right hand, sorry, and their left hand is also holding their Gladius, because their right hand is on the straps of the soldier in front of them. What is that so? So basically, we’re asked to imagine, and I’m going to be nice to this after so we have to assume is the front guys would all be able to sidle their way back. The person behind them would be able to let go of the guy, shuffle forward, take his Gladius from his from his hand, from his shield hand, hold up his shield and and refresh while people were trying to kill them.
Speaker 1 39:40
I do think this might be a logistic way of trying to solve like, how do we do it? Like they’re standing there with all of the equipment and they’ve got whoever is their master of battles behind the scenes being like, how are we going to do this change of formation? Like, how do we make that work physically? It’s like you’ve got this giant shield, you got this sword, if you’re holding both at the same time. Maybe you’ll accidentally injure the person who you’re relieving. So we’ve got to get them out of the way. But this obviously sets up that next line to be completely vulnerable. So presumably, it’s not how it was done.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 40:12
I think you’re right, though. I mean, I think you know, props are due. This is the most serious, scholarly version of this you’ve seen in film, right? I mean, Spartacus isn’t doing anything close. They tried with their cohorts. So there are a couple of historians, I can’t remember. It’s been a while. I don’t think anybody supported the Rome version recently, but there have been a couple of scholars that suggested this is what happened, that in the midst of the fight, individual roles of soldiers would relieve each other. But, yeah, it kind of staggers the imagination that that could work. But that’s one of those gaps in our evidence. We don’t know how they relieved each other. We have no idea how that worked. It seems impossible. The best argument that I’ve heard well, I mean, we don’t even know. We don’t even know if the if the cohorts fought in those regular lines, as much, or whether they were just all sort of clumped, it’s the best answer I’ve heard is that there are actually probably a lot of gaps in fighting and a lot of pauses. Particularly if you stayed in your kind of orderly groups, you’d clash together, and people would die, and energy would be exerted, and then they’d back off. There’d be a natural pause every so often, and maybe that’s it. But I think you’re right. I think this is a serious I shouldn’t have said scholarly, because scholarly is not the standard by which history is history. It is instead interpretation of the past selectively in a way that you find meaningful. So maybe, maybe scholarly is not the word, but it is a serious attempt, I think you’re right to figure out what the heck might have this
Dr Rad 41:44
is the tricky thing about being an academic who studies history on film, because so often you’re like, that is completely inaccurate. And then people say, Okay, well, how should it have been? I have no idea, but I know that that’s not how it was, exactly,
Dr Jeremiah McCall 41:57
and that’s that. And that goes back to like, I’m not going to try and pronounce the French on it, because my French pronunciation has been made fun of in like six US states. And the setting of a film, right? All right, I’m going to try. It’s mise en scene. Oh, yeah, the mise en scene, yeah, yeah. There you go. See, I knew I could goad you into pronouncing it, because I can’t, in any event, right? The setting of the setting of the scene, everything that’s in the shot. And yeah, they’ve got everybody in the shot, so they got to figure out some way to relieve and so, yeah, that’s what they do. So, yeah, you know, I mean, fair enough at the end, this is probably the best that you’re going to see. And then they get to Philippi, and they kind of go for it even more. Still, don’t have pila. It’s a civil war. Romans are afraid of spears too. Why aren’t they doing a nice I
Dr Rad 42:43
mean, surely if you’re gonna have peeler, it’d be in a civil war when they’re wrong, you think right, because everybody’s got them,
Speaker 1 42:49
that’s when you have to surprise them by showing up without them. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2 42:53
it’s like, it’s like a pila fight in a phone booth or a knife, but you brought a dope Philippi. The sources are pretty clear. There were two battles, not one, but, but this telescope says, cinema does the setting they’re making dry and dusty, although I don’t actually, I mean, it was, I think it was spring or summer time, and Greece can be dry and dusty in that time. I think the seriousness of the soldiers, their shields are kind of at rest, leaning against their knee, which makes a lot of sense. And, you know, kind of the seriousness on their face, and that’s something that HBO really kind of goes with, is trying to get sort of the gravity of this. And I love the fact that when they do this, I assume they must be using CGI stuff to add on to it, but they have many, many units on the field, and they’re taking these aerial shots, and you absolutely have the sense that they’re in different units coming together, and they come together and they clash again. They didn’t throw a pila at each other, but they clash with each other, and they’re stabbing and they’re thrusting, and it devolves into chaos in the front, but it doesn’t devolve into quite as much chaos. So you got a sense, maybe, that there are still formations back there, but it’s, it’s a brutal slug fest. Is a brutal stab Fest in the front rows. And I think they do a really good job with all of that. And then no whistles are blown, but they relieve the front lines and do that thing again. You’re like, okay, they’re committed to this. This is how it’s, it’s the way. And I should say it looks really cool. It looks really cool when they do it. The shot of the relief. Couldn’t ask for anything more interesting, too, except for when Brutus commits suicide. There’s no aristeia, there’s no there’s no individual leaders going through and making a show. I don’t think that our protagonists are even in there. I don’t think verenus And polo are even at that battle. I can’t remember, but Anthony’s not going in doing that. Of course, Octavian is not doing that. Was sick. He was not feeling well,
Speaker 1 44:50
yeah, excuse me, I’m not I’m not sure what anybody’s trying to say here about
Dr Jeremiah McCall 44:56
he had to rest in his tent. Apparently, we thought. Ahead. Now, of course, I’m a middle I’m a middle aged history teacher in high school, so I would not be doing any better. I mean, so I should not be throwing stones. But in any event, the No Irish days makes sense. You got the generals kind of behind commanding and sending in reserves and things like that. So I think they do a really good job on that. I don’t think they do starting speeches. I think, you know? I mean, if we’re going to nitpick, right, Antonius was certainly charismatic to his soldiers, and we don’t ever have him being, like, giving a speech or something like that. And I believe Brutus and Cassius, I think all this show, because I just went back to the video clips, I think all they’re doing is arguing or is talking about what he wants on his birthday. And isn’t it his birthday? And shall he have a cake? Which do Romans have cake? I don’t. Well, the bigger
Dr Rad 45:44
questions. Feel like, no, like, I take cake very seriously, and I feel like they don’t have cake. Like, I understand
Dr Jeremiah McCall 45:50
it, yeah, okay. I mean, right, they’ve got fish guts, but they don’t have cake,
Dr Rad 45:53
yeah? Maybe like a sweet bread of some kind or something, yeah,
Dr Jeremiah McCall 45:58
sure, there you go. But okay, we’re agreed it’s not really cake, okay. But anyways, they don’t seem to do a very good job speaking to the soldiers, either. And we actually kind of think that happened. We think that it’s impossible for the commanders to have actually reached all the people in their armies when they were giving speeches. But the speech for your local group was probably something you tried to do, because at the end of the day, battles were not lost primarily through wounds. They weren’t lost when more people got killed. They were lost when one side lost its morale to the point that it decided self defense, self preservation was a better shot for them than staying in this orderly formation. And that’s when the real devastating killing goes on. So speeches and stuff are kind of an important reminder
Dr Rad 46:41
of that. So let’s switch, perhaps, from the late Republic to the Empire, because we don’t want to miss that. Of course, Gladiator 2000 we can’t not mention that, especially because the opening scene of that movie has a particularly memorable battle scene between the Romans and Germanic tribes. How accurate do you think this scene was?
Dr Jeremiah McCall 47:05
It’s funny. I don’t Are you familiar at all with Brett Devereaux blogs and things?
Dr G 47:09
He rips this one to shreds.
Speaker 2 47:12
Yeah, yeah. And I think he does gladiator too. And I went back to read because I was like, Oh my gosh. I mean, I know him digitally, like we all know each other, right? And I said, Oh my gosh, I better go and read that. Because if he says gladiator one was horrific after I was being kind of positive on it, I want to at least be ready for that. But apparently it’s just gladiator two. And you all had a good time a few weeks ago ripping a hole into that one too. We did. So they finally have the right arm, the segmented Lorica, the Lorica segmentata, which makes them kind of look like lobsters, right with the overlapping plates. They have put those in movies in the Republic, all over the place, and they never existed in the Republic. And that is the armor. If you want to show Romans, you show them in the segmented armor. By gladiators day, by the second century, they actually were using this armor. So finally, we’ve got the right armor, and it looks really great on them. And they’ve got head scarves, which I would imagine you’d want if you were throwing a helmet on that’s kind of banging around stuff like that. I mean, it would have a lining, but, and they’ve got pila that they don’t use, and they’ve got Gladius, and their and their shields are curved. And they, I didn’t look but I bet their military sandals are I bet they look great too. You totally, I think, get the authentic visualization of what this is like. Nitpicky details, sure, but I’m not an imperial historian, so I don’t know what they are. I think this is a great visual. Then they move into battle, right? Okay, and so first thing, of course, is we have to have the fireworks. The Roman catapults launch flaming balls of something at the Germans who are yelling in the trees. It’s a trope, right? You’ve got the disorganized but courageous Germanic people and the disciplined Roman people, and they’re standing firm, because after the fires come, they still go, ah, and everybody knows that they’re really tough. And you just kind of wonder, did they do that? I really didn’t think they did. I thought the, I thought the chances of using catapults to hit people on foot was almost nil, but apparently there is a little of that. We’ve got a few places in the sources where artillery was used. But I’m still kind of skeptical. I think they wanted fire. They wanted the they wanted the wolf dog. They wanted Maximus, Wolf, dog, to leap through the flames. Oh yeah, which, sadly, doesn’t look as good as I remember it looking
Dr Rad 49:27
I just, I’m glad that, because I feel like that means that that animal was not hurt. They were more concerned about hurting the animal than doing this, that which 50 years ago would not have mattered.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 49:39
Oh, God, they formed their Testudo. We have no evidence of anybody ever forming a Testudo, right? That’s the ones with the shields on top and the shields in front, like the tortoise. We have no accounts of that ever being done, except for in a siege, when they were trying to lift people up over towers and things like that. Thing. We might have one example, but they use it against the German arrows. Now this is clever based. Likely the Germans fire their arrows. The legionaries clam up like a Testudo to block the arrows, and the Germans take that moment when they’re kind of hunkering to run in and charge two into them. Now this is clever because it means there’s no space to throw their pila Aha, and looking at us like, oh my gosh, that’s how they did that. That’s totally right. That is the most legit falsehood ever. It’s like they ran too fast. You couldn’t use it. They keep formations, but then they devolve into a brawl, because they always got to devolve into a brawl. And my original nerd specialty is the Roman cavalry. That is not what I went to school for. It just sort of worked that way. As you know, dissertation is kind dissertations kind of work that way. And the classic misunderstanding of of ancient and medieval cavalry is that they rode their horses into people, and that the impact of riding their horses into people was what took out the infantry. And about 24 about 50 years ago, John Keegan wrote a book called Face of battle that’s been kind of inspirational to many, at least my generation of military historians, where he pointed out, and I guess he knew horses. I don’t know horses that you really can’t make horses run into obstacles that they can’t jump over or get or get around. They’re gonna they’re gonna stop. And furthermore, if you did ride the horses in then you’re talking about these very expensive animals that cost training and food and everything like that, and you’re running them into a bunch of infantry, wrecking the horse, wrecking you on top the horse. And let’s not forget, these were usually nobles riding the cavalry, riding the horses, so it’s not going to happen. And that’s what I like about the gladiator cavalry charge, because it suggests that they just got in there and mixed it up. And as far as we can tell, that’s what cavalry did. They took an already occupied infantry enemy, and they added fear and disruption by coming in from some other side and roughing things up. And I really like that. And I like, I like his little speech at the beginning, right? You’re dead. And in Elysium, I like that the lines are sort of deforming of the horses. He says, Stay in line. And of course, some horses are faster than other horses, so they don’t completely stay in line. I think it’s a good cavalry charge. And then it gets back to a melee. It gets back to a brawl, like they always do. But I think with those caveats, just as I think Rome, the Rome series is the one to watch if you want to come as close as you can to visualize and what these might look like. I think you can do the same with that gladiator intro if you’re looking for the Imperial Army. By the way, you can move this earlier if you want. But Spartacus, in the midst of the Army, after having downed a soldier, grabs a six foot handled mace club and starts swinging it around. I don’t
Speaker 1 52:45
know if you remember a pivotal moment. All of the
Dr Jeremiah McCall 52:48
enslaved people had Roman equipment, and the Roman people had Roman equipment. Where did he get this six foot tall mace that he was able to like swing around?
Dr Rad 52:56
Well, we do know that the slaves did manufacture their own armor and weapons, so perhaps that he had a creative person on his team
Dr Jeremiah McCall 53:05
and that, and that’s the beauty we can we can go conspiracy theory logic, prove that they didn’t make a club like Exactly, exactly. Audience, please, don’t do that. We don’t say, prove that it’s not true. We say, here is the evidence that it might be true. Sorry. Okay. Teacher in me couldn’t
Speaker 1 53:21
help it. As we’re heading towards the battles of this imperial period. We’ve also got things like Centurion from 2010 and the eagle from 2011 so a good decade post Gladiator. And also films that the people who worked on would have been able to see HBOs Rome and be like, huh, maybe both these films center around the supposed disappearance of the ninth Legion in Britannia. They’re probably not as well known as gladiator but we’re interested in how their depictions of battle might compare to the blockbusters.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 53:59
You really kind of have to squeeze it to get it from a stone, because they’re not the both of those movies. I mean, maybe they maybe because they were going for something different, I’m not sure. But both of those movies really focus on a protagonist that is doing their own kind of special ops, right? Centurion Michael Fassbender is behind enemy lines, and he has to kind of work his way back. And the eagle, Channing Tatum is also, you know what? I have to confess, I never finished the eagle. I got about halfway through, and I was like, this is just not gripping me. Oh, and so I got scared when I was getting ready for this podcast. I was because I saw a video that said final battle in the eagle. I was like, there was a final battle. I didn’t write that in my book, but no, it’s just like 20 guys in a river stabbing each other. It’s not a final battle. We’re okay. You can still buy the book, but again, if you buy me a coffee, that will be at least as much money in my my compensation. So chronological order, no, I’m gonna do the eagle first. What? What I like about the eagle so things, this is a great example, again, of you’ve got to put something in. You can’t leave blank spots in a scene. You’ve got to have everything filled in. And so there’s this kind of great scene. Tatum has come to relieve whoever was the off the commander of this fort. Think his dad was dishonored by losing the Legion’s Eagle standards. I can’t remember, but he gets on this discipline kick with his soldiers in the fort and has them prepare defenses and get ready to be a serious obstacle to the Britons in the area probably did look like that. I didn’t check to see if whether their hammers and stuff were authentic looking. I bet they were. I bet they probably went into that detail. But they’re putting like pine pitch on to seal things up, and they’re cutting stakes and doing all this stuff. And so this is really good. And I like that. And then you notice, of course, that when they put their armor back on, when they’re done doing these things, they have leather. Oh,
Dr G 55:52
it’s a return of the leather. We’ve come full circle,
Dr Jeremiah McCall 55:56
I know, right? And it’s leather segmented armor. It’s the correct lorica look, the lorica segmentata, but it’s leather,
Dr Rad 56:03
just like that leather.
Dr G 56:04
It’s a budget thing. I’m sure
Dr Jeremiah McCall 56:06
it’s a budget thing. I’m sure you’re right. I mean, I guess it’s good that at least they weren’t like the muscled body armor that just Tatum
Dr Rad 56:14
has, that the Superman look, the Batman look. This is what I like about
Dr Jeremiah McCall 56:17
it. What they end up doing is there’s some scouts he sent out, and the scouts had been caught by the Britons, including this chief warrior dude who’s got a really crazy look in his eye, and he’s got a bare chest and some flowing robe and lots of lots of really cool beard hair swirling around, and is speaking in Gaelic. I don’t know what he’s speaking in. He’s speaking in something that would be appropriate for a Britain in the north,
Dr Rad 56:40
a Pictish, I don’t know, not Latin. That’s the most important part, right?
Dr Jeremiah McCall 56:44
Not Latin. So those scouts that he sends out are brought back in by the British war, by the British Army, or the Britain army, and they’re captives, and they’re kind of made to kneel down, and they’re a few 100 yards away from the fort. And there’s this big show of the Britain leader speaking, and we have subtitles to hear that he’s talking about all the awful things the Romans have done, which, let’s face it, is true, the Romans did horrific things to the people that they fought. It’s right. It’s the they make a desert and call it peace. Quote. So he’s doing this, and he kills one of the soldiers, and the soldiers are all terrified, and we’re really feeling the plight of the soldiers, because that’s kind of the position we’ve been given, right? We’re pro Roman in this or we’re supposed to be. And Tatum says, I put them out there. I’ve got to save them. 50 men on me, and the 50 soldiers all line up in their leather armor. That’s not going to help them at all. What I really like about that is the energy they put into how freaking scary it must have been to be a small group that was going to run out and try and do some kind of rescue operation like that. And we can’t say things like that never happened. We don’t know and do the rules necessarily apply when you’re talking about these things. That actually also brings me back to there’s a night fight before this where the Britons attacked the fortress, and Tatum grabs two swords and starts killing people with his dual wielding skills, which I mean, I learned my Dungeons and Dragons 45 years ago. I’m impressed, I, you know, but I but I doubt he learned those things. I don’t think anybody was learning how to use two swords. The reason I bring it up, though, is who knows what was happening in night fighting, when people were doing the horrific work of killing each other? I mean, who knows what was going on? Back to the back to the scene, though, the soldiers are scared. One of them vomits. One of them’s murmuring a prayer. They all look very serious. They look very intimidated. And I thought that was a really nice touch. They don’t always show the fear that must have been involved with us, and I thought that was really good. And then they come out, and they form their Testudo, even though that’s not probably how they used it, and then the Britons start jumping on top of the Testudo. So it’s like this armored tortoise. And I think that’s possible, because we have this example where the Romans using a siege to sort of lift people up six feet, five feet. So they probably could do that, but the Britons are all jumping on and again, you’re emphasizing right, disciplined, orderly Romans, disorganized Britons, which is probably a fairer take. The Britons were fighting in more loose war band formations than the Gauls, for example. And you see that idea of the line holding of the Romans with their shields in their position, holding the line. And that’s that morale idea. As long as you stay in your position, you are better defended than if you run on your own. Paradoxically, if you get so afraid for your life that you run, you immediately become more likely to be killed. And so they get around, they get around the captives, and they form a circle. And I thought that was a pretty interesting way to look at that, too. And I mean, of course, there’s no testimony for circles around captives this, this is not the sort of stuff that made it into the accounts. I liked, again, that they were trying. Trying to keep this idea of cohesion, this idea of maintaining your perimeter, so that you support each other together. That’s kind of the eagle. I think, I think it’s some nice visualizations of some ideas and not really a visualization. Oh, oh my gosh. I forgot the chariot. My understanding again, middle aged high school teacher thankfully never been in an ancient battle, never been any battle. My understanding is that the worst possible thing you can do when you are a line of soldiers with swords and you see a chariot or anything else on horses, is go run. And he commands them to run. Forget what his name is, but Channing Tatum says, run. And they all start running. And as soon as they’re running, they’re not protecting each other in the chariot with its scythe.
Dr Rad 1:00:43
Oh, they’re scythes wheels. They like that touch in Hollywood.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 1:00:47
Yeah, I sometimes I wonder about the physics of it, like if you put your shield down and put a foot against it, but a horse drawn chariot, that’s got to be a lot of power, right? I don’t know. I just don’t know how that all sorts out scythe wheels and blocking and stuff like that.
Dr Rad 1:01:01
I think they got it from Grease, quite frankly,
Dr Jeremiah McCall 1:01:05
probably so. And then centurion is just an ambush scene. They’ve got that marching in order. Yep, absolutely. They would have narrower lines when they’re marching in order. I really liked that. So they march into this area that looks like a perfect trap. And there’s a Hills up on each side, and the general who’s at the front, which I don’t know they might be, sometimes they might be, the general at the front is like, Wow, this looks really bad. Tell the Centurion in the rear that we need to start backing up, which made me go, huh? You would have thought you could send some scouts ahead to do that, and the Romans used scouts, but we know, right, Varus in the tutenburg Forest lost legions to ambush, and so this does happen. The Britons come out from the tops of the hills, and they have fiery, rolling, flaming fireballs.
Dr Rad 1:01:54
Of course, the fiery rolls
Speaker 2 1:01:58
this time, I think, Peta, you were the one saying that you’d run away if the flaming logs were coming died. You You wait, you’d wait and then let them burn out. This time, they don’t really have a chance. They’re stuck there. They got to put up with the flaming fireballs. It’s, it’s and they’re horrible. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Here’s what I liked. The equipment was fine. I think they actually did have their metal armor that time. They didn’t have a chance to throw pila because they were disorganized. This should have been a text box in the book if I had realized right 10 different cinematic ways to avoid throwing
Dr Rad 1:02:26
spears. Exactly.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 1:02:29
It’s It’s amazing. What I did like, what I thought seemed authentic, was as they were waiting for the attack, and they were, they formed their kind of perimeter line and and the unit commanders, the local officers were prepping them. You know, you’re ready. You’re trained watch for and I thought that was an interesting take on that idea of morale. Again, we, our best guess is that to maintain this morale, one of the reasons that the Romans and the Greeks tended to be very effective in their infantry battles. Is they ended up Phyllis column wrote about this in 1989 I think basically the socio economic order of those societies is replicated in the military formations. So you have the aristocrats leading and then you have the reasonably well off plebs in officer positions, and then you have the farmer soldiers, and so that’s important, and the speeches are important. And absolutely the sub Commander, the centurion who had been with you and guided you and trained you, is going to be really important in a time like that. So I thought that was a cool take on morale, but not really given us much to sort of visualize. I think gladiator is still going to give us the best one for visualizing battle in the empire, and then add in that eagle sort of shield wall thing that was pretty cool.
Dr Rad 1:03:48
I actually kind of wonder if the difference in these movies is also the budget. You know, you can’t necessarily have huge battle scenes in every single movie because it’s so expensive. It’s kind of a metaphor for room itself. Sure, they like to picture these gigantic battle scenes when they’re talking about even things in the early republic. It makes it sound so grand, but if you actually were teleported there, you’d be like, Oh, it’s like 100 guys versus 100 guys. This isn’t quite the what I was imagining.
Dr G 1:04:18
I think you’re right. So I’m always interested. I don’t, I don’t know enough of it. I mean, so And sorry, Peta, because you’re an English teacher. So you will, you will get me on this. But I still like to think about authors having intention when they’re expressing things.
Dr G 1:04:33
This is a tragedy where to start.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 1:04:37
So I accept that there are big institutions making these, these movies. And so it’s not really, was it auteur theory or something like that? It’s not really the director doing sort of everything on their own, but it’s just at some point, you still kind of, I just, I wish I knew more about the decisions people made. This goes back to being a teacher. Why is this portrayal being given? By this person. How is that making sense? And how are they making sense in their mind? And so, oh my gosh, I wasn’t using your code name either. Sorry. Dr, G so. Dr, red, I think your idea about, I think your idea about budget limitations and stuff, there’s got to be a lot of truth to that. They’re making a movie. They’re not making a historical monograph. So, yeah, it’s got to play a
Dr Rad 1:05:22
big role. Well, even if you think about academic books, so, and we would all have experienced this, I certainly have Dr G will understand where I’m going with this. Even we have word limits, because they can only print so many pages in a book. They can only afford to have a book of a certain size, and you can’t exceed that, as it turns out, yeah.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 1:05:43
So I’m writing a book right now for educators to design games for their history classes, but then also to structure and support students designing those games. And so one of the things, because it’s just meant to be for any teacher who thinks cool, I want to do this. It’s not meant to be for somebody who has any game design experience. And so I was talking about abstractions, right? And games are abstractions, which I often get confused. What people mean by that. What I mean by that is a simplification that keeps the essentials. And the part that we often forget is that text is an abstraction, right? If you say such and such a person was born on such and such a day, and you make that statement, somebody might say that statements historically accurate. My understanding from watching like dramatic hospital videos on TV and stuff like that, is that actually giving birth is a lot more complicated than that. If you say such and such a person died on such and such a day, we would say that’s a historically accurate statement. But again, something’s going on, some reality that’s totally not being captured. So, yeah, they’re all, they’re all kind of, you know, like you said, word counts and, you know, efforts to liven up our prose, and all the other things we do, we’re all. We’re all taking a past that does not exist anymore and trying to selectively turn it into something that we think is meaningful.
Speaker 1 1:06:58
And I think this is something that Ridley Scott leans into as well, where he’s like, I’m not trying to make trying to make a historical film. I’m trying to make an exciting movie. Yeah,
Dr Rad 1:07:08
so let’s put sharks in the Colosseum. God damn it, I think, yeah. And
Dr Jeremiah McCall 1:07:12
fair enough, right? If he made that. So I think Robert Rosenstone, I think, was sort of the leading person on film, theater, excuse me, on history, on film. And I was going back and glancing at one of his articles. I just never, I never went this way into vid individual, into film, because my video game stuff is similar, but I just, I’ve learned more and studied more and found that more compelling. But I wanted to kind of go back and look, and he makes a point in an article that there’s a number of sort of snooty, stuffy historians. They’re like, well, we need to have more historians on set. We need to have more historians dictating how these things will go and and he says, No, that’s not what we need. And I actually made the same point about video games, because there was a movement in the early 2000s that we just need more historians making video games. No, we don’t need more historians making video games or movies. They are their own legitimate art forms. They are made for purposes that are not the same purpose as a monograph, as a popular book, as whatever. And, yeah, Ridley Scott, you know, God damn it. He wanted to make the Colosseum, and he wanted to have, you know, tigers. He had to
Speaker 1 1:08:16
have tigers. He wanted it. Boy, did he get it
Dr Jeremiah McCall 1:08:22
see. So it worked out for him. So
Speaker 1 1:08:25
thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us. This has been really fun and going back and looking at these films through a different lens. I will. I think the subtitle for this episode has to be, where is the peeler?
Dr Rad 1:08:40
Yeah, I was gonna say justice for pila. Pila, pila, pila,
Dr G 1:08:45
but thank you so much for taking the time. We really appreciate it.
Dr Jeremiah McCall 1:08:48
You bet it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much.
Dr Rad 1:09:00
Thank you for listening to this special episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources, sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes. Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman. The Partial Historians is part of the Memory Collective, creators and educators dedicated to sharing knowledge that is accessible, contextualized, socially conscious and inclusive. To find more from the Memory Collective head to collectivemem.com. You too can support our show and help us to produce more engaging content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes and ad free content. If monthly patronage is not your style, we have merch. We have a book, or you can just buy us a coffee on ko fi. And we’d like to say a big thank you to all our Patreon supporters for making special episodes like this one possible. However, if you’re imperial coffers do not overfloweth, one of the easiest and most important ways to help us is to tell someone about the show or give us a five star review wherever you listen. Until next time we are yours in ancient Rome.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
