This week and for the next two weeks (I, II, III), we’re going to take a close look at arguably the most famous and recognizable Roman battle sequence in film: the iconic opening battle from Gladiator (2000).1 Despite being a relatively short sequence (about ten minutes), there’s actually enough to talk about here that we’re going to split it over two weeks, talking about the setup – the battlefield, army composition, equipment and battle plan – this week and then the actual conduct of the battle next week.
The iconic opening battle, set in the Marcomannic Wars (166-180) during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180) dominates the pop-cultural reference points for the Roman army in battle and you can see its heavy influence in things like how the Total War series presents Roman armies (particularly in trailers and other promotional material). Students and enthusiasts alike will often cite this sequence as the thing which sparked their interest in the Roman army. It is hard to overstate how pervasive its influence is in the public imagination of what the Roman army, particularly of the imperial period, was like, especially as its style is imitated by later pop culture works.
Which is why it is so unfortunate that it is such a deceptive historical mess. This sequence in particular is a banner example of what I’ve termed elsewhere the ‘perils of historical verisimilitude,’ the habit of historically based popular-culture works including what we might think of as fake signifiers of research, things that seem historically grounded rather than being historically grounded, as a way to cheaply cash in on the cachet that an actually grounded representation gets a work.
Gladiator actually provides a perfect metaphor for this: its main character’s name. Russell Crowe proudly informs us he is, “Maximus Decimus Meridius,” a name that certainly sounds suitably Roman, picking up the three-part name with that standard second declension -us ending. It sounds like it could be a real name – if you didn’t know Latin you would probably assume that it could be a real Roman name. But, as we’ve noted, it isn’t a Roman name and in fact gets nearly all of the Roman naming conventions wrong: Roman names are ordered as praenomen, nomen and cognomen, with the nomen indicating one’s gens (‘clan’ more or less) and the praenomen selected from just a couple dozen common personal names. Decimus is one of those two-dozen common praenomina (which also means it is never going to show up as the name of a gens), so it ought to go first as it is actually his personal name. Meanwhile Maximus (‘the greatest’) is very much not one of those roughly two-dozen praenomina, instead being always cognomen (essentially a nickname). Finally Meridius isn’t a Latin word at all (so it can’t be a praenomen personal name nor a cognomen nickname),2 meaning it has to be the nomen (referencing a fictive gens Meridia). Every part of his name is wrong and it should read Decimus Meridius Maximus.
It sounds just right enough to fool your average viewer, while being entirely wrong. It is ‘truthy’ rather than true – verisimilitudinous (like truth), rather than veristic (realistic, true).
In the case of Gladiator‘s opening battle scene, the attention is on creating verisimilitude (without fidelity, as we’ll see) in the visual elements of the sequence and only the visual elements. The visual representation of a Roman army – the equipment in particular – is heavily based on the Column of Trajan (including replicating the Column’s own deceptions) and since that is the one thing a viewer can easily check, that verisimilitude leads a lot of viewers to conclude that the entire sequence is much more historically grounded than it is. They take their cues from the one thing they can judge – ‘do these fellows wear that strange armor I saw on that picture of a Roman column?’ – and assume everything is about as well researched, when in fact none of it is.
Instead, apart from the equipment – which has its own deep flaws – this is a sequence that bears almost no resemblance to the way Roman armies fought and expected to win their battles. The Roman army in this sequence has the wrong composition, is deployed incorrectly, uses the wrong tactics, has the wrong theory of victory and employs the wrong weapons and then employs them incorrectly. Perhaps most importantly the sequence suggests an oddly cavalry-and-archer focused Roman army which is simply not how the Romans in this period expected to win their battles.
Now I want to be clear here that this isn’t a review of the film Gladiator (2000) or my opinion in general on the film. To be honest, unlike the recent sequel, I enjoy Gladiator even though it is historical gibberish. So I am not telling you that you aren’t ‘allowed’ to like Gladiator, but rather simply that, despite appearances, it is historical gibberish, particularly this opening scene, which I often find folks who are aware the rest of the film is historical gibberish nevertheless assume this opening scene is at least somewhat grounded. It is not.
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Maximus’ Un-Roman Army
We pick up in an improbably mud-soaked clearing with a title card informing us that we’re in ‘Germania,’ which is correct in a very broad sense that this is the Second Marcomannic War and the enemies here are the Marcomanni and Quadi, who are Germani (Germanic-language speakers), but the army here isn’t operating out of the Roman provinces of Germania (superior and inferior) which are on the Rhine, but rather on the Danube, from the provinces of Noricum and Pannonia (Superior). But in the sense that we’re in germania magna, the greater zone of Germanic cultural influence, sure, fine.
In the process of Maximus riding up, the failure of negotiations and Maximus riding to join his cavalry, we get something of an overview of the Roman army and its position and both are wrong. Let’s start with the soldiers: we see a very clear distinction between two kinds of soldiers, the mail-clad auxilia, all archers, and the legionaries wearing the lorica segmentata and there appear to be about the same number of both groups. And here is where we first see the clear influence of the Column of Trajan (and to an unfortunately lesser degree, the far more appropriate Column of Marcus Aurelius) on the depiction, because this use of armor to distinctly signal the Roman citizen legionaries and non-citizen auxilia is straight from the Column of Trajan, completed probably around 113 and commemorating Trajan’s two Dacian Wars (101-102, 105-106).
What this sequence gets correct is that the Roman army was divided into those two groups, they were roughly equal in number (by this period, the auxilia probably modestly outnumber the legions in total manpower)3 and Trajan’s Column does use that visual signifier to distinguish them. This component is the crux of the verisimilitude that leads people to trust the rest of this sequence.
I should also note there is no Legio III Felix. There was Legio III Gallica, III Italica and III Parthica. Indeed, there was no Legio Felix of any number, though there was a Legio IV Flavia Felix, “Flavius [Vespasian]’s lucky 4th legion.” Maximus is later going to claim to be ‘general of the Felix legions,’ a claim which makes no sense from multiple directions (no such legions, but also no such office).
The problems start almost immediately from there. Roman auxilia were far more varied than what we see here in terms of equipment and tactics and only very few of them were archers. So let’s break down Roman auxiliary contingents. With all due caveats about the limits of our evidence, infantry auxilia outnumber cavalry by about 2:1 in attested auxilia units (auxilia were grouped into cavalry alae and infnatry cohortes, generally of 480 men (sometimes around 800), but unlike for legionary citizen-infantry, these cohorts were not grouped into larger legions).4 So we ought to expect about a third of our auxilia to be cavalry, which is important because the cavalry detachments of Roman legions were very small (and mostly for scouting and messenger duties). Auxilia cavalry ranged in equipment and could include horse archers and even ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry, but most were mailed shock cavalry, equipped quite a lot like how Gallic or Germanic warrior-aristocrats or Roman legionary cavalry would be.
Of the remainder, the most common kind of infantry auxilia by far seem to have been heavy infantry, fighting in fairly heavy armor. These fellows get depicted in Roman artwork generally in mail armor, with flat oval shields (as opposed to the curved, rectangular imperial-period Roman scutum), spears and swords. These fellows, totally absent in this sequence are all over the Column of Trajan, with their flat oval shields being frequently seen (although one must distinguish them from Dacians who carry the same shield; the auxilia stick out for their mail and helmets). A bit less than 10% of auxilia units are attested as cohortes sagittariorum (‘cohort of archers’). We also know the Romans used slingers within the auxilia, but as far as we can tell, not in specialized units; they may have been brigaded in with other auxilia cohorts. In either case, they appear in fairly small numbers. Finally, we also see on things like the Column of Trajan Roman allied or auxiliary units that are substantially lighter infantry: on the Column of Trajan, these are local troops shown wielding large clubs and stripped to the waist, presumably representing troops local to the Danube region, fighting in local (unarmored, with heavy two-handed weapons) style.
So whereas the army we see is a nearly even split between legionary heavy infantry and auxilia archers (with a small amount of legionary cavalry waiting for Maximus to show up to lead them), in practice a typical Roman field army would have far fewer archers, indeed around ten times fewer: not almost 50% of the force, but in fact probably a bit less than 5% of the force (since they’re less than 10% of the auxilia who would make up around half of a Roman field army). Meanwhile we’re simply missing the – by far – two most common sorts of auxilia cohorts, those of heavy infantry or heavy cavalry. This mangling of the structure of a Roman army is going to have implications when we get to Maximus’ overall plan for the battle as well.
Meanwhile, the legionary infantry are also much too uniform, literally. This is easily the most pardonable error, because what has happened here is that director Ridley Scott has copied the Column of Trajan but far too uncritically. After all, the Column of Trajan is not a photograph and thus has space for the artists producing it to take liberties, particularly in the name of imperial ideology and propaganda. In this case, showing large numbers of identically equipped soldiers, often moving in unified formation, serves the same rhetorical purpose in antiquity as it does today, suggesting an impressive, inhumanly uniformed and disciplined source. Moreover, the segmented Roman body armor, which we call the lorica segmentata (we don’t know what the Romans called it), was very distinctive to the legions, as it was the one armor that it seems like the auxilia probably (the evidence here can be tricky) didn’t share. And keeping the legions distinct from the auxilia also matters, as the legionary soldiers are higher status citizens who thus get ‘higher billing’ in the imagery, as it were, than the auxilia. So showing all of the legions equipped neatly with this armor makes them seem distinct, impressive and uniform.
In short, it served Trajan’s image (and thus the artists aim) to suggest that all of his legions wore this armor.
Archaeology tells us quite clearly it was not so. Indeed, the lorica segmentata, so iconic because of its use in this way on the Column of Trajan, was probably the least common of the three major types of Roman legionary body armor in this period. This most common armor of the Roman legions was almost certainly still – as it had been in the Late Republic – mail, exactly the same as we see the auxilia wearing. We find fragments of Roman mail in legionary sites in all corners of the Empire and it remained common everywhere. To head off a standard question: no, it does not seem that the Romans ever got the idea to layer other defenses over mail, so when it was worn, it was the ‘primary’ armor (worn over a padded textile defense called a subarmalis, but not under any other armor).5 We also see mail represented in Roman artwork, including on very high status soldiers, like senior centurions.
The next most common armor was probably scale armor, which we find very frequently in the East (that is, on the frontier with the Parthians/Sassanids) and often enough (if less frequently) in the West (that is, the Rhine/Danube frontier). We also know that some auxilia units wore this armor too and we see quite a bit of scale armor – wholly absent in this sequence – on the Column of – wait for it – Marcus Aurelius (completed c. 193). That’s the column that commemorates this war. Contemporary with this fictional battle. But it is less famous and somewhat less well-preserved than 70-years-earlier Column of Trajan, which they pretty evidently used quite a bit more of.
The lorica segmentata shows up the least often and – to my knowledge – effectively exclusively in the west on the Rhine/Danube frontier, where it is still probably not the most common (although it may have been more common than scale on that frontier). So what we ought to see in this army are legionaries who are marked out by their large scuta (the big Roman shield, by this period distinctly rectangular and also (as in the republic) curved), but in a range of mail, scale and lorica segmentata (with mail and segmentata being the most common, because we are on the Danube frontier, but scale hardly rare), along with auxilia divided into specialist cohorts (480 man units) each with different sets of armor and weapons: a few missile cohorts (archers, slingers), a lot more heavy infantry cohorts with spears and long shields, some lighter troops, and so on. The auxilia ought to be wearing basically every armor under the sun except for the lorica segmentata (which to my knowledge we’ve only ever found in sites associated with the legions).
Finally, these units are backed up by a whole load of catapults. We see two kinds, dual-arm arrow-throwing machines (which most folks would casually call ballistae) and single-armed pot-throwing machines (which most folks would casually call catapults), all of them in stationary mounts. Now on the one hand, ‘the Romans use lots of torsion-based catapults as artillery’ is a true statement about the Roman army of this period, but on the other hand once again beyond that basic idea, most of this is wrong. Once again there’s an issue of verisimilitude here: the appearance of strange catapults and the true fact that the Romans used a lot of unusual catapults is likely to lead the viewer to assume some research has been done here and thus that these are the right catapults. For the most part, they are not.
We can start with the easy one, the larger single-armed pot-throwers. These are onagers, a late-Roman simplified single-arm torsion catapult, named for their fearsome ‘kick’ (like an ass, an onager). These are popular favorites for Roman artillery, for instance showing up in both Rome: Total War and Total War: Rome II (both of which have main campaigns set during the Late Republic). There’s only one problem, which is that Gladiator (much less the even earlier Total War games) is set substantially too early for an onager to appear. Our first attestation of the onager is in Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in the last two decades of the 300s AD about the events of 353-378 (his work was broader than this, but only the back end survives). Vegetius, writing roughly contemporary with Ammianus also mentions them. But before the late fourth century, we don’t have any evidence for this design and it doesn’t show up on the Columns of Trajan or Marcus. So this isn’t just a little bit too early for these catapults but, given the evidence we have, around 150 years too early, the equivalent of having a line of M1 Abrams show up in a film about the Battle of Gettysburg.
What we do have are a number of twin-armed bolt or arrow-throwing machines and the Romans certainly had those, though what we see doesn’t match up well with what the Romans used. What we see is a single size of fairly large arrow-throwing engines, aimed upward to fire in fairly high arcs and built with large metal cases containing the torsion springs (generally made of hair or sinew, tightly coiled up; it is the coiling of these springs which stores the energy of the machine).
These two-armed torsion catapults came in a wide range of sizes and could be designed to throw either arrows/bolts or stones (the latter carved into spheres of rather precise caliber for specific machines). And we ought to see a pretty wide range of sizes here, from massive one-talent engines, which threw a 1 talent (26kg) stone and stood about three times the height of a man, to much smaller anti-personnel weapons (scorpiones) that were more like a ‘crew served’ weapon than a large artillery piece. By Trajan’s time, the Romans had even taken to mounting these smaller crew-served engines on mule-drawn carts (called carroballistae) to allow them to be rapidly repositioned, something like early modern ‘horse artillery’ (they were not meant to fire on the move; when we see them on Trajan’s Column, at least one of the operators is usually standing on the ground outside of the cart to winch the machine). These smaller machines, which would have made up the bulk of those deployed in a field battle, seem mostly absent in the sequence.
The result of all of this is that the Roman army presented in the opening moments of Gladiator manages to strike a remarkably unhappy balance: having just enough of the appearance of accuracy to decisively influence two decades of subsequent depictions of the Roman army without actually being particularly correct about anything beyond a very surface level. But subsequent pop-culture (again, I think Rome: Total War played a significant role here) would codify this vision of the Roman army – fire-throwing onagers, lots of auxilia archers, legionary rather than auxiliary cavalry, uniform use of the lorica segmentata – as the dominant model for quite some time.
But the army isn’t the only thing that’s wrong.
Maximus’ un-Roman Fortifications
The army is also deployed wrong.
What we are shown is pretty clearly a prepared defense on a hillside, with a series of raised terraces, with a mix of abatis (sharpened wood obstacles, often crudely cut wood stakes set in an X pattern) and mantlets, with gaps in those defenses to allow units to move and a whole bunch of catapults positioned up on the hill. The terraces make for a layered, multi-stage fighting position at each level. On the one hand, the Romans were hardly averse to field fortifications and one wonders again if this set was a product of someone with an active imagination looking at the Column of Trajan, which features a lot of scenes of Roman soldiers cutting trees and building bridges, roads and forts.
The problem isn’t that there are field fortifications, it is everything else about them: the style of field fortification, their position, layout and use. As we’ve noted before, Roman armies on campaign built fortified marching camps nightly, so we would expect Maximus’ army to have such a camp, but as we’ve discussed even more so, one of the classic, famous features of Roman armies is that they build the same layout of camp wherever they go, the famous Roman ‘playing card’ forts, generally built on flat, open ground (rather than hillsides). That defense would not look like this, instead consisting of a ditch (the fossa) behind which would have been a earthwork rampart (the agger) topped with a wooden palisade (the vallum); thus rather than successive layers, you’d have a single clear fighting position (the vallum) on a mount with the ditch directly in front of it. And that would be a continuous line, with just four gates (at the center of each side), rather than this kind of checkerboard pattern of fortifications, because of course the purpose of this defense was to prohibit entry. Moreover, the line of field fortifications we see are not part of, nor connected to, a marching camp: it is simply a line of fortifications on the side of the hill with nothing on the flanks, rather than the distinctive ‘playing card shape.’ We don’t see the camp sitting behind it either.
But the really immediate problem is that Maximus’ army has formed up within his troops strung through the field fortifications, with legionary soldiers mostly in front of them (but some are behind them) and the archers in between the stakes and mantlets. This may seem like a sensible way to form up a defense, but it is not the Roman way. Maximus is very intentionally “offering battle,” – inviting his opponent into an open field engagement. The way a Roman army did this was invariably forming up on the flat, open, unfortified ground in front of the camp, toward the enemy, signalling that they would fight in the open, outside of their walls (as Maximus does indeed intend to do).
So what we ought to see is Maximus’ army formed up outside in the open field, with the camp likely visible some distance behind them. That camp would be protected by very different fortifications: you’d be able to make out its ‘playing-card’ shape, with watch-towers on the corners and the raised vallum running the exterior and the relatively neat grid of tends in the interior.
Finally, before we get to the battle plan, I want to note one more oddity here, which is the battlefield itself. The battlefield is a muddy field, which it looks to have been recently clear-cut, otherwise surrounded by dense forest. Of course part of the reason is that this is Bourne Wood, a coniferous tree plantation (and frequent filming location) in Surrey, England (which is why the trees are all the same species, so neatly spaced out) rather than the edge of an old-growth forest somewhere in southern Germany.
But the thing is, the Marcomanni, Quadi and other Germanic-language speaking peoples were an agrarian society, same as the Romans: their villages were surrounded by farm and pastureland. Of course a lot of the forest – old-growth forest, rather than tree-farms as here – remained, but if a Roman army wanted a flat, open space to offer battle in, they needn’t have cleared it themselves (and indeed probably couldn’t, at least not in the time frame they’d have to prepare for a pitched battle), but could simply march to the nearest village with its patches of farmland. Getting a Roman army to fight in dense, old-growth forest, after all, famously required clever ambushes, as a Teutoberg Forest (modern Kalkriese) in 9 AD. And if the enemy didn’t want to fight in the open, Roman armies were perfectly happy to burn villages and pillage crops as the standard way of attempting to force an enemy to accept an offer to battle or else vacate the area.
A Very Un-Roman Battle
With all of that established, we can now get to Maximus’ battle plan. The attentive reader may already have begun to notice the cracks forming here as we’ve discussed how different the composition of a Roman field army would have been from what we see here, but I am always struck by how this scene, which for so much of the public is the paradigmatic Roman battle, is very un-Roman way to fight a battle.
Now some caveats here are necessary at the start. One of the oddities of studying the Roman army is that the gaps in our evidence shift between periods. So, for instance, the Roman army of the Middle Republic (that’s c. 343 BC to c. 101) is quite poorly attested archaeologically – being always on the move in offensive operations will do that – but its structure, equipment and tactics are very clearly described by our literary sources, such that we have detailed narratives for quite a lot of large-scale pitched battles. For the first two centuries AD, this problem is in many ways reversed: the Roman army, now permanently stationed in frontier forts, suddenly becomes very archaeologically and epigraphically6 visible, but our literary sources lose interest in the details of Roman military operations. They still report outcomes – victory and defeat – since those matter for the reputations of emperors and their generals, but since those historical sources have shifted their focus from the politics of the Roman Republic, where common soldiers were also key voters, to the politics around the emperor, in which even a frontier general might be a relatively minor figures, their interest in the detailed conduct of battles trails off.
As a result, somewhat paradoxically, while overall our information for the Roman army of the Early and High Empire is much better that that for the Middle or Late Republic, our understanding of its tactics is actually a fair bit weaker. We do get a few, generally relatively brief, battle descriptions in authors like Tacitus and Josephus, but there’s far less detail here than what we get for the Middle or Late Republic from authors like Polybius, Livy and Caesar. We also get some discussion of tactical dispositions in Vegetius and Arrian’s Array against the Alans, but we have a lot of reason to suspect that these are not typical formations but rather fancy, special use formations that may have been rarely, if ever, used.
All that said, we do have one significant advantage which is that our fictional battle in Gladiator is taking place in 180 AD, at the end of two centuries of relative stasis in Roman organization, equipment and tactics. The Roman army will change substantially between the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (in 180) and the end of the reign of Constantine (in 337) but it changes very little between from the reign of Augustus (r. 31BC – 14AD) all the way to Marcus. Indeed, from a tactical perspective, Marcus Aurelius’ legions seem to have been little different in their approaches and capabilities to those of Julius Caesar two and a half centuries prior. And given that broad sweep of time, we get enough battle narratives to track the development, or more correctly the lack of development, of large-scale Roman battle tactics.
Maximus’ plan of battle in Gladiator, however, fits the Roman way of battle so poorly that the limits of our evidence mostly don’t matter very much: even with what we know, this is not how the Romans win a battle.
Maximus’ tactical plan comes in roughly three stages: first he plans to ‘unleash hell’ with massed archer and catapult ‘fire’ (which I can write here with no issue because they’re all fire arrows and pots), a huge part of his plan to the point that he sets the forest ablaze. He then advances his infantry to draw the enemy into the open ground and then finally he charges the enemy in the rear with his cavalry, having apparently galloped all the way around the enemy force.
Though Rome: Total War wouldn’t come out for another four years after this movie, this is pretty classic Total War tactics: archers, positioned safely behind heavy infantry, wear down enemy forces, which the infantry then pins and cavalry flanks in a ‘hammer and anvil’ attack. Functionally no ancient army regularly fought this way; it remains really striking to me that as fun as they are, Total War games really struggle to reproduce the actual tactics of the periods they are meant to describe. Historically, archers are more generally deployed interspersed with the infantry or on their flanks but only rarely tucked in as a distinct unit behind them, for the obvious reason that archers who can see and shoot directly at their targets are more effective. Meanwhile when you read about Alexander or Hannibal flanking an army with cavalry, they are almost always punching through and collapsing an enemy flank and then ‘rolling up’ the army, not galloping all the way around and behind an army, for the obvious reason that real armies are a lot bigger than Total War armies (and, as we’ll see next week, a lot bigger than Gladiator armies) and take a lot longer to gallop around and more to the point few commanders were willing to leave a flank ‘in the air’ (unguarded by any natural obstruction) if they could at all avoid it, which they usually could.
But plan is an even worse fit for the Romans compared to most armies. Even before we look at battle records, simply thinking about the composition of a Roman army can give us a sense of which ‘arm’ (that is, type of soldier) they expect to be decisive. We’ve already discussed the breakdown of the auxilia, but putting the legions that sit at the core of a Roman army back in the picture can really make the point. As noted, a Roman field army is about half legions and about half auxilia and other allied forces. The legions (generally two or three of them) in a Roman field army are in turn roughly 98% heavy infantry (5,280 heavy infantry with a small contingent of 120 legionary cavalry, serving mostly as scouts and messengers). Meanwhile, as we’ve noted, the auxilia are roughly 2:1 infantry to cavalry, with the majority of the infantry being heavy infantry. Cn. Julius Agricola’s field army in northern Britain had sufficient heavy infantry auxilia that he was able to fight an entire pitched battle (the Battle of Mons Graupius, Tac. Agricola 29-38) using only his auxilia to mount a heavy infantry assault (some 8,000 strong) while his legions – kept entirely in reserve – never needing to be committed. Some auxilia probably formed lighter infantry units and we certainly seem the Romans employing irregular allied formations of light infantry as well to screen the army; the auxilia always took the forward screening position for an army on the march, for instance. As noted, dedicated missile troops make up at most something like 10% of the auxilia.
Putting those numbers together, we might posit a model Roman field army that is about 49% legionary heavy infantry, around 29% auxilia heavy infantry, around 17% cavalry (almost entirely auxiliary, not legionary, cavalry) and about 5% archers and other missile troops. Adding in some irregular local forces for light infantry or other roles would push these percentages down a bit, but we are still fundamentally talking about a Roman army was roughly three quarters heavy infantry by total numbers.
That is not a pinning force. The heavy infantry is instead the decisive army of a Roman army: the Romans expect the heavy infantry to win the battle, with the other ‘arms’ (archers, cavalry, light infantry) merely screening or assisting in that process.
Indeed, as I joke to my students, the Romans believed that the quickest way to an enemy’s vulnerable rear was through their front, the same ‘theory of victory’ on the battlefield as Roman armies had in the Middle and Late Republic. Roman armies generally aim to win through direct heavy infantry assault on the enemy’s front, typically with a ‘linear’ assault – meaning that they are attacking cross the entire enemy line, without forming a wedge or refusing a part of their army. It is an extremely blunt way of battle, but it works remarkably well because the Roman army is built for it: loaded with heavily armored infantry in fairly flexible maneuver units (by this period, cohorts of 480 men), arranged typically in three battle lines (each typically about 6 men deep), one behind the other. That arrangement means that the Romans have tactical reserves, but assuming the army isn’t seized by panic, it also limits the ability of an enemy to win suddenly by breakthrough: they’d just be breaking through to the next full battle line. It’s a way of fighting that locks an enemy into a grinding, head-on-head attritional battle which – far more heavily armored and well armed – the Romans are generally going to win.
Indeed, for much of the imperial period, Roman strategy seems to have been built on the reliable assumption that if the Romans could bring an enemy to a stand-up pitched battle, they would almost always win and usually win easily. Precisely because this way of battle was so damn blunt and direct, it was also reliable.
Of course such an approach was vulnerable to being enveloped (as the Romans had been at Cannae in 216 BC) but that is generally what the auxilia were for. Generally, it seems that the auxilia were deployed on the flanks of the legions (where, in the Republic, the socii would have gone) and the cavalry to the flanks of the auxilia. The cavalry were not expected to win the battle (indeed, they frequently vanish from battle accounts in both the Republic and the Empire) but rather simply to screen the flanks of the advancing heavy infantry. Light infantry and missile troops likewise seem to have been used mostly as harassing or screening in battle, to enable the heavy infantry – legionaries and auxilia – to deliver their assault with minimal fuss. And I do mean assault: Roman armies functionally always assume they will attack, advancing into contact with the enemy; they do not wait to receive an enemy attack. It takes fearsome odds indeed to get a Roman army to take up a defensive position and hold for an enemy’s advance.
Maximus’ battle plan here is actually somewhat Macedonian (the Romans would have said Greek, probably with a sneer) in style, treating his cavalry as the decisive arm and the infantry as a mere anvil against which the cavalry hammer would strike. The Romans, simply put, do not fight that way. So while the barrage of flaming arrows and catapult shot is very cinematic, the Romans do not fight that way. While the image of Maximus charging through the forest shouting ‘hold the line’ (for some reason)7 is really cinematic, the Romans do not fight that way. Indeed, Roman generals do not command from the front of their cavalry (again, “that’s a Macedonian thing,” the Roman says with condescension), but rather from behind their legions, ‘driving’ the legions into battle.
What I find ironic here is how Ridley Scott, like many modern directors, can’t quite shake out of a concept of battle rooted in ‘fires’ (that is, attacks with ranged weapons, often artillery). Modern warfare, after all, is dominated by the side which can put the most metal in the air. But the armies that Ridley Scott ends up putting to film – the Romans, Latin crusaders and even to an extent Napoleon himself – are examples of quintessentially shock-based armies that expect to win by pushing into contact.8 However out of place they are, massive volleys of catapults and fire arrows are ‘cinematic’ in a genre that has a far more developed visual vocabulary for fires than it does for shock (which often turns into a confused mess on screen). Of course a talented, visionary director might try to find a way to make a shock action equally cinematic and Scott occasionally manages, but more frequently relapses back into the easy solution of “more catapults on screen.”
A Proper, Roman Battle
So how might a Roman general approach this problem instead? What would an actual Roman battle plan look like?
Well first, the Romans will have constructed a fortified marching camp as Roman armies build one each night and will certainly have done so here given that they have to show up, encamp and then wait for the results of diplomatic negotiations. Chances are on arrival, our actual Roman general – lets call him ‘Decimus’ – is going to end the day’s march by throwing forward a light screen while he builds his camp and then pull his army back within the camp for the night. He’ll send out the envoy in the morning.
Since Decimus expects the negotiations may fail, he’s likely to draw up his army in the morning, as the envoy departs, to offer battle. He’ll have planned this process the night before with his officers and senior centurions, probably aiming to use more than one of the four gates his ‘playing card’ fortified camp will have so that his army can draw up quickly once the men have eaten breakfast. We might expect Decimus to have some of his better auxilia cohorts exit the camp first to screen the rest of the army against any sudden surprises as it forms up, although it would be fairly hard for an enemy army itself to form up and advance quick enough to launch a surprise attack.
Decimus is going to draw his forces up at the edge of the flat, open ground where he’d prefer to fight, some distance from his camp – essentially daring his opponent to meet him in the open. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘offering battle:’ by forming up this way, Decimus makes clear he is willing to leave the protection of his fortified camp and fight in the open – his opponent could then accept his offer or alternately (by drawing up on terrain more favorable to them) refuse. In real historical battles, this sort of negotiation – “I’ll fight here, will you?” – can go on for a few days, but the demands of logistics means neither army can afford to sit still for very long.
The battle formation is likely to be pretty standard. Even for very talented generals like Julius Caesar, Roman tactics are about reliability, rather than fancy maneuvers. Generally this means the legions – a Roman field army will typically have two or three in the imperial period – will go in the center, one next to the other. The heavy infantry auxilia cohorts will form up on either side of them. That full line – auxilia – legion – legion – auxilia will have reserves. The equipment distinctions between the hastati, principes and triarii of the old manipular army are gone but the unit titles remain and Roman armies still generally seem to have formed up in three successive battle lines, just like they did in the glory days of the Republic.
Decimus is likely to want to anchor at least one of his flanks on some sort of obstruction – a river, hill, dense forest – rather than leaving it ‘in the air,’ but in any case, his cavalry will be deployed to protect those flanks while the infantry wins in the center. Catapults and archers might be deployed to support the infantry or to close off a specific troublesome line of advance. Caesar does this, for instance, at the Battle of the Axona (57 BC), putting catapults in a fortified position on his vulnerable right flank to prevent it being enveloped (Caes. BGall., 2.8). Archers and other light troops might likewise be used to holds space in rough ground if, say, a flank was anchored on something like a bog or rough hill, unsuitable for cavalry or heavy infantry.
In either case, Decimus is not going to be with the archers or the cavalry, but in a command position behind his legions with his retinue. Roman generals, after all, were not warrior-heroes who led their troops from the front, Alexander-style, but ‘battle managers’9 who commanded from the rear where they could issue orders effectively and observe the battle as it developed. From that position – being on a horse, Decimus would be able to see over his infantry – he would observe the enemy forming up themselves. It is, by this point, too late to make major alterations to his own dispositions- it takes a lot of time and creates a lot of vulnerability to shift units around – but he can decide if he wants to wait where he is in the hopes that the enemy will accept his offer of battle in the open. If not, he can either retire the army back into the camp or – if he is feeling confident – advance to accept battle on the enemy’s terms (in this case, on the treeline and up the high ground). In practice, Roman generals were generally pretty willing to accept battle on these terms, so I expect Decimus would advance.
We’ll get into what that would look like as a smaller tactical level next week, but the key thing here is that Decimus, unlike Maximus, would be expecting to carry the day by advancing his heavy infantry directly into contact and breaking the enemy that way. Given how much more heavily armored his soldiers are, he can expect that, even if the initial morale shock and impact of his charge doesn’t shatter the enemy line, his heavy infantry are likely to grind through their opponents quite rapidly, as heavy infantry that meets lighter infantry in contact in good order generally makes a pretty one-sided slaughter of the fight quite quickly. If for some reason the first line fails to win, it can simply fall back to let the second line try, by which point the enemy is almost certain to be too badly wearied and wounded to withstand the attack. So long as he can keep from being enveloped or ambushed, Decimus is probably pretty confident in his ability to win, probably with very few losses.
Maximus, by contrast, is going to launch a tactically poor attack over bad terrain which very nearly gets him killed and looks like it costs him a good portion of his army. But we’ll get to that next week.
- I’d think its only real rival for prominence would be Spartacus (1960).
- If you are wondering, “but then were does our word ‘meridian’ come from, the answer is from Latin meridies, meaning ‘midday.’
- See figures in P. Holder, Auxiliary Deployment in the Reign of Hadrian (2003)
- There’s some complexity here because some infantry auxilia cohorts had small attached cavalry contingents too.
- I suppose I should note that is an odd exception for a type of very fine armor sometimes called lorica plumata (‘feathered armor’) by modern writers where metal scales were mounted on mail armor (typically with extremely fine, small rings), rather than on a textile backing. This armor type seems to have been rare and must have been very expensive.
- That is, inscription evidence: the graves of soldiers will often have their service history listed on them, for instance.
- What line are they holding? Normally to ‘hold the line’ means to hold a linear position against attack but he is galloping unopposed through a forest. Does he just mean for his men to hold formation? Why do they need encouragement to do that?
- Napoleonic warfare, of course, involves a lot of fires, both on their own and as a prelude to shock, but the armies of Revolutionary France and Napoleon subsequently were also notable for making heavy use of assault columns to enable larger and more determined but less experienced bodies of soldiers to shock enemy units (who, with more experience, might well win a prolonged exchange of fire with more accurate and quicker shooting) from a position.
- To borrow Everett Wheeler’s term.
“cheaply cash in on the [cache] that an actually grounded representation gets a work”
Should be cachet [1]: in the sense of “Prestige, high status; the quality of being respected or admired.”
[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/cachet_n?tab=meaning_and_use#10932827
Fixed
>> It sounds just right enough to fool your average viewer, while being entirely wrong [on the topic of the name].
Well that’s not really fair. By this article’s own admission, it has the order wrong, and 1 out of 3 of the names wrong. But Decimus is definitely a Roman name, and Maximus is a real cognomen (though an unusual one). So it’s about 50% wrong. That’s definitely a lot of wrongness, few exam systems consider 50% a good grade, but it’s not entirely wrong. Yes, I am being pedantic, but that is the title of the blog and, somewhat more seriously, opening with hyperbolic criticism looks vindictive and would make a casual reader take the rest less seriously. I know the sharpness of the quill is part of this blog’s style, but there’s really no need to exaggerate when there is so much to point out already.
I respectfully disagree with the assertion that Bret’s criticism of the name is “hyperbolic” or that it “looks vindictive.” In my experience, on the rare occasions where my native language (Dutch) features in English-language media, it is typically used in a way which any native speaker would immediately recognise as “wrong” in a way beyond butchering the pronunciation. (I fully understand that not everyone can master the dark arts of correctly pronouncing “Erg gezellig toch?”) Sometimes because words are being used which are not actually part of the Dutch language (just like Meridius here is not actual Latin), more often because words are not being used in the correct order (just like Maximus and Decimus here are in the wrong position), or just as often because that phrase would never be uttered by a native speaker in the given (or any) context despite being grammatically and semantically correct (see the point about “latinity” which Bret raises in other posts on this blog).
Is Bret exaggerating his frustration with the name for comedic purposes? Possibly! Am I entertained because I can relate to this frustration on a personal level due to having my native language abused by people who only care about whether they can pass it off as seemingly correct to an English-speaking audience? Certainly! In fact, I suspect most people on this planet can relate for similar reasons… (To be clear, I meant no personal offence whatsoever with that final remark.)
I’m not saying the name isn’t wrong, or that there’s one shouldn’t be annoyed at names (or language generally) being used wrong. I’m saying *entirely* is too strong a qualifier to apply to it. Things can be partially wrong, and that can be annoying. There’s just no need to jump straight from “correct” to “entirely wrong” while utterly ignoring the grey zone in the middle.
Surely if you agree that Bret is exaggerating his frustration (which you concede is a possibility), then you must also agree that he is (possibly) being hyperbolic? The two statements mean the same thing, I’m not sure how you can fully disagree with one but tentatively agree with the other
To be even more pedantic, a hyperbole is not merely an exaggeration; it’s an extreme exaggeration that isn’t meant to be taken literally (i.e “I was waiting in line for a million years!”). So “he’s exaggerating” and “he’s being hyperbolic” are not equivalent statements.
I stand corrected: all hyperbole are exaggerations, but not all exaggerations are hyperbole.
And what you describe happening to Dutch in Anglophone media is itself something that tends to happen to English (and American Anglo) names in non-English media. English has a significant corpus of given (first) names that are common enough to be used outside of just being passed down in a family but which are never used as family (last) names: Biblical names with specifically English-only spellings (and pronunciations) codified in the King James translation and names loaned in from other languages where they mostly originated as cognomens are the largest part of this.
There are a lot of cultures where it is impossible or extremely rare to have given names for individuals that just can’t plausibly be the names of families, and in turn it’s normal for a native English-speaker to read a name in subtitles for an “English” or “American” character that completely breaks suspension of disbelief.
My current favorite example is probably the sinister South Korean-created Lockheed-Martin stand-in “John & Mark”, but there are plenty of times when it’s an actual character with lines and everything.
“There are a lot of cultures where it is impossible or extremely rare to have given names for individuals that just can’t plausibly be the names of families, and in turn it’s normal for a native English-speaker to read a name in subtitles for an “English” or “American” character that completely breaks suspension of disbelief.
My current favorite example is probably the sinister South Korean-created Lockheed-Martin stand-in “John & Mark”
Nitpick, “John” and “Mark” are both perfectly plausible English-language surnames, though they’re more common as first names (as indeed is “Martin”!) Examples: children’s author Jan Mark; pre-Raphaelite artist Augustus John.
My father’s name is “Wilson.” The only other Wilson he has known was a Chinese man who chose an English name on the basis of his admiration for Woodrow Wilson. Of course, he didn’t want to offend the Woodrow family by claiming to be related, so he took the President’s personal name as his English personal name.
Presumably at some point he learned that he’d gotten American name order mixed up and that there was no Mrs. Woodrow and no Woodrow kids, but by that point it was too late. (It doesn’t help that in this case, BOTH “Woodrow” and “Wilson” are more common as surnames than given names, kind of a reverse-John&Mark situation, so you can’t even rely on knowing that “Teddy” is a given name to track whether this particular author has chosen to call him “Roosevelt Teddy” to make it easier for his Chinese audience.)
So should she be Usagi Tsukino or Tsukino Usagi? If you call her Usagi Tsukino, is it because you don’t understand Japanese at all, or because you’re translating it to a different language?
I’d say “entirely wrong” is accurate in this case. While two of the names are real Roman names, none of the three is in the correct position.
That’s like calling a fictional German noble of the Kaiserreich “Wittelsberg Otto von”. Individually, those are correct possible components of a German nobles name, but each one is very recognizably used incorrectly. Same thing with Maximus Decimus Meridius.
I’d say *entirely wrong* would be calling a German noble “Maximus Decimus Meridius” or a Roman General “Wittelsberg Otto von”. That is, obviously, more wrong than doing it the other way around. And if it’s possible to do something more wrong, that implies that the original way of doing it wasn’t *entirely* wrong. Because you cannot logically be more a thing than one which is already entirely that thing.
Logically then, if I then call a Roman general “Wittelsberg Otto von Pachacuti”, that’s obviously more wrong than just “Wittelsberg Otto von”, so “Wittelsberg Otto von” can’t have been entirely wrong. And I can always trivially construct an even more wrong name ad infinitum, so it follows that no name can ever be entirely wrong.
We are thus faced with the choice of either retiring the use of the phrase “entirely wrong” with regards to names altogether, or accepting that it’s figurative language and that different people have different, subjective, thresholds for referring to a name as “entirely wrong.” (E.g., swapping branches of PIE vs. swapping the order of names.)
Good point about the infinite descent and, yes, maybe “entirely” is not a word that should be used in this context at all. It doesn’t make sense to use it if there isn’t a related case where the word “partial” could be used. Having a correct praenomen, an (unusual) cognomen, and an (inexistent, but plausible as fiction) nomen in the wrong order seems to be almost a textbook case of giving partial credit.
Moreover, just because something is subjective doesn’t mean all takes should be given the same credit. At some point, two things are so wrong that even if one is technically wronger than the other by some objective metric, the perceived wrongness is the same. Is this subjective? Of course. But I doubt that there are many people who, in good faith, find “Maximus Decimus Meridius” indistinguishable from “Wittelsberg Otto von” in its level of wrongness as a Roman name. Anyone who genuinely does, I suspect, is somewhat lacking in perspective.
In English we call what you are describing, “not even wrong;” a category incorrectness for statements that indicate so much confusion on the part of the speaker that they cannot be evaluated for factual content.
It’s about as right as Romanes eunt domus: just enough to tell what it’s supposed to be and that it’s completely wrong.
Yeah, if by “completely” you mean “partially”.
Yes, “people called Romanes, they go to the house” definitely sounds like both a coherent sentence and something that would convey even an inkling of the intended political meaning.
Here’s a better example: Purple eater peoples. Hey, those are real words, so that sentence is only partially wrong!
You could even make the argument that most Latin people spoke in the Roman Empire (especially in the east and when writing) would have been some early form of vulgate, and would probably butcher the grammar and conjugation of a Cicero or a Caesar. Even today graffiti is hardly known for the accuracy of its orthography. “Yankees, feck off” tagged on a wall would hardly qualify for inclusion in Hansard but, because it gets the point across, it can’t be *entirely* wrong.
Now I’m curious if there were “pidgin” or “creole” variants of Latin in the outlying areas of the empire. E.g. varieties that used mostly Latin vocabulary but had very nonstandard grammar.
@holdthebreach,
We definitely know that daughter languages of Latin like French and Spanish lost case endings except for pronouns (and that daughter languages of French, i.e. the various creoles in different parts of the world, then went on to lose case differentiation even for the pronouns), so I can totally believe some guy out in the provinces not caring about case endings for “domus”. Would be interesting to know if that ever actually happened.
Just to be clear (and pedantic), “domus” is the wrong case, so the phrase would mean literally “Romans are going a house.”
@Hector
Without mass media, every household begins to develop it’s own accent. People have multiple context-dependent ways of speaking, and wherever you have a layer of social interaction the household accents will drift together. It is almost impossible to imagine that the formal public-speech-giving Latin (that generals could rely on all their legionaries understanding) was actually a dialect you would hear small children called to breakfast with in any part of the Empire.
Honestly, I’d love to read more about vulgates, dialects, and language gradients in the late Republic / Principate. Beyond very broad statements that the west spoke Latin and the east spoke Greek, history books (at least, the ones I read) never seem to dive deeper. Does anyone have reading recommendations on this topic?
I’m not sure that merely having a right name makes up for it being right in the wrong place, using an asian naming style for a person with a western naming style and vice versa makes it a different name, Johnson Smith is a different name from Smith Johnson. Likewise, Decimus being a real name in the wrong place is another aspect of it being wrong. It’d be like having Gunderson as the first name, as in Gunderson Bjork, instead of having the name of Bjork Gunderson. Thus, there is a total of 6 right/wrong aspects for a Roman full name, a reasonable and proper name in each nomen segment, and that said name fits the nomen segment, raising the incorrect ratio to 33%.
If we collapse the correctness of a Roman name into merely 3 right/wrong aspects and require it to have both a reasonable and proper name in the right place, then it is entirely wrong as explained in the post. Otherwise, it is more 33%, indeed not entirely wrong.
I think this discussion is partially explained by the fact that current American naming convention doesn’t really differentiate between first names and surname. A surname may be quite freely used as a first name, and “Gunderson” as the first name is not implausible, though surely rare. Thus, having the names in a wrong order doesn’t really seem that big a deal.
For a Finn, it is legally forbidden to give a name that resembles surname as a first name. This means that a first name may not sound like a surname in Finnish ears, not just that the name is actually used as a surname. (There are certain cultural rules what a surname and a first name, even if newly invented, usually sound like.) In most European countries, the same applies, although it may not be a written law. In a culture like this, it is easy to understand that using a word that sounds like a praenomen as a nomen for a gens, or a cognomen as a praenomen is completely wrong.
However, I would like to note that Meridianus could be a plausible cognomen, for a freedman. The names of slaves could be more or less anything, and a freedman kept his old name as a cognomen.
Surely the explanation is that the name was conceived of as Decimus Meridius Maximus, but someone decided that putting Maximus first sounded better, and emphasized the nickname the character is known by.
That is very plausible. It also reflects customs of the late 20th/early 21st century. But just as a Victorian matron referred to her husband as Mr. [Surname], so a Roman general would not be addressed or referred to by his praenomen.
By your logic, 2+3 = 7 is only 1/3 wrong because it’s just 1 digit off from a correct expression e.g. 2+5 = 7. The whole can be more than just a collection of its parts.
Names have particular cultural meaning in multiple ways. If you went to a [insert suitable east Asian country], assumed western name order and started addressing people the same way as you’d in the West under that assumption, you’d come off as rude no matter how almost-correct you viewed yourself to be, and you’d be treated accordingly. Just because of missing that cultural context of order, which parts are used why, and honorifics.
For the purpose of communicating the name to a western audience, putting the “nickname” first, the “surname” (not necessarily making sense in the language of the setting just like many ‘murican surnames don’t make sense in English) last and something common first-name-ish enough in between works well – and it’s quite possible Scott reordered it on purpose. Doesn’t make it historically accurate!
There’s no contradiction in saying that something is simultaneously historically inaccurate, culturally insensitive, and yet only partially wrong. I’d even say that getting a name *partially* wrong can cause far more offence than getting it *entirely* wrong – as discovered by generations of school kids deliberately mangling their teachers’ names. “Entirely” wrong doesn’t mean “causes offence” it means that there’s nothing right about it, no way it could be more wrong, and none of the intended meaning is conveyed. So I agree with what you say, it just don’t follow from it that getting the name order wrong makes the mangled name *entirely* wrong.
For the record, I have occasionally referred to Koreans by the wrong name order, because I was trying to be culturally sensitive and use the Korean order, but they’d already swapped their name order on business card to match the western norm. The reaction was mild confusion on their part and embarrassment on mine, but no offence taken.
As for the arithmetic example, it doesn’t really apply to the context of natural language. Mathematical equations are correct or incorrect, there is no middle ground, and it doesn’t make sense to even bring the qualifier “entirely” into it. Natural language, on the other hand, doesn’t work like that. I guess you could take a fully prescriptive stance and say that any phrase that doesn’t conform perfectly to the rules is equally and irrevocably wrong. But in that case the qualifier “entirely” is meaningless and (ironically) entirely unnecessary. In such a situation, a strong prescriptivist would be forced to conclude that the sentence contains a tautology, and is therefore not perfect, and is therefore wrong. Strong prescriptivism is rarely a sensible position to argue from.
A three-part name would usually be interpreted by a modern audience as first, middle, last and thus would probably assume that Decimus Meridius Maximus was being referred to by his family name (there were hereditary cognomina so it might not be that off base). Would anyone be particularly surprised by a modern character who mentions his name is say “John Paul Jones” but otherwise is called Jones throughout the film?
The movie is in English, not in Latin, and as part of the change in language follows English name ordering conventions.
The decision to use the conventions of the language the audience understands is not a mistake, any more than the decision to put Gladiator or the Dark Crystal in English.
The argument “actually these are English naming conventions” would be more convincing if these were English naming conventions. English typically reads names in the order of 1) given name, 2) nickname or alias, 3) family name. In which case he’d be Decimus “Maximus” Meridius, not Maximus Decimus Meridius. Although in practice Roman cognomena are often more extended family names, something for which English uses hyphenation, so they could have also gone with Decimus Meridius-Maximus. But they didn’t do those things, they gave an order which is wrong in both English and Latin.
So while it is very clever to suppose they might reorder a name to fit English conventions, they didn’t actually do that. I might suggest the reason they didn’t do that is because they do not, in fact, understand Roman naming conventions and did not bother to look them up.
I wonder what name would be 100% wrong in your opinion. Mark Antony?
Mark Antony could be taken as a translation of Marcus Antonius, so not really; the characters speak in English, not Latin, so translating the names along with the rest of the language hardly counts as an error IMO.
I think the Monty Python “Biggus Dickus” is 100% wrong. To use Bret’s language it has the verisimilitude of Latin with the “-us” ending, but absolutely nothing beyond that, so no veracity. It’s a thinly veiled pun in English, and has no connection to real Roman names beyond rhyming.
To flip it around, what do you consider a name that would only be partially (say, 50% ish) wrong?
Mark Antony would only be partially wrong. English is a Latin language so translating name is not necessary.
But of course if you say it is a just translation, and the original name is correct, then we can apply the same to Biggus Dickus as well.
That makes no sense. Why is it a mistake to translate Latinate names? It’s an editorial choice, there are stylistic reasons for both doing it and not doing it; just because it isn’t your preferred option doesn’t mean it’s wrong (even partially wrong). The Biggus Dickus comment makes even less sense: it’s neither an English name, nor is there any Latin name it could plausibly be an English translation of.
Ok so there is no partially wrong name. Either they are correct, or not.
Ok so you mean we can have a movie about a Roman general named George Martin and the audience would understand that the name in Latin is Georgius Martinus? Alright then.
Biggus Dickus is a comedic name. Don’t tell me the Roman could not come up with any name like “Big Dick” for a comedy as well.
No, because “Georgius Martinus” is not a valid Latin name. You can’t say that a name is a translation of Latin into English when the Latin name doesn’t exist… I’m genuinely perplexed that you don’t grasp this?
As for comedic names, I don’t know. Perhaps the comedies of Plautus have joke names; if so, then translating them into English (as hard as translating puns is) would be fine in my books.
“No, because “Georgius Martinus” is not a valid Latin name.”
Or rather it’s not a valid Roman name. It would be a perfectly valid Latin name for, say, a 16th century philosopher called “George Martin” or “Georges Martin” or “Gyorgy Martin”, who published in Latin and therefore Latinised his name (cf Linnaeus, etc.)
No, because “Georgius Martinus” is not a valid Latin name
“Martinus” was a Latin name at least by the time of Martin of Tours (4th century), i’m not sure exactly when it originated though. Point taken though since I assume you were talking about an earlier portion of history (e.g. the first century when “Biggus D*ckus” was supposed to be set).
So those people don’t exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavius_Martinus
“English is a Latin language”
Are you sure?
>> “English is a Latin language”
>Are you sure?
Of course it is. I only speak English, and when I watched Gladiator I could understand the Romans just fine.
This is my favorite example of “fake Latin”, from the 15th c:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flen_flyys
I’m curious about the local non-auxiliary troops showed on Trajan’s Column, the ones with no armor and two-handed clubs.
Now, I don’t know anything about ancient battle other than what I read in places like here, but that seems a really weird equipment mix. If they have no body armor at all, they’re vulnerable to quite a lot. Wouldn’t they want to supplement their defense with at least a shield? But a two handed weapon precludes that. And if they’re going to go for a two handed weapon anyway, why a club and not something with more reach like a spear of some sort?
I realize that just because it doesn’t make sense to me doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, but what’s the logic here?
It would not shock me if it was an artistic convention rather than an accurate depiction of their equipment, perhaps just signaling “there were primitive local barbarians on our side”.
I can buy that, especially since even today the symbolism for “primitive caveman” is scanty clothing and a big club.
As the host says, the column has value as propaganda. Locals that are naked from the waist up and carry wooden clubs is an easy way to say they are barbarians.
Perhaps their roles were (i) to finish off wounded men in armor and (ii) to fend off lightly-armored skirmishers or scouts?
That would require them to be mixed in with some sort of heavy infantry. That certainly couldn’t have been the Roman (including not-local-to-here auxilia) heavy infantry for multiple reasons, such as “language barrier” and “the heavy infantry in question hasn’t trained with these finisher-guys and doesn’t know how to let them do their work while avoiding getting their own head bonked with a two-handed club”. Possibly they could have been mixed into whatever the local heavy infantry is — including for the reason that by assumption the locals have heavily-armored men to finish off, and in every culture, people fight their neighbors more than they fight outside invaders — but in that case, the locals have a heavy infantry fighting system that would remain quite adequate even if this “gimmick” soldier is removed.
If they aren’t mixed in like that (partly because these locals would, by necessity, be equipment-poor on average), I would expect that some form of polearm (“halberd”) or pike would have been a much more natural fit. This still leaves open the question of missiles, of why they wouldn’t quickly turn into standard medium infantry (big shield, one-handed spear, little armor).
And for a fun aside: it seems plausible to me that the artists carving the Column simply had never seen one of these polearms, only heard/read a verbal description of them, which they misunderstood, hence the “club”.
replace pike or Halberd with spear and shield
Those may be intended to be Dacians or Bastarnae, a “barbarian” people to the east in what is now Romania. They were very tough opponents for Trajan, and a lot of them fought with the “falx”, a two handed blade with a short shaft. Like a lot of Celts and Germans, only the very rich had armour.
I know these depictions (as can you: https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.pOknPh2uCveqgTJWDPw19AHaFd&pid=Api), and as I have a degree in archeology, I can say that these are quiet correct depictions of germanic warriors (trousers in the correct style, also the cloak and the hair). But the clubs are certainly not authentic, authors like Tacitus ascribed spears as typical germanic weapons, swords more for theier elite, but clubs are never mentioned.
I am not completely sure what troops are described here, but as far as I know there are troops depicted on the Trajan’s column (sometimes called “Germanic auxiliaries” or “bare-chested irregulars”), which are armed with one-handed clubs and shields (the same type of flat oval shields used by other auxiliaries). They are depicted without have any armor or even tunics – only trousers.
It is hard to determine their combat role, but I suppose they likely were used as light shock infantry, for charging enemy positioned in rough terrain.
I loved the scene allz even the inclusion of the Zulu chant. It was a bit (big bit) of a liberty from Ridley Scott but he loved the film so included it.
One thing that always stood out to me about this sequence (and I was surprised to find unmentioned here) was how much it was really more of a medieval English battle dressed up in segmentata. The archers behind the stakes, the decisive charge by the knights, the catapult fires all feel very medieval coded to me.
I don’t have any real knowledge of mid century film, but it would make a lot of sense for me for Ridely Scott, as an English director, to have grown up in and borrowed from a more ‘Arthurian’ tradition of movie battles. Take a look at some of the pictures from Henry V (1944), for example.
Ridely Scott never let anything as silly as “history” or “facts” get in the way of a cracking good time, and for that I generally forgive him. I still think Gladiator is a masterclass of an action movie, even after learning much more about real Roman history (from this blog in part!). Thanks for the pedantry as always!
We’re going to get to the actual arrow barrage next week and yes, this is one of my points – it feels very much like the (also inaccurate) popular understanding of Agincourt.
Even the “cavalry force circling behind the enemy army to charge them in the rear” is something that happened in Poitiers (1356) or Castagnaro (1387). In the latter John Hawkwood hid a cavalry force in some nearby woods beforehand, to charge at the right time, which it’s what I remmeber it happened in Gladiator
The force led by Hawkwood at Castagnaro was actually a reserve force of dismounted men at arms who broke through the Veronese left flank: there was no cavalry, no wood in which to hide and no outflanking as far as I know.
Somewhat fitting in with this criticism, my impression of the “what is this armor” picture Bret provides is that it looks late medieval. (Also, too, what’s with holding the bow horizontally and pulling to the chest? Archery is normally done with a vertical bow, held sideways, and drawing across the chest, because that allows a longer draw and better aim. That looks like somebody using a – firearm. Sigh.)
The funny bow grip may also be an “acting” thing, because the prop bows aren’t real bows and the safety concern of “nobody should actually be able to loose an arrow that actually endangers anyone” may outrun the historicity of how the bows are handled.
For the one pictured, it looks like the cameraman (or director) wanted a dramatic shot from slightly below, focused on the face of the archer, but there’s no really good way to get that exact shot without the bow blocking the view. otoh they could’ve picked a different shot just as well, or a different moment/ movement. and/ or they got it confused with a crossbow, or yeah a rifle
(holding bows so they’re tilted with respect to the ground does happen, but you still keep it in line with your body/ spine and bend at the waist – I need to do this, I’m left handed but blind in my right eye so need a weird position to get my left eye able to sight down the arrow properly. but I’m still drawing to my cheek, bow vertical wrt my face. for one thing with an actual war bow you’re not gonna be able to use your muscles properly trying to use it like a crossbow)
It feels like the one thing missing from this description is the presence of the Emperor, who is depicted as being to the rear, mounted, surrounded by his Praetorians, watching the battle play out (while seeming to have left the running of the battle entirely in the hands of Maximus: ‘they honour you, Maximus’, he says, when the soldiers start cheering for them both.) How accurate is that to the way that a Marcus Aurelius or just a generic Roman Emperor would conduct themselves on the battlefield?
Very likely, by the time of Marcus Aurelius. After the Julio-Claudian dynasty, one major problem of the Roman emperor was the lack of institutional stability. The imperial office could be claimed by any successful general with a major army, so the units under a single commander became ever smaller, and the emperor could not delegate major armies. Essentially, the emperor was the only man who could command a large army, so they tended to spend a lot of time campaigning.
The Roman general was supposed to lead from behind. The contemporary military manuals recommend that the standard pre-battle speech includes the note that the general will be behind his troops, able to see the performance of the men, and everyone will get his due reward afterwards.
“Essentially, the emperor was the only man who could command a large army, so they tended to spend a lot of time campaigning.”
Like other kingdoms and empires, then.
*Some* other kingdoms and empires, but far from all. Even later Romans (aka, Byzantines) often had Emperors stay in the capital and let generals do the fighting for them; although the prevalence of this varied between periods. I’m also not aware of Queen Victoria leading very many charges personally in the British Raj.
I’m also not aware of Queen Victoria leading very many charges personally in the British Raj.
Smuts, you magnificent bastard! We read your book!
i considered Maximus formally as the magister equitum of this force
To my knowledge, that office didn’t exist in the time of Marcus Aurelius.
The original Magister Equitum is the 2IC of a Roman dictator (original version). AIUI, Sulla doesn’t bother with one, and neither do the emperors until Diocletian, if not later. Diocletian accedes to power in 284 CE, 104 years after the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE. The Late Western Empire revives the office of Master of the Horse / Magister Equitum, but at a far more junior level.
“AIUI, Sulla doesn’t bother with one, and neither do the emperors”
Sulla actually did. It was one Valerius Flaccus.
Caesar interestingly neglected to have a master of horse in his first dictatorship in 49 – but later he did. His first master of horse was Marcus Antonius. Then he replaced Marcus Antonius as master of horse – with Lepidus. Who lasted till Caesar´s assassination.
Yet Caesar had announced plans to replace Lepidus in turn. Two replacements – with one master of horse at a time, meaning limited term. One of the prospective replacements was Calvinus. The other was Gaius Octavius.
After Caesar´s assassination, Lepidus soon resigned, and Lex Antonia abolished dictatorship.
Even given that the formal office of “master of horse” did not exist in Marcus Aurelius’ day, one could nonetheless imagine Marcus Aurelius giving formal command of the cavalry and an semi-formal status as “highest-ranking commanding officer in this army who isn’t me” to a specific trusted officer. Probably he never actually did that, sure, but it’s not quite so anti-historical as all that, maybe?
“one could nonetheless imagine Marcus Aurelius giving formal command of the cavalry and an semi-formal status as “highest-ranking commanding officer in this army who isn’t me” to a specific trusted officer. Probably he never actually did that, sure,”
I am not sure that the position about it is “probably never, sure”.
Precisely who were leading officers of an Imperial Roman army when an Emperor was not present? Titles, distribution of assignment
Precisely who were the leading officers when an Emperor WAS present?
For an example of a battle with no Emperor present – Battle of Teutoburg Forest. The overall commander was Quinctilius Varus.
Who were the other commanders? A Numonius Vala commanded the cavalry and tried breaking out (he was pursued, caught and killed). Numonius Vala is called a “legate” and described as Varus´ second in command. Was Varus himself a legate of Augustus, too? Both Varus and Vala legates? The other commanders mentioned were called “prefects”. One Eggius who fought to the end, and one Ceionius who surrendered but committed suicide after surrender. There were three legions at Teutoburg. Did all legions have prefects, or did one legion not have any prefect because it was under command of Varus?
About the generic conclusion that Emperors could not trust generals with armies… Years of Four and Five Emperors make me uncertain of that conclusion. When you look at battles where Emperors lost and won Empire and life…
*1st Bedriacum, April 69 – Otho was present at battlefield but Vitellius was not. Why did Vitellius trust Caecina and Valens with armies, and why did Caecina and Valens hand Empire to Vitellius rather than grab it for themselves?
*2nd Bedriacum, October 69 – neither Vitellius nor Vespasianus were present. Vitellius´ forces apparently had no commander – arrested their commander Caecina for treason, but precisely who was second in command? On Vespasianus´ side, one Antonius Primus
*Cyzicus, 193 – neither Severus nor Pescennius present, Severus trusted one Candidus, Pescennius one Asellius Aemilianus
*Nicaea, 193 – Severus not present (Candidus in command), could not find if Pescennius was
*Issus, 194 – Severus still not present (this time a Cornelius Anullinus in command), Pescennius present
*Lugdunum, 197 – first battle with actually both emperors present
So… when emperors commanded multiple legions and fought for their life, who were in charge of significant parts of the army? In terms of formal official title?
Snorkack, I’m going to be honest, I have a lot of trouble parsing your writing style, which tends to meander in a stream-of-consciousness style. I can’t figure out if you’re attempting to deliver a specific message, to prove a specific thesis, or to ask specific questions that you don’t already know the answers to…
I couldn’t get past the Zulu chanting lifted from the “Zulu” or “Zulu Dawn” soundtracks for the presumed German barbarians. My suspension of disbelief was destroyed within the first minutes and I never got it back.
Now do the battle in HBO’s rome. Then the rest of the show!
Part of the problem with doing that is that Rome shows very very little of the battles. There’s a close-up of some shifting fresh legionnaires to the very front in season one in what’s supposed to be Alesia from memory, and a small bit of Philippi in season two – am I forgetting another one?
Great production values… that didn’t stretch to loads and loads of extras in battle scenes or serious CGI to replace them.
I care less about the battles than commentary on the politics/life in rome
You should check out Adrian Goldworthy’s channel on YouTube, he has an extensive episode-by-episode breakdown. He’s a very serious (ex) military historian on Rome, with a knack for clear and evocative writing, so he knows what he’s talking about.
I did not know he had a channel, that sounds great. thanks
If you have the disc set(s), then their history consultant does a few commentaries on particular episodes. The bit I remember is around someone announcing to all their associates that they knew their wife had been unfaithful. That was shameful, but – apparently – not as shameful as not knowing.
The bits after the assassination of Julius Caesar are definitely mixed in terms of accuracy, even before you get to the plot hole of the way that the fictional centurion had been made a senator earlier, as a way of getting a bodyguard into places they couldn’t otherwise go, but – despite the (historical) agreement about keeping all of Caesar’s acts and appointments valid after his killing – he isn’t one later on.
I was thinking of HBO’s Rome, too, particularly during the description of how Romans of the period actually fought. It might have been a little overzealous in painting the Germanic enemies as chaotic berserkers with zero military structure, but I bet a few auxiliaries on the flanks, or even the legionaries furthest from the center might have had hours of battle with roughly as much excitement as Lucius Vorenus had in that scene…
> Alexander or Hannibal flanking an army with cavalry, they are almost always punching through and collapsing an enemy flank and then ‘rolling up’ the army
It’s almost 2000 years after Alexander, but the Battle of Wittstock shows this being done successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wittstock with Banér detaching a large chunk of his army to take a detour. It also shows why this was usually *not* done: It left the army perilously close to being defeated beacuse a third of it was missing. (and Leslie, the other swedish commander actually wrote home being fairly horrified at the gamble and how many casualties he’d suffered for it)
The most dramatic (and successful) instance I can think of where a commander actually did the full go-around was at Rocroi where Enghien (later and better known as Condé) swung his right wing cavalry pretty much all the way around the Spanish army to knock out its artillery and attack the infantry from the *rear*, all but winning the battle at a stroke (albeit the quality of the Spanish infantry meant that finishing them off was a pain in the neck).
As at Wittstock, the French left and centre was in trouble, and that they were losing ground probably made the sweep on the right easier. But unlike Wittstock, at Rocroi it seems to have been at least in part a response to the way the battle was going, rather than a predetermined plan to weaken the left-centre to reinforce the right.
Early modern battles seem to have been a lot more tactical than ancient battles. At least in terms of fancy maneuvers and positioning. Brett has talked about the general on the hill with the spyglass being a early modern thing, because of spyglasses, and Wittstock is at least two decades after its invention. (The telescope patent in 1608 is rejected because the item is already in common use).
Link to the comment about telescopes:
https://acoup.blog/2022/05/27/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-i-reports/#easy-footnote-16-13055
we might just have more/better accounts of them.
I think it could be said that we have sufficiently detailed contemporary descriptions of pre-modern battles that are consistent with one another as to conclude that their tactical standards were the norm, if not absolutely foundational.
There’s also a matter of what different equipment brings to the dynamics of fighting; the use of decent firearms can be traced directly to just completely different methodologies of fighting, not just with regards to range and overall lethality, but how independently units can function when such things can cover their own flanks, and how they experience and respond to pressure. In part, higher emphasis on large scale manoeuvre not only becomes possible, but necessary, because delivery of a shock that causes rout en masse just doesn’t come out the same way.
I would trivially forgive filmmakers for breaking from reality, if the reality of battle was more boring. Entertainment can be entertaining, not educational.
But damn, if what you described as accurate, wouldn’t work perfectly fine as cinema – even better than what was filmed, for the themes of the movie! You want to show Rome as a powerful, organized, strictly-governed society? Show disciplined infantry marching through hails of arrows, to deliver an assault, using their extravagant levels of armor and weaponry to crush a mob of barbarians. (Go ahead and give them uniform lorica segmentata, it might be unrealistic but it does help that theme.)
You could even do a fake-out on a modern audience – set up the battle plan like our protagonist is cocky and overconfident, doing a move that in a *modern* war would get your men killed, and then the twist is he actually *is* that good, this *is* a good tactic, they take minimal casualties while winning the battle, because this *isn’t* Verdun or Crimea. Hype up Roman heavy infantry as being particularly effective, because gladiators are (thematically, not actually) Roman heavy infantry, and in particular show that Maximus/Decimus *sees* them as valuable, understands how they fight and how they win.
If you absolutely need to show the protagonist being physically competent in combat, have an enemy cavalry unit hit them from behind, he fights hand-to-hand while ordering the triarii to about-face, fend them off. That can be the one thing that goes wrong in the plan, to keep things interesting, without altering the outcome.
I’m not a filmmaker but I really don’t see why that *wouldn’t* work in the medium.
That’s a pretty fun trope inversion, show the enemy lines loaded with ranged weapons, our hapless general orders the heavy infantry forwards over open ground. This guy is an idiot they’re going to lose! Then instead of magic machine-gun arrow fire the armour actually armours, the enemy archers waver and withdraw and the enemy melee infantry lasts all of ten minutes. The idea of being in a barbarian army, (tropet yes I know)full of shoulding and bravado and hype to help overcome your fear then having to face these densely packed, quite uniform looking heavy infantry who just keep steadily advancing in an orderly fashion sounds terrifying. For you, a farmer doing his levy duty for the first time in his life, this is the most exciting and terrifying thing to ever happen. For the Roman soldier opposite you this is merely Tuesday, er dies martis.
That sort of thing is already part of the visual language used for science fiction an fantasy battles. The reason we don’t use it where it would be actually historically accurate is that it *looks* unrealistic.
There’s a term for this that I forget–the idea that actual fact would be considered nonsense so it doesn’t get included. The example I always hear about is gladiators stopping for commercial breaks. Absolutely historically accurate–gladiators would trot out products and advertise them during breaks in the fighting–but modern audiences would consider it horribly inaccurate. Another is colors. Actual Medieval and ancient clothing was brightly colored and dressed up however the woman of the house could afford to dress it up, because people like nice things. But it clashes with the modern view that ancient people were ignorant, smelly, unwashed, and crude. And in armed conflicts, no one would believe that “punch up the center, hit them where they’re strongest and wear them away” is a viable tactic, not after the World Wars. Armies have to be uniform, because that’s what armies ARE in our day–despite the fact that an accurate portrayal would be a bunch of people dressed up in whatever armor they could get.
Makes it hard for a film maker to accurately portray…well, anything, really. If you do it right everyone thinks you’re an idiot. Imagine the backlash if “The Last Kingdom” looked like an old Techincolor/Erol Flinn flick! If you want people to believe you, you have to get the facts wrong. And most directors and producers and film people, not being terribly devoted to history, will opt for the latter every time. Historical accuracy that breaks suspension of disbelief is not a money-making decisions; historical inaccuracy that brings people to the theaters, is.
Note that this is nothing new. Pretty much all of Arthurian Legend falls into this–folks wouldn’t believe knights would fight in old-fashioned armor or behave in ways that “today” (for whatever value of “today” we’re talking about) would consider uncouth. So the knights get updated wardrobes and moral compasses. Shakespeare did this extensively as well. I like to joke that the Hornblower series is “What if Forester had been sent back in time?” because of how out of touch Hornblower would have been for his time period. The trope is old as dirt and not going anywhere any time soon; story-tellers will always adjust their stories to match their audiences.
That sounds like a type of anachronism, except instead of an object or event it’s the modern audience’s expectations that are in the wrong time.
The TVTropes page for this is “Reality Is Unrealistic.”
The other month I saw “Gladiator II” with a friend who didn’t buy that whole flood the Colosseum for naval battles bit. But that was real history.
I tend to give the Hornblower series a pass, mostly because Hornblower and the people around him all think that he’s a complete weirdo on certain topics, and they all pertain to those aspects of his character that are anachronistic.
Wikipedia has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_Problem – which references the film-makers deciding to leave Colosseum commercial breaks out of Gladiator!
And that would add the theme that Maximus idolized Roman superiority.
The problem is again with the pre-existing film grammar. The uniformly-equipped, machine-like, relentlessly grinding troops have a long filmic history of being the villains (as opposed to the rag-tag, underdog heroes).
You don’t want to imply your main protagonist and hero is part of (what is by cinematic visual tradition) the Big Evil Empire.
I think Bret’s point, alluded to by him and others on this site, is that movies have their own, almost century-old at this point, “grammar,” i.e., a set of battle tropes to which movie battles must generally conform. Those tropes are probably most heavily influenced by the two World Wars. So movie battles won’t look much like Agincourt or Desert Storm, they will look like Verdun or the Battle of the Bulge.
I’m not sure this would be impossible, but I expect it would require more work. So if you just want “generic battle sequence to start the movie”, this is what you get.
Over time, everything naturally falls into a rut.
It seems to me that the “Proper Roman battle” Scott describes, grinding up the center, etc., would be perfect for a different type of scene, one that focuses less on the epic sweep, and more on the experience of an average infantryman. Get the camera down in the ranks, show the unit discipline, the anxiety as they slowly march toward an enemy they can’t really see, then the release as the two line crash into each other, some brutal hand to hand, only for the enemy to give way, and then the line reforms. Occasionally break to the general, calmy sitting on his horse.
That would tell a very different story, but surely a worthy one.
You could do the troops marching through a hail of arrow fire now with CGI. I’m not sure back then how well it could be done back when Gladiator was first made. There was certainly the budget to shoot arrow like objects to be defeated by shields and armor, but there was the chance that somebody might lose an eye or something from all the flying objects.
I had actually never seen Gladiator, so when I saw this week’s topic I went and watched the opening battle for the first time, and even just being a layperson who reads this blog I was repeatedly like “wait, what?” The one that struck me most was “The infantry has spears… Oh, those are pila! Of course! Wait, nobody’s throwing them. You were supposed to throw them!”
Also, I expect we’re less well-informed about what the Germanic combatants would have looked like, but I also suspect that we know enough to say these fur-festooned Hollywood savages ain’t it.
Almost certainly not. Germany never had that many bears, if nothing else.
I’d expect mostly padded or other cloth defences (most of these guys are levies), escalating to metal armour as you get into the Big Men, aka, the warrior aristocracy, with mail likely the top end. Roman-style helmets might be fairly common among those who can afford them; 26 Etruscan helmets dating to c. 450 BC–350 BC were found in Negova (modern Slovenia), and I see little reason to assume the trade ever stopped.
In terms of weapons, lots of spears, long knives and/or single-hand axes as backup, generally round shields, with again the richer folk actually looking more Roman, i. e., you “average” rich boy wields a spatha-sized locally made sword, the richer boy one tier higher has an Imperial-issue spatha, and the guy above THAT had his spatha custom made in the imperium.
While we do see a lot of luxury trade into the germania, weapons seem to be one of the thing they often produce locally (though often influenced/copied from roman patterns) there’s some *very* fine metallurgy for high-end stuff found in the winder germanic area.
Disappointingly, they would have looked a lot like Celtic ones, both militarily and otherwise. Small agrarian polities, subject to the same pressures. Wild furs are not actually that abundantly available(*), and to be actually functional clothing, they would have been significantly processed. What is available is wool from domesticated sheep. (I understand that linen grew poorly north of the Alps. Hemp did grow, and is an excellent material for ropes, sacks, or paper, but AFAIK it can’t be spun into fine enough thread to make for comfortable clothes.) Unlike the Mediterranean peoples, they would have worn pants (…though even today, the generic term for the concept of “clothing, clothes” is Kleidung, where a single Kleid is in English a dress, an article of clothing today exclusively worn by women). Militarily, because they were small polities, they run out of recruitable headcount before they reach logistical limits, thus — whether they try to fight their neighbors or the Romans — they put all military-age men on the field, and consequently the average expense of equipment is low. Sedentary (cereal) agricultural economy means they are predominantly medium infantry: shield and spear, maybe with a throw-and-charge weapon (Frankish francisca, Roman pilum).
And now I wonder: is the attritional (deep and, wealth permitting, armor-heavy) fighting style an adaptation to the ruggedness of the Italian terrain, where usually the battles involving Roman/Samnite/whatever armies would have terrain features anchoring both flanks (and limiting the width of frontage), while in some other regions on the world, features would tend to be spaced more sparsely (…”typical width of alluvial plains from river to hillside [steep enough not to plow therefore also forested]”??) and consequently, with one or both flanks open, a more populous (infantry) army would expect to envelop a smaller army by exceeding their frontage (and backing them against the anchoring feature — or stretching them so thin (in “soldiers per meter of frontage”) that breakthroughs and “restoration of maneuver” become inevitable)? [breath] This “less attrition, more maneuver” fighting system would in turn favor the tactical mobility of a more cavalry-heavy mix, independently of whatever is economically straightforward to produce, thus elites fight on horseback and remake the social order to create more cavalry.
*: Even under the most favorable assumptions, population density needs to be much lower for that. However, the real limit is that even in the absence of agricultural population density, if the people have access to sheep, they will retool the ecosystem from producing furs to producing wool (and from producing game to producing mutton and milk). Hollywood got the (mistaken) image from trade reaching reindeer-herding Northern Scandinavia, arctic Siberia, and agricultural-frontier Canada. The mistake is in thinking that, given that the civilized (agricultural, urbanized) clothing-workers processed the furs — because it was more remunerative for the locals to spend their effort on getting more furs to sell — then clearly the non-urban, non-agricultural (a.k.a. savage) locals must be wearing them unprocessed.
Hemp is, at least later on, sometimes used for clothes but its very much a sign of poverty near destitution. (or deliberate asceticism, “ashes and sackcloth”)
Linen is cultivated north of the alps (as far north as scandinavia) but its way less productive, so indeed, most of it will be wool of various types.
Hemp is used for clothing today as well – my Dad had a jumper made from it. But that might be a newer technology, and even if not it might still be too coarse for inner garments.
“Wild furs are not actually that abundantly available(*), and to be actually functional clothing, they would have been significantly processed. What is available is wool from domesticated sheep.” “However, the real limit is that even in the absence of agricultural population density, if the people have access to sheep, they will retool the ecosystem from producing furs to producing wool (and from producing game to producing mutton and milk). Hollywood got the (mistaken) image from trade reaching reindeer-herding Northern Scandinavia,”
Sheep itself is a furbearing animal. One clothing material is sheepskins – with or without fleece on. The sheepskins with fleece on are by definition furs.
Large parts of Norther Scandinavia had access to sheep, cattle and horses – needing hay from the limited patches of better soil scattered around the landscape. Most of the landscape is not too high or steep to get around, but too stony and infertile for plough or scythe, and it was (and is) left as forest. Which was useful for many products – including wild furs.
By Marcus Aurelius’ time the Germani were coalescing into larger groups, better-armed (hence the war – the aim was to break up one such group). The Marcomanni gave him a tough fight, invading Italy and defeating a few Roman armies. By this time they had been trading with/learning from Rome for a few centuries, so their battle line was probably better equipped – more armour is a distinct possibility.
And as the Germani coalesced, they eventually formed a coalition which at least asserted itself to contain “all the men”: hence the French (and many late Latin?) name for said group of Teutons.
While I understand the complaint about the over-uniformity of the Roman troops, that specific issue is likely about preserving continuity and making the costumes easier to manufacture than anything else.
“if a Roman army wanted a flat, open space to offer battle in, they needn’t have cleared it themselves (and indeed probably couldn’t, at least not in the time frame they’d have to prepare for a pitched battle), but could simply march to the nearest village with its patches of farmland. Getting a Roman army to fight in dense, old-growth forest, after all, famously required clever ambushes, as a Teutoberg Forest (modern Kalkriese) in 9 AD. And if the enemy didn’t want to fight in the open, Roman armies were perfectly happy to burn villages and pillage crops as the standard way of attempting to force an enemy to accept an offer to battle or else vacate the area.”
But at Teutoburg Forest, the Germans used clever ambush to maximize their advantage.
Did they offer battles in dense forests on other occasions? What was Roman response? And the outcome?
“if he is feeling confident – advance to accept battle on the enemy’s terms (in this case, on the treeline and up the high ground). In practice, Roman generals were generally pretty willing to accept battle on these terms,”
Sounds like you have examples, not just Teutoburg?
About the muddy field – sure, you need high explosives to break up turf of a pasture, as shown by US civil war photos. Explosives – or ploughs. If it was a field and the Roman army camped there after ploughing but before the sown grain had sprouted, would the army trample away the furrows?
About picking a battle location – sure, fields are what is worth fighting for.
Does not mean that fields are the best place to fight at, for the defender.
In Germania, fields are not continuous. Between field A and field B there is non-field, usually forest. Likely between field B and field C ditto, et cetera. Yes, the owners need to get around. Tracks fit to drive a few cows, maybe a cart with grain or hay. Width tree to tree according.
If Romans camp on field A and the defenders wish to prevent Romans from trampling field B, where do they prefer to make a stand?
Enter field A to fight Romans on open field A on Roman terms?
Wait for the Romans at the treeline of field A, defenders in the forest?
In the middle of the track through forest?
At the treeline with defenders in field B and Romans coming out of forest?
At some natural obstruction in the middle of the forest track?
A minor point, armies in the past would generally have never been campaigning if the field was just sown and the crops weren’t near harvesting. They needed to feed off the crops they encountered to stay in the field. Part of the reason there were traditional campaign seasons.
I think you are failing to make a distinction between bands of trees between fields (which would have been smaller than an army) and the deep forest (which would have been much larger). I imagine that the Romans (and the Germans they are facing) would be happy enough to fight around the first, but more reluctant to engage from within the latter.
It’s worth noting that besides the point already made by Jeff S about campaign seasons, a lot of ploughing in this period would not have involved actual ploughs, as was pointed out by a much earlier post on here. I daresay that as far as the lands substantially less prosperous than Rome were concerned, only a small minority of farms would have been touched by one.
https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-actually-farming/
> Now as we’ve noted, the very poorest of farmers are not going to have regular access to a plow-team. While they may have used human power to move a plow, the more common expedient here was hoe-farming using hoes, digging sticks or small ‘hard ards.’ That was slow, inefficient and backbreaking work, so getting access to a plow-team was important if at all possible. Even for an animal-drawn plow (with a plow-team, normally oxen) there’s quite a lot of muscle work to be done to keep the furrows (the grooves left by the plow) straight – the straighter and more even the better – and to keep the plow down in the earth (pushing down on it may be necessary). Remember: you are not only moving the weight of the plow, but the weight of all of the earth it is turning up. This is one of the advantages of an animal plow team – oxen, being big, strong things can pull a much deeper plow. Of course a lot of land needed to get plowed and in a relatively constrained time window; as you might imagine, the fellows who might own the plow teams would thus be in a position to make sure their lands were plowed during the most favorable time windows.
> named for their fearsome ‘kick’ (like an ass, an onager)
In Roman Empire, ass kick you!
It occurs to me that the term “kickass” could have origins in which the “kick” suffix is an adjective and not a verb. As in, an ass that is prone to kicking (as has been encountered in just about any time and place that has handled them).
“Indeed, as I joke to my students, the Romans believed that the quickest way to an enemy’s vulnerable rear was through their front, the same ‘theory of victory’ on the battlefield as Roman armies had in the Middle and Late Republic.”
As I understand it, Roman cavalry seems to have mattered a fair bit early into the Roman Republic (when Rome didn’t yet have, or wasn’t yet used to having armour superiority). Then Rome got increasingly used to fighting armour-deficient opponents, and went for a through the front approach. Interestingly, bit over two centuries later, Caesar, once he had to fight fellow Romans who enjoyed just as much armour as he did, seems to have decided that cavalry flanking one’s opponent is actually a pretty great idea.
Rather than a geometric quip, I’m getting the impression that Roman tactics were very heavily informed by their opponents’ deficiencies, and judging by Caesar’s approach at Pharsalus, the ‘Straight through the front’ plan loses a lot of its appeal if the other side enjoys the same amount and quality of armour as oneself.
Suddenly, cavalry to the flank becomes cool again.
Partly duplicate of above: perhaps this also depends on the typical terrain, and given that you mention Caesar, somewhat also on the general?
If you expect that the battles you will fight will happen on broad plains, with one or both flanks open, the bigger army can exceed the frontage of the smaller one and envelop them. (Or stretch them so thin that breakthrough(s) will inevitably happen.) This expectation of maneuver, and the expectation that armies will be stretched thin, makes heavy shock cavalry valuable. By contrast, if you expect to fight battles on fields that anchor both flanks and constrain frontage — e.g. small-ish river valleys, enclosed by hillsides too steep to plow and consequently forested in addition to being steep — then both armies will stack up too deep for cavalry to break through, and there is nothing to do but for the infantry to grind. This favors more armor, but is comparatively undemanding of tactical brilliance.
But a general under casualty-avoidance pressure (and perhaps trusting in his own tactical-brilliance superiority) would have a reason to, if the opportunity presents itself, tilt the field toward having more maneuver (and complexity). Increasing dynamism and complexity biases the distribution of tactical outcomes toward the more brilliant general (or field leadership). Even independently of that, since battles with more maneuver have an extreme outcome distribution (i.e. more disproportionate casualty figures), and given that a bloody tactical victory is a strategic defeat for Caesar at Pharsalus, he might well prefer to roll the dice on a double-or-nothing over taking even a guaranteed Pyrrhic victory (not that that was exactly on the table to begin with).
While terrain matters, I doubt it’s particularly relevant in this case. While Pharsalus, in Thessaly, was certainly cavalry-friendly, Italy doesn’t appear to have been particularly cavalry-unfriendly, judging by Hannibal’s exploits (and the Romans as well as Pyrrhus weren’t far behind; Heraclea, insofar as we can trust the accounts, seems to have been fairly cavalry-heavy with both sides’ cavalry being used to considerable effect).
In short, Italy’s terrain doesn’t appear to have particularly inhibited cavalry. Indeed, Roman cavalry seems to become less significant as Rome pushes out of Italy and into more cavalry friendly territory (Po river valley, southern Gaul, Hispania). Hence the suspicion that the dearth of armour amongst Rome’s opponents’ mattered a great deal for this development and wouldn’t have happened if Roman levels of armouring had been more widespread.
This being said, I’m with you about the general mattering. Switching to something you – and your army! – aren’t/isn’t familiar with is not easy. It might even be impossible as the means simply aren’t available (of course, Caesar did have the means, courtesy of his campaigning in Gaul getting him decent Gaulish and Germanic mercenary cavalry).
Of interest would be the evolution of the Roman army during and after the crisis of the 3rd century (as well as the period between Caesar and the establishment of the principate), since Roman armies constantly fighting each other should’ve seen a similar/continuing development.
AFAIK (with very limited K), this did happen in the late empire, but emphatically not during the post-Caesarian civil wars.
Very handy — and illuminating! Thank you for sharing this critique with us.
One question and one thought:
Isn’t the wall or embankment behind the fossa called a murus? I seem to recall from my school days a perpetual Caesarean refrain: murum fossamque ducit.
The Roman approach to battle seems similar to the British approach to naval battle in the Age of Sail: just let us get close to the enemy and fight it out broadside to broadside; we will always win those battles.
If you are better at concentrating force than the other fellow, you probably should.
I would say more that if you are better man-to-man or gun-to-gun than your enemy, you should eschew maneuver and seek close engagement.
Nelson turned Trafalgar into a melee, but your typical British vs French/Spanish engagement involved a lot of manoeuvre – which the British with their better-trained and more experienced crews usually won. The endeavour was first to gain the weather gage and then to cross the enemy’s bow or, even better, their stern and deliver a raking fire. At Trafalgar the Redoubtable was holding its own against the Victory until a second British ship raked it stem to stern, killing a large portion of the crew.
All else being equal, that would suggest you can concentrate force more effectively. If all else is not equal, you might still be inferior at concentrating force.
Recall the line that two Mamluk horsemen would defeat three French cavalrymen, but two thousand French would defeat three thousand Mamluks.
I only watched Gladiator the one time, on release, and was very disappointed and have never gone back. My lingering impression — apart from the general violence and Zulu chanting — was that most of the film seemed cribbed from bits of other films, like Spartacus and I, Claudius, and even Fall of the Roman Empire (which is not even very good) — so what was the point? Oh, to make a few denarii. I forget.
The influence of Fall of the Roman Empire is obvious, yes (although I disagree that that film isn’t any good – it’s not historically accurate, no, but if you set that aside it’s pretty decent). But I do think Gladiator is excellent on its own terms. There is an awful lot to praise – performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Oliver Reed, the sets, the cinematography. The arena sequences, especially with the tigers and the chariots, are fantastic. Even the opening battle scene, all over the place historically as it is, stands out as something special for its scale and drama in the pre-Lord of the Rings era. There’s a reason it was a massive hit, won an Oscar and pretty much restarted the sword-and-sandals genre single-handedly.
A comparator would be Braveheart, which like Gladiator is a decent movie if you can ignore how historically inaccurate it is. But I think Gladiator is a better movie on those terms, and unlike Braveheart it doesn’t have propaganda baked right through it. It also doesn’t start out by making any bold claims to truth in defiance of history, which makes it rather less teeth-gritting.
I seem to remember watching Braveheart and seeing the opening sentence talk about the “pagan King Edward”. I did wonder if they were trying for some kind of record for speed and absurdity of inaccuracy.
It does have a good villain, though I don’t know if he has any resemblance the real King Edward but his name. I’d rather watch Rob Roy, which I imagine is just as inaccurate, but a lot more fun, and better supporting characters.
I’d say he has ‘some’ resemblance. Longshanks was supposed to have a reputation for a fearsome temper, and his manner in going about war with the Scots was pretty harsh and uncompromising even by the standards of the day. But he wasn’t doing anything as ridiculous as ordering archers to shoot into a melee containing his own troops (which would be both uncouth and tactically unsound, neither of which might be seen as attributes of him), nor violently murdering his own courtiers. And he was reportedly very good at the impressive, ceremonial aspects of being a king, and administering in the interests of justice in the realm. I think his portrayal by Stephen Dillane in Outlaw King is a bit closer.
Oh, that and how Patrick McGoohan is very tall, that’s another thing he can lend in common.
And he was not a pagan! My father, who had traced our genealogy back to Edward I, was particularly outraged by that statement, a slur on his 20th or so great-grandfather.
I think they probably just meant ‘heretic King Edward’?
And that would still be wrong, because this was pre-Reformation Europe where literally every monarch west of Byzantium and north of the Pyrenees was Catholic. There wouldn’t have been a heretic king.
Just a cinematic ‘not even wrong’ moment, moving the Reformation a few centuries back (or maybe transplanting Lithuania?)
@Frank, there’s a lot of room for heresy under a catholic/universal umbrella.
There is, and even by those standards none really apply to Edward I, who was in fact renowned as a man of faith (in no small part because he was a crusader, which shows what counts for orthodoxy at the time).
One might contrast with Robert the Bruce, who is providing that narration, a man who was actually excommunicated for several years due to having violated the sanctity of a church by murdering a rival claimant there.
Surely “pagan” just means “a real bad guy”?
“But I do think Gladiator is excellent on its own terms.”
That’s always been my take. Is it historically accurate? No. In fact, in college I took a Roman Life course and did a pretty thorough documentation of just how inaccurate. But that was never the point of “Gladiator” and while it’s absolutely fair to criticize the inaccuracies it’s also unfair to call it a bad movie because of them.
Think about Trajan’s Column for a moment. That, too, was inaccurate–often wildly inaccurate. But that’s okay, because, as our good host stated, it’s not a photograph. It’s not intended to be a 100% faithful depiction of the Roman army. It’s there to tell a story. In this case, “Trajan is awesome!” but it’s still a story. Likewise, “Gladiator” isn’t intending to be historically accurate, but to tell a story. And it does that really, really well.
I’m not going to complain about the pedantry of the criticism. That is, after all, what I came for! But I think it’s a grave error to argue that simply because something fails in one aspect, it therefore isn’t good. I still enjoy the movie! The failures aren’t irrelevant, but….well, they’re part of the fun for me, in a way. They’re a way to explore the movie more, and to enjoy it more. It’s like a good friend where you can engage in some healthy counter-signaling, where you can poke fun at each other without anyone taking offense.
Again, think of Trajan’s Column. It is factually inaccurate, in known, well-documented ways. Does that make it a bad work of art? Of course not! The inaccuracies are significant, in that they inform us about the piece, the artists, and the audience.
> But I think Gladiator is a better movie on those terms, and unlike Braveheart it doesn’t have propaganda baked right through it.
Still haven’t seen Braveheart, but having seen this film just recently (after the second, as the case may be), I don’t think I can agree about it lacking in propaganda. Not when this is a literal quote from that film!
Marcus Aurelius: What is Rome, Maximus?
Maximus: I’ve seen much of the rest of the world. It is brutal and cruel and dark, Rome is the light.
Now, the Emperor here counters with “You have never even been there” (completely ahistorically, of course, as pointed out in Parts II and III of this) and about “the dream of Rome” being lost. And sure, Maximus, too, loses his faith in that “dream” for a while after he is enslaved and thrown to the arena – before regaining it right in time for the climactic conclusion, obviously. Still, that doesn’t exactly redeem things considering the following:
1) The depiction of the Marcomanni alone ought to leave no doubts that the film clearly agrees with Maximus about “the rest of the world” being “brutal and cruel and dark”, with Rome as the light, and hence their conquests being justified.*
2) The Republican Rome which the film wants us to idolize and strongly implies was less cruel and brutal than “the rest of the world” happened to be the one which had utterly massacred the people of Corinth and Carthage – to give but the most infamous example. To quote from one of the oldest posts on here:
https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-was-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-i/
In that context – where the Romans are at war with an entire people, then the entire people became valid military targets. And the Romans behaved as such. Polybius describes the Roman process for sacking a city – “When Scipio thought that a sufficient number of troops had entered [the city] he sent most of them, as is the Roman custom, against the inhabitants of the city with order to kill all they encountered, sparing none, and not to start pillaging until the signal was given…one may often see not only the corpses of human beings, but dogs cut in half, and the dismembered limbs of other animals…” (Polybius 10.15.4-5; emphasis mine).
Such slaughter was not seen as outside the rules of war, but rather a normal consequence of attempting to hold out against a besieging army. A city which wanted to avoid massacre should surrender before the siege began in earnest (the last moment to so surrender, under Roman rules of warfare, was before the first ram touched the city wall).
3) Marcus Aurelius’ solution for restoring “the dream of Rome” is for a tough military man like Maximus needing to take the reigns and “to give power back to the people of Rome, and end the corruption that has crippled it. “ Indeed, it’s actually Maximus who brings up the completely reasonable point ” But surely a prefect, a senator, somebody who knows the city, who understands her politics.”, and the Emperor’s response is But you have not been corrupted by her politics. I don’t think I need to comment any further on this – particularly considering everything our host already wrote about the sequel doubling down on the same idea.
*Interestingly, the one area where the sequel could be said to have improved thematically is in its depiction of the aftermath of the opening battle. As ludicrous as it was, both tactically and chronologically, the narrative worked a lot harder to avoid the impression the fighting was for the conquered people’s own good.
To clarify my opinion – like our host and seemingly most other commenters here, I still do not think this film is outright bad. The performances are absolutely excellent, Zimmer did his thing with the soundtrack*, a lot of the other “technical” work is pretty great, etc.
Now, unlike some people, I actually disagree that the chariot scene was good – to me, it was a neverending avalanche of fast cuts, all to obscure the obvious point that if the charioteers simply stopped at a distance and shot at the Maximus’ crew, driving away for a bit if they attempted to chase them, there was effectively nothing they could have had done about it, and the film would have been over then. (And of course, there is also the whole thing that contra the film’s narrative, it’s chariots which would have been seen as the barbarians’ weapon by the Romans.) The opening battle also didn’t particularly impress me; granted, I already read a number of posts on here beforehand, but even outside of that, I don’t think I would have rated it any higher than, say, the final battle from The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.
Even the dialogue is often quite clever – particularly if or when you could divorce it from the implications above. As much as the film’s Commodus might have differed from the real one, lines like “I don’t pretend to be a man of the people, Senator, but I do try to be a man for the people.” are a whole cut above gratingly flat satire in more recent works like the misfire known as Mickey 17. Something like “the thunder god” exchange still gives me chills.
https://movie-sounds.org/famous-movie-samples/quotes-with-sound-clips-from-gladiator-2000/the-silence-before-you-strike-and-the-noise-afterwards-it-rises-it-rises-up-like-a-storm-as-if-you-were-the-thunder-god-himself
If Gladiator really did happen to be a fantasy movie or even a sci-fi movie**, I would have had much less qualms with calling it great. While the advocacy of “military saviours” would have likely remained even in those hypothetical versions, it would have been a lot more forgivable. And besides the mere handful of best-known examples, the median level of fantasy/sci-fi “epics”, like the aforementioned The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Mickey 17, is still such that a film done with the skill of Gladiator would have towered over them. Sadly, it is saddled with all of its ludicrous notions of history, and this drags it down to the point I cannot call it much more than “decent”. Similar to say, how Korea’s Oldboy is an absolute film classic to many for a lot of similar reason, like the direction, the performances, a number of scenes you’ll hardly see anywhere else – but its reliance on a twist that is genuinely ludicrous if you think about it for even a few minutes likewise cancels out many of its strengths.
*By the way, Zimmer has been touring the world with an orchestra in recent years. A recording of their performance in Dubai, Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert has even been screened in some cinemas recently, and I’m sure it’ll be available on streaming services soon enough. Besides the concert, it also includes some fairly interesting recorded conversations with key collaborators (not Ridley Scott, but there is Nolan, Bruckheimer, Pharrell Williams, Villeneuve – even Zendaya revealing she watched Interstellar in cinemas five times and now says anyone wanting to be let into her house has to agree to watching it. Unfortunately, I outright dislike Interstellar, so I guess that makes the gulf between us – already large considering I also dislike Dune Part Two – outright insurmountable.) There was also a time he said on the stage something like “I’ve been around the world, and here [in Dubai/on its Coca Cola Arena] is where the future is.” Your mileage may vary on whether this was within the bounds of typical niceties to one’s hosts, or is indicative of genuine opinion.
**Now, a dedicated film historian could likely trace a lot of Roman inspirations in various sci-fi already. I am reminded, though, of a comment on last year’s Star Destroyer Fireside mentioning a sci-fi book series, Dread Empire’s Fall where the main human characters were effectively (gender-swapped) Sulla and Marius, with those names altered just enough that you probably wouldn’t recognize it without having it to pointed out to you, but cannot unsee once it had been. I.e. you could very easily see Scott doing something similar to his script here.
FWIW, I’ve always conceived of this movie as taking place in some sort of parallel dimension, which also has a Roman empire, but a weirdly different one.
Or, in other words, fiction.
“Students and enthusiasts alike will often cite this sequence as the thing which sparked their interest in the Roman army”
Nah it’s Asterix & Obelix for me. The Romans get their asses kicked in there, but I got interested in their style.
Quite possibly you’re seeing a Europe vs America divide, if not a generational one. Asterix is part of the cultural fabric not just in francophone countries, but in most of Western Europe (though slightly less in Britain than the continent from my impression). In the US it seems to be far more niche and viewed as a foreign comic book rather than a mainstay of literature that just happens to have lots of pictures.
For me it was one of those small illustrated books for children with tons of pictures of roman legionaires and diagrams about battles.
Though Asterix & Obelix is also responsible for spreading the idea that roman field armies are only comprised of legionnaires who are all armored in lorica segmenta…
I imagine the universal lorica segmenta in Asterix is due to Uderzo the artist rather than Goscinny the writer, and I don’t blame him in the slightest.
Ever tried to draw maille armour? It’s almost as tedious as making the stuff. Medieval artists took shortcuts whenever they could. Even the English effigies for Very Important People look to me as if the maille rings have been carved at least twice as large as they were in reality.
As for the lack of other troop types, we call Roman armies “legions” after the most important and numerous troop type. The Romans themselves probably did the same.
Something I have been reflecting on in recent years is that it’s probably not an accident forAsterix & Obelix to have emerged precisely when it did, in 1959. That was, after all, the time when France was less than 20 years removed from the trauma of a shock defeat and occupation – and it went straight from that to another painful loss in Indochina, and then to the quagmire of the Algerian War, with the place which had been “theirs” for ~130 years at that point – long enough for a number of French to start believing they really were “one people” – to “suddenly” go to great and bloody lengths to break free, and France responding with heavy repression. Right in the middle of all of this (the Algerian War began in 1954 and ended in 1962), there was clearly a demand for an imagined simpler, cleaner, heroic past, which the comic fulfilled. The same point appears to have been made in at least one of the academic treatments of the series (sadly paywalled.)
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_4
I also see some eerie parallels here with “Lizards Must Die”: a piece of Russian media which is very similar in concept (the main characters are ancient, pre-Ruric Slavs who can become superpowered by drinking Lake Baikal’s supremely pure water which lets them fight the literal Lizardmen) if perhaps not in quality of execution emerged and became a hit in late 2022, under very similar circumstances (i.e. several decades after USSR’s collapse, the Chechen Wars, and after the invasion of Ukraine.) Granted, the initial premise actually dates back to a series of parody “history lecture” videos which began in 2018 (amongst other things, they not-so-subtly mocked “BRICS will be Russia’s future” talking point by pretending that South Africa (literally the acronym for the modern-day republic, ЮАР) had actually been an ancient polity and was always an ally of the Rus’ even thousands of years ago) – but then, it probably reinforces the point that it did not go truly viral up until it became overwhelmingly clear that any romantic notion of “reunification” with Ukraine is dead and buried, and a demand for even obviously fake yet comforting myth shot up.
That was a very clear dissection! The part about “one-sided slaughter” is pretty convincing and, after several centuries of warfare with Romans, must have been quite clear to all non-state polities in Rome’s neighbourhood, too (none of which had great numbers of heavy infantry, I suppose).
So my question is: why would any army composed of light infantry ever accept battle on open ground with a Roman army? Why wouldn’t they keep up a guerrilla war, Mao Zedong-style? Such a guerrilla war, punctuated by the giant ambush at the Teutoburg forest, finally convinced Augustus to give up on occupying Germania up to the Elbe river, even though (apart from that one huge defeat), the Romans did not lose big battles.
The answer must lie on a strategical level, where the Roman commander closes off all alternatives until the Barbarian opponents accept battle on open ground, but I cannot think of how they would have done that.
Keep on buring down their towns and harvesting/burning their farm fields until :
A.) They’re going to turn on their leader for not protecting their stuff – forcing the leader to either surrender their position as leader, or try to fight for the stuff. (And the new leader will be selected for their willingness to fight.)
B.) Rome has destroyed enough stuff that they’ll be forced into famine and dispersion
A&B2) They’ve lost so much that they surrender to the Romans so that the consequences of A/B don’t occur
C.) The Romans complete a regional genocide, and the land is Roman now. Who cares that there wasn’t a decisive victorious battle?
Mao had the advantages of the KMT wanting there to be a China afterward, an international community that could have opinions about what happens in China, and a friendly(ish) superpower backer (USSR). A theoretical, say, Gaulish tribe has none of those in a conflict with Rome. Romans don’t give a damn if they’ve slaughtered and/or enslaved your entire people, there is no global or pan-Europic community that might react, and the only superpower IS Rome.
Romans don’t give a damn if they’ve slaughtered and/or enslaved your entire people, there is no global or pan-Europic community that might react, and the only superpower IS Rome.
It would have been interesting if, say, the Persians had backed/financed Germanic guerrill warfare (or likewise, if say during the 16th and 17th century the English had financed resistance against the Spanish in like Peru or Mexico). Kind of like the rival powers did during the Cold War. Though I don’t know if Persia was ever in a logistical position to do that.
It would have been interesting if, say, the Persians had backed/financed Germanic guerrill warfare (or likewise, if say during the 16th and 17th century the English had financed resistance against the Spanish in like Peru or Mexico).
The British encouraged and assisted a lot of South American resistance movements – IIRC at one point about half Bolivar’s army was made up of British soldiers? That was the 19th century, of course, but earlier than that they (and the French, and the Dutch) were supporting local seaborne resistance against Spain in the Caribbean, in the form of buccaneers.
The logistics of Persia supporting Germanic guerrilla warfare against Rome are enough to make your eyes water, though. Because support doesn’t just mean a few Stinger missiles, it will mean “feeding the entire tribe after Rome burns their fields and villages” and that is a lot of grain to ship from Isfahan to the Elbe valley.
I’ve encountered a hypothesis that Mithridates of Pontus supported both Spartacus and Sertorius in their wars/rebellions against Rome. There are mentions of Mithridates negotiating with Sertorius and sending him gold and ships in the sources.
To add to what @Dan said, it’s worth disentangling guerrilla tactics from Fabian strategy / scorched earth, which have important distinction
The former is an army that doesn’t maintain a border or perimeter of “land it controls” vs “land the enemy controls”. Instead dissolving into the civilian population from which it launches attacks on the enemy’s rear (if you can call it a rear when there’s no frontline to begin with). It’s hard to see this working when the army is just the adult male civilian population temporarily under arms. If there’s nowhere to hide (no “sea in which the fish can swim” to invert Mao’s famous phrase), then a guerrilla can’t really exist, because the Romans will slaughter adult men who don’t submit and disarm, and do so happily without considering it immoral.
A Fabian strategy / scorched earth tactics means keeping your army as one regular body capable of fighting a pitched battle, but refusing to accept a fair fight. Instead, always retreating – either deeper in the interior or in a very strong defensive position. Either way, by keeping a large body of men close to the enemy, you prevent them from dispersing (either to forage, or take multiple small settlements quickly) by the threat of you launching a counter attack and defeating them in detail. This could work against the Romans. But it required either a lot of territory that could be (temporarily) lost while the Roman supply chains run out of steam, and doing so before the leader’s legitimacy amongst the people he’s defending is lost. And/or having strongly fortified positions which the Romans would hesitate to take when fully garrisoned. The Parthians / Sassanids, at times, had both of these, but Germanic tribes rarely had either.
There is also a 3rd, related, option. The tribes could disperse their army between many local villages, forcing the Romans to do likewise in order to make timely progress, but then secretly recongregate the tribal army and destroy the Romans piecemeal. This is sort of what happened at the start of the Vercingetorix’s “rebellion” in Gaul. But for it to work you have to move troops faster, more secretly, and with better co-ordination than the Romans. Which is also pretty tough, all it takes is one spy/deserter to ruin the whole plan.
On the face of it, a dispersed force is vulnerable to defeat in detail. So it might take fewer Romans to deal with a guerrilla war than a conventional one.
It seems to me there are not that many guerrilla wars in recent European history: if you can take the country at all, holding it afterwards is relatively easy. The crucial words being “if” and “relatively”. You can always build fortresses to help you.
It seems to me there are not that many guerrilla wars in recent European history: if you can take the country at all, holding it afterwards is relatively easy.
Tito’s partisans fighting the Nazis in Yugoslavia is considered a classic example of (eventually successful) guerrilla warfare.
Tito’s partisans fighting the Nazis in Yugoslavia
Fighting the Nazis and their Croatian allies, to be more exact. Wouldn’t want to exonerate those guys, they were as bad as they come.
Yeah, when even the Waffen SS is saying, “Guys, y’all’re being a little too enthusiastic about exterminating the civilian population,” it might be time for you to rethink your life choices.
@60guilders,
Yea, i think it’s often a mistake that people in Great Power countries make, to think of history only in terms of how great powers like America, Britain, the Soviet Union, Germany etc. behave. The middle powers and the small countries of the world have agency too, although their agency is constrained by operating in between the dominance of the great powers: sometimes they use that agency in good ways, and sometimes, like in this case, they use it in very bad ways indeed.
I said “not many” not “none”.
More to the point: The WW2 examples are all parts of a larger conventional war. Tito’s partisans won because they were on the winning side of the larger war.
@Hector: That’s one of the things that really frustrates me about The Discourse surrounding the war in Ukraine, particularly the anti-globalist side–it’s like they’re completely unwilling to admit to the possibility that the Ukrainians might have decided of their own free will that it would be better for their country to be tied to Europe rather than Russia.
@60guilders:
Well, that’s what happens when a certain fraction of the loudest voices advocating a position are quietly being supported by Russian intelligence, and a significant fraction of the social media voices advocating the position are in fact doing so from Moscow. No surprise that the movement will over time become inoculated against the idea that “unification with Western international institutions” might be actively preferable to “conquest by the Russian army.”
For the benefit of those readers who have only vaguely heard about the pro-Nazi Croatians, I believe a mention of Jasenovac camp is unfortunately necessary. The so-called Srbosjek (“Serb-cutter”) is just one measure of the depths of depravity they sank to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp#Srbosjek
The war that gave us the name is of course the Peninsular war (though the term seems to have existed in other languages previous) Partisan warfare was also a pretty big factor in WW2,
It also tends to overlap heavily with revolts and such (though of course, those usually aren’t successful)
As depicted in the Memorable image of “Gorilla Warfare” in 1066 And All That
https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/M359243/Gorilla-Warfare-as-practised-in-Spain-and-Portugal-during-the-Napoleonic-wars
Aside from Spain, the ‘kleine krieg’ (little war) was also a feature of the Netherlands’ Eighty Years War. Basically the locals were so prone to rebellion that dispersed small packets were needed to keep them down – but these vulnerable to larger attacks.
“It seems to me there are not that many guerrilla wars in recent European history”
Depends very much what you mean by “recent”, though. There aren’t many wars full stop in recent European history if you mean since 1945.
There are surprisingly many: about every Soviet-occupied area (Western Ukraine, Baltic countries, Eastern Poland) had a local guerilla movement but these were overcome by the Soviets, as they didn’t have an outside backer. The German and Italian radical left attempted to have a local urban guerilla movement, but these were so widely condemned by the population as terrorism that they were struck down by regular police work, without involvement of the regular military, even if they got some moderate help from the Eastern block. On the other hand, the Basque terrorism was able to continue operation much better, because it had the passive toleration of the French authorities and much wider popular support. In any case, none of these movement can be said to have had major influence in actual politics.
The Greek communists guerilla movement was destroyed by the Greek regular forces in a few years. Essentially, this was a US-British-Soviet-Yugoslav proxy war where the Yugoslavs and Soviets were not willing and able to provide Greek communists with support that would have enabled them to maintain operations against a regular force that had the support of a very large part of the population.
The North Irish Troubles is an example of a successful modern European guerilla war, as the IRA was able get a large portion of its program fulfilled by political settlement that ended the war, and the Unionist side is still able to leverage its armed power politically. Naturally, this is because both sides had outside support: Republicans had the passive support of US and Irish governments and the Unionists had the support of the major part of British establishment, or at the very least, passive toleration.
The 1970s Yugoslav military developed probably the most advanced doctrine of guerilla war in Europe. For them, the key was not to fight guerilla war as the strategic choice. Instead, the guerilla war was a tactic to be used only in areas occupied by the enemy, while the regular forces would try to keep as large a portion of the country as possible. However, the local forces would have a very decentralised command structure, so as to allow a smooth transfer to guerilla war when the enemy overran an area. This was quite effective, in fact: the local commands of Slovenia and Croatia were able to wage succesful regular war against the federal Yugoslav forces in the 1990’s.
The Finnish and Swedish militaries developed idea similar to Yugoslavs, too. Happily, none of these plans has never went to effect, so we don’t know how effective they might be.
“The North Irish Troubles is an example of a successful modern European guerilla war, as the IRA was able get a large portion of its program fulfilled by political settlement that ended the war, and the Unionist side is still able to leverage its armed power politically. Naturally, this is because both sides had outside support: Republicans had the passive support of US and Irish governments and the Unionists had the support of the major part of British establishment, or at the very least, passive toleration.”
I’m not sure about this interpretation. The IRA didn’t get support from the Irish government; it was illegal in the Republic of Ireland just as it was in the UK, with similarly harsh legal measures in use. It got support from a small part of the population, from Libya and from sympathisers in the US.
The IRA’s explicit political objective throughout the Troubles was the end of British rule in Northern Ireland and the union of Northern Ireland and the Republic to create an all-Ireland democratic socialist republic – this has not happened in 2025, 27 years after the political settlement. So I don’t think there’s a sense in which the IRA has achieved “a large part of its program”.
The 1970s Yugoslav military developed probably the most advanced doctrine of guerilla war in Europe. For them, the key was not to fight guerilla war as the strategic choice. Instead, the guerilla war was a tactic to be used only in areas occupied by the enemy, while the regular forces would try to keep as large a portion of the country as possible
That’s really fascinating! Although maybe not surprising considering Yugoslavia had substantial experience with guerrilla warfare in WW2, and also substantial interaction with developing countries who in some cases were fighting or had fought guerrilla wars of their own.
Considering that Yugoslavia was neutral/nonaligned in the Cold War, do you know if they expected to be defending primarily against a hypothetical attack from the capitalist world, the Warsaw Pact countries, another regional power, or some combination? Who did they expect to be fighting in a guerrilla war?
My understanding of the Yugoslav military doctrine is limited to having read a single source on the topic, Colonel Janne Mäkitalo’s doctoral dissertation. The 430-page book is in Finnish, but if you are actually interested, there are nowadays excellent pdf-translators available.
Based on that book, the Yugoslavs actually considered Soviet aggression the most likely scenario, while the Western aggression was considered possible, but less probable. With regards to its non-allied neighbours, Yugoslavia didn’t really have a need for guerilla doctrine: Austria or Albania were not serious military threats.
And if you are really interested in the theory of guerilla war, without a communist ideological bent, the classical study of Paavo Ilmola is available on the Internet. Again, only in Finnish, but AI translation is nowadays quite readable. The 1957 book was considered so good that the Finnish National Defence University decided to republish it in 2016 (after it was declassified), with extensive foreword chapters, in the series “Classics of Finnish art of war”.
“Who did they expect to be fighting in a guerrilla war?”
The Soviet Union. Tito broke with the USSR in ’48 and by 1949 the CIA was anticipating that he would ask the US for military aid https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP82-00457R003100140005-1.pdf
The US did indeed start shipping weapons to Yugoslavia in 1951.
But the guerrilla-focussed defence policy (ONO, “Total National Defence”) really kicked in with the foundation of the territorial defence forces in 1969, one year after the USSR invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. In theory ONO was aimed at both sides of the Cold War impartially, in case one or other felt the need to occupy Yugoslavia in the early stages of a general European war.
In reality it was aimed at the USSR, because a) look at what happened in 1948 and 1953 and 1956 and 1968, the orcs have form here, and b) just look at the geography, you are not going to get the Sixth Fleet trying to land marines on the Dalmatian coast, but Austrian (and other) armies awfully arrayed have been storming down through the Hungarian plain and boldly by battery besieging Belgrade for centuries.
Shan Hackett’s “The Third World War” had as the triggering event a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia to which the US responds by sending troops to help Yugoslavia defend itself. Given his position and those of his co-authors, I think it’s safe to assume that this was seen as a credible scenario in NATO in the late 70s.
@ajay,
I know about the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, of course, and I also know that Yugoslavia was never an “Eastern Bloc” country after that point, and was neutral/nonaligned for the rest of the Cold War. My understanding, though, was that they did take American aid in the early 1950s and feared a Soviet invasion, that relations with the Soviet Union improved somewhat after Stalin’s death. Tito seems to have taken a fairly nuanced position on the Soviet intervention in Hungary, for example. I didn’t know that they were actively fearing a Soviet intervention as late as 1969.
“I didn’t know that they were actively fearing a Soviet intervention as late as 1969.”
Oh, they were fearing a Soviet intervention as late as 1985.
See p233 et seq of “Yugoslavia: a country study” by Glenn Curtis (1992) https://www.loc.gov/item/91040323/
@FInnishReader,
Thanks, I’ll see what I can make of those sources!
“Instead dissolving into the civilian population from which it launches attacks on the enemy’s rear”
This seems to imply that the insurgents are small in number compared to the civilian population, and not that much better armed. For them to be a threat, the counter-insurgents must be pretty weak, too. Or eager to give up and go home. Or both. This seems to imply relatively small, weak forces, fighting among a sea of people who don’t strongly support either side.
As I understand our hosts previous posts, the non-state peoples Rome was fighting against managed terrifying mobilisation rates. Enough Romans to overcome their army is also enough Romans to enslave or exterminate and replace the entire population if they disperse their army.
Right, that was exactly my point. It’s why guerrillas / insurgencies (in the “true” meaning of the phrase, rather than dispersed regulars) are pretty rare in the ancient world. For it to work you need a large civilian population amongst which a small number of insurgents can operate and for those insurgents to be able to cause significant casualties even when heavily dispersed. This is possible in the modern era because the element of surprise is a much bigger force multiplier when you have guns and explosives than when you have a spear.
Mao Zedong had a discipline force with centralized command, a home base and an allied supplier (the Soviet Union). The Germans were instead a loosely confederated tribals that wanted to keep their farms not getting burned by Romans instead of running to the forest and becoming hunter-gatherers.
Becoming a hunter-gatherer is not really an option. First, the life of a hunter-gatherer requires a different skillset from being a farmer. You need to know the plants that you are gathering much better than any experienced woodsman. Second, the farms have already destroyed a large portion of the most fertile ground and vegetation that you would use for gathering.
Third, and most importantly, hunter-gatherer life requires a lot more space than you have available. Even a poor and technologically backwards agricultural community has easily ten times more population density than a hunter-gatherer population. If you are fleeing to forests permanently, most of you are going to starve.
Fourth, if the enemy is actually serious, they can still eliminate you. A hunter-gatherer is dependent on certain natural features and you can, if you wish, track and ambush them like you would track and ambush a wolf or a bear by utilising this predictability. For example, when the Sami were still living as hunter-gatherers, before they became nomadic reindeer herders around the 16th century, the Finnish “birkarls” were regularly levying taxes on them, because they could be found readily enough, even if their population density was extremely low.
@Finnish Reader,
Great points! I was unaware that the Sami were hunter-gatherers until that late in history.
We do have a few examples of agricultural peoples who “reverted” to a H/G lifestyle. One of them is the Moriori of the Chatham Islands (south of New Zealand). The climate wasn’t warm enough there to support the Polynesian agricultural package that derived originally from tropical or subtropical zones (New Zealand was already kind of marginal, the Chatham Islands just made it impossible), so they gave up agriculture.
The fact that becoming hunter-gatherers was not a survivable option for the Germanic tribesmen would indeed do much to explain why, as NVA points out, the Germanic tribesmen didn’t want to do that.
It may have been a bad idea to bring Mao Zedong in. What I meant is that the inhabitants of Germania did wear the Roman forces down between 9 AD and 16 AD. The big defeat at the Teutoburg forest was not enough for Augustus to order retreat, but the small-scale war until 16 AD convinced him to have the troops retreat from the Elbe to the Rhine and Danube borders. Apparently the damage inflicted on the Roman army weighed heavier than the damage inflicted on the local population and its livestock and fields.
So why did the Marcomanni accept an open battle against Marcus Aurelius, when small-scale raids and ambushes might have been enough to wear him down?
It’s worth noting that according to Wikipedia, at least, the Roman forces, under the command of “Germanicus Julius Caesar” (that point about Romans constantly reusing names again) actually came A LOT closer to subjugating Germania outright in those years than is commonly understood nowadays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanicus
In fact,
The big defeat at the Teutoburg forest was not enough for Augustus to order retreat, but the small-scale war until 16 AD convinced him to have the troops retreat from the Elbe to the Rhine and Danube borders.
It’s doubtful that Augustus could have had been convinced of anything in 16 AD – considering that he died in 14 AD. It was his successor Tiberius who ordered the retreat – and according to Wikipedia (apparently citing Tacitus) a BIG reason for that was Tiberius’ fear that a “Julius Caesar” who conquered all of Germany would do the same thing back in Rome as the Julius Caesar who conquered all of Gaul (and in fact, Germanicus’ death in 19 AD was widely suspected to have been the result of poisoning.) Of course, it is entirely possible to treat this as little more than an early iteration of a “stab-in-the-back” myth, but then again, it might be valid.
In fact, I think it’s quite instructive to recall the ultimate fate of the Teutoburg Forest’s winner, Arminius – far from dying in his bed at the end of a long life, or at least in some freak accident while still being honored and respected by his people, he ended up assassinated by those in his own tribe – while his own wife and son were taken from him years earlier by her father, Segestes, who always supported the Romans – to the point the entire defeat at Teutoburg would not have happened if Varus didn’t dismiss Segestes’ warning of Arminius’ treachery as mere emnity between a father- and son-in-law. (In the end, Segestes managed to escape to Roman territory and retire on an estate with his daughter and grandson after Germanicus’ relief force broke through a siege of Segestes’ stronghold by Arminius’ allies, and Arminius died without ever seeing them again.)
If this is how divided and compromised the Germanic resistance actually was, then the argument Romans could have had won outright without excessive strain seems to at least be plausible. IMO, plausible enough that a treatment of “unrestrained Germanicus counterfactual” on here could be at least as fascinating as the “Alexander Goes West” one.
I’ve always been partial to the theory that Roman diplomacy was so incredibly bad that they could reliably just put an army anywhere and get it attacked by mortally offended locals.
But that’s what they wanted anyway, so can we really say it was bad diplomacy?
I think there’s a case for Rome having been actually pretty decent at diplomacy, at least by ancient world standards. Frontiers like Gaul, Germania, and Hispania could have a lot of local allies in addition to enemies (the Teutones and Cimbri were arguably more of a threat to friendly Gauls than they were to Rome directly, at least at the outset), in addition to their capacity to conduct international relations with neighbouring major powers. They started off on good terms with Carthage against the mutual enemy of Epirus, and had a stake in the politics of Ptolemaic Egypt long before turning it into a province.
Arguably, the thing that would make the presence an offence in the first place was being present to support one group over another. It’s always worth remembering that a lot of these places did not have a singular unified identity, but were more of a patchwork of interrelated but generally competing peoples.
Never mind the extent to which successful incorporation of local aristocracies made the empire remarkably resilient against regional uprisings.
The Romans were big on “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. If you read the 8th chapter of the 1st Maccabees, you can see how the elite of a small nation threatened by the enemies of Romans saw the Roman republic:
The treaty text is quoted in the book of Maccabees, and said to be:
Personally, I think this cannot be a completely authentic text, because its preamble is very different from the normal Roman or Greek diplomatic style, but the rest sounds pretty normal Roman legal style. Essentially, it is not really an alliance treaty but a treaty of benevolent neutrality, with a final clause reminiscent of 18th century cabinet politics.
I suddenly want to read Maccabees. I did not expect a brief description of Roman government in it.
“Each year they entrusted to one man the responsibility of governing them and controlling their whole territory.”
For something probably written before 63 BC, the author seems to not grasp the consular system.
As I pointed out above, the Roman diplomacy even in Germania appears to have been good enough that itvery nearly preempted the entire defeat at Teutoburg, as Arminius’ plan was totally compromised by…his own father-in-law. Moreover, that father-in-law continued to support the Romans even AFTER Teutoburg, and ultimately, he pretty much fared better than Arminius himself within their own lifetimes. After all, he took back his daughter and grandson, escaped to Roman territory and retired on an estate, apparently living out his life there, while Arminius’ forces failed to stop them due to Romans’ intervention and Arminius died at the hand of his own tribesmen not long after, never getting to see his wife and son again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segestes
This whole case makes one of think of how people throughout history seem to LOVE the tales of traitors getting “steel instead of gold” from those they defected to about as soon as they served their purpose (this includes the earliest days of Rome itself with the myth of Tarpeia), or at least very clearly making the wrong choice compared to the alternative. While history is very much not neat morality tale where that kind of thing always holds true, the kind of fiction where a character pulls off what Segestes did and to the same outcome still appears to be a bridge too far even for readers who otherwise claim to love “grim, realistic stories”.
What they had was perfectly acceptable heavy infantry for clashes against their peer competitors. That it was inadequate for fighting the Romans, they mostly learned by fighting Rome.
Some questions:
1: The auxilia described as: “heavy infantry cohorts with spears and long shields”, I imagine those would be of the “omnispear” type, not javelins. So equipped rather like triarii or hoplites. Or would they also have javelins?
2. When onagers did arrive in the timeline, were they used similarly in field battles as the ballistae? Did they replace ballistae or were they used side by side?
My (decade plus old) ancient wargaming rules say that auxiliary infantry were originally recruited with their native arms and armour, whatever that might be. Then about the time legionaries switched to pilum the auxiliaries became more standardised with similar armour and shields but javelins instead of pilum.
The onager, single armed torsion projectile thrower, seems to have replaced the larger twin torsion arm “ballistae” that threw stones, but the smaller twin armed bolt throwers stayed around. So side by side in sieges, I don’t think onagers were ever really a battlefield weapon.
More info on the confusing terminology and usage in
Collections: Ancient ‘Tanks’? Chariots, Scythed Chariots and Carroballistae
Collections: The Siege of Gondor, Part III: Having Fun Storming the City
Collections: The Siege of Eregion, Part III: What Catapults?
That timing seems off by several centuries. The Legions switched to pilum in the early Republic and the auxilia didn’t even exist until the Empire.
At least two different sets of ancient wargaming rules use “auxiliary” to describe the non-Roman infantry contingents, and that’s what I meant. Bret refers to them in the early army as “socii” instead. Yes, “auxilia” as the formal name/term is later.
“The Roman army in this sequence has the wrong composition, is deployed incorrectly, uses the wrong tactics, has the wrong theory of victory and employs the wrong weapons and then employs them incorrectly.”
A veritable tour de force of pedantry, Bret.
I wonder if there was a missed opportunity here as well to not contain some signifier of the archers being Germanic as well. It might have been both historically more accurate and aligned with the comment on conquered peoples.
I’m also wondering if another logical point against the idea of using all of that fire is that it seems to take liberties with how wet everything must be with all of that mud around.
On the mud,
https://acoup.blog/2019/10/18/collections-the-battlefield-after-the-battle/
And the uselessness of shooting fire arrows at human beings who are 75% water has been mentioned on one of his podcasts, but can’t remember exactly which. Anyone?
The discussion of Roman names reminds me of a historiographical question that has vaguely puzzled me for some time: what determines the names by which important Romans are commonly known today? In some cases they are called only by their (gens) nomen, like Vergil. For those from prominent families, that mostly won’t do, so the various Claudii are mostly commonly called by a combination of nomen and cognomen, like Claudius Pulcher. (The emperor is an exception, for some reason.) Some are commonly known by cognomen, like Cato or Cicero (although the latter is sometimes called by the nomen Tully, especially in years past). And a few are known by praenomen plus nomen, like Marcus Aurelius. I am unable to discern a comprehensive set of rules governing this process.
And some are known by nicknames, like Caligula, or by modern names, like Mark Anthony. Although I have noticed a recent trend to use more “proper” name, ie, Gaius and Marcus Antonius.
I suspect there is no general rule for the names modern historiography uses, just conventions based on prior use to try and limit confusion. There are an awful lot of Romans with the same names, and making things clearer for the reader is generally preferable to strict rules.
The praenomina are quite typically useless for identifying Romans, because there are few of them, and each gens used even fewer. However, praenomen and nomen were and are often a combination distinctive enough to be actually useful, like Marcus Aurelius. As far as I understand, the upper-class Romans of the late Republic and early empire mostly used cognomina to refer to each other, like in “Quosque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?”
However, this was really somewhat patrician a custom. There were old plebian families who mostly didn’t use cognomina at all. For example, Mark Anthony was really just Marcus Antonius M. f. M. n, with no cognomen. This may have been a way of displaying prestige: you have a gens so old and so strong that it doesn’t stoop to naming branches by cognomina, and mostly doesn’t use individual cognomina either.
We really don’t know very well how the lower class people addressed each other in daily life, because we don’t have that much evidence. The Roman comedies would be the best source, but no Roman comedy with Roman characters survives, and the only Roman tragedy about Romans, Octavia, is set in the Imperial court.
In later empire, the Roman naming system declined, as the praenomina and nomina lost their function. Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus) and Ambrose (Aurelius Ambrosius) both lack a praenomen altogether, and at least Augustine never actually used that nomen “Aurelius” himself, or had a preserved letter that would address him as “Aurelius”. The nomen was only mentioned by his disciples. (Naturally, “Aurelius” was the nomen of everyone whose family got their citizenship in the Caracallan reform, so about everyone in the provinces was Aurelius, and both church fathers were provincials.)
>”We really don’t know very well how the lower class people addressed each other in daily life, because we don’t have that much evidence. The Roman comedies would be the best source, but no Roman comedy with Roman characters survives”
Wouldn’t this be one of the places where grafitti and such would be useful?
I really pondered this when writing the above, but to be honest, I know those too badly to make any guesses. I know some inscriptions, and for example, the electoral advertisements in Pompeii used all three names for the candidate. On the other hand, the famous “Aleximenos sebaste theon” graffiti and its response, “Aleximenos fideles”, has the main text itself is in Greek, and refers to a person by his Greek name, also in the Latin response. I would really appreciate if someone better versed in epigraphic evidence could take a position here.
BTW, the acts of martyrs are one source. I would say that the Martyrdom of St. Justin is probably pretty authentic, and it uses only a single name for everyone. Even the perfect Quintus Junius Rusticus is simply mentioned as “Rusticus”, though he is surely a citizen, and as everyone in Justin’s circle gets beheaded, they might be citizens, too. (BTW, the answers of the Christians are model examples of evasion. Nobody names anyone living in Rome and denies all knowledge of any other Christians.) As the text is from a time before Reform of Caracalla, it has some value in showing that the three names were not used very widely in Christian circles, at least.
I think it’s mostly self-reinforcing. If a name or set of names has been used in the past, it continues being used. It’s not like we have a perfectly consistent set of rules for how we refer to modern politicians in general media; last name only is most common, first name only is somewhat more common for women but not universally so, first and last name (possibly using a shortened form) occurs, some are known by acronyms (FDR, JFK, AOC) and sometimes it’s first name, middle initial, last name. Deviations from just last or first name become much more common when there’s a possibility of confusion.
I would be curious how names used in modern works match up with the most commonly used names in the sources.
It is all custom.
It’s almost entirely down to random chance (or probably more specifically, by what texts and translations makes the most impact) I would suspect “Mark Anthony” is largely because of Shakespeare? (notably “Tully” has fallen out of favour but i still see “Livy” sometimes)
Also Horace and Ovid?
Horace is an interesting case: I think there are two members of the gens Horatia known by nomen, distinguished by use of different forms, Horace (the poet) and Horatius (at the bridge). Other Horatii generally have to be identified by cognomen or nomen plus cognomen. I may be forgetting someone though.
Ovid is the only member of gens Ovidia to have attained a place in history, so just his nomen is sufficient.
And, looking at the Loeb Classical Library catalogue, there are quite a few other Romans who are still best known by an Anglicised name: Appian, Julian, Terence, Pliny, Juvenal, Sallust, Lucan, Justin. And that’s not counting a lot of Anglicised Greeks (Plato) and saints (Augustine).
The whole point about Roman names actually being very few in number and repetitive – first brought up in the November 22 Fireside linked in this post – actually makes me think of something quite relevant to today.
That is, how often would you have heard or read a statement like “Western culture(s) is individualistic while the Eastern is/are collectivist?” (Usually followed with an argument along the lines of “the individualistic, entrepreneurial spirit lies at the foundation of Western success and provides an advantage over China even now, etc., etc.”) If you pay any attention whatsoever to the Western “punditocracy”, an argument like this popping up sooner or later seems like a statistical inevitability.
I have always found this argument quite dubious – both from personal circumstances (having been born soon after the fall of USSR and seeing what was supposed to be “legacy of collectivism” but did not come across all that different on a personal level) and from having taken an effort in recent years to seek out quite a number of films from Eastern countries and again finding rather more similarities than differences. Research, too, shows that things are nowhere near as neat as these trite narratives.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220221221130978
A wealth of research has suggested the West tends toward individualism and the East toward collectivism. We explored this topic on an unprecedented scale through two new items in the 2020 Gallup World Poll, involving 121,207 participants in 116 countries. The first tapped into orientations toward self-care versus other-care (“Do you think people should focus more on taking care of themselves or on taking care of others?”). The second enquired into self-orientation versus other-orientation (“Which of the following is closest to your main purpose in life? Being good at what you do in your daily life, Caring for family and close friends, or Helping other people who need help?”).
We anticipated that self-care and self-orientation would index individualism (hence be higher in the West), while other-care and other-orientation would index collectivism (hence be higher in the East). However, contrary to expectation, there was greater self-care in the East (45.82%) than in the West (41.58%). As predicted though, there was greater self-orientation in the West (30.20%) than in the East (23.08.%). Greater self-care in the East invites one of two interpretations. Either these items: (a) index individualism and collectivism as anticipated, so in some ways the East is more individualistic and the West less individualistic than assumed; or (b) do not index individualism and collectivism as anticipated, so the concepts are more complex than often realized (e.g., collectivism may involve prioritizing self-care over other-care). Either way, the findings help complexify these concepts, challenging common cross-cultural generalizations in this area.
The other key thing, though, is that those who believe in such narratives also seem to generally have a very positive view of (Greco-)Roman culture as the foundation of “Western civilization”, etc. Hence, it’s quite remarkable that according to our host, the two beliefs would inherently contradict each other.
This naming convention actually indicates something quite important to know about the Romans which is that this is not a strongly individualistic culture, at least by modern standards. Romans are defined, in their names, mostly by being one more iteration of a family tradition and even the most individualistic part of their name – the praenomen – is a cookie-cutter nod to family traditions. The ideal Roman family was, in effect, one Appius Claudius after the next, each one quite a lot like his father, on and on forever.
“The equipment distinctions between the hastati, principes and triarii of the old manipular army are gone but the unit titles remain”
Does this mean individual centuries or cohorts were designated Hastati/Principles/Triarii? Does the experience/age stratification remain?
So ok, I rewatched the scene, and learned why the supposedly iconic scene left no imprint in my memory, but also, what’s going on with the dogs?
Taking large dogs into battle was apparently not unknown among the legions, although they were more often kept for patrol and sentry duties.
But why are they important enough to have to deal with the extra overhead of animal actors?
I was trying to find some article going in-depth about how dog trainers worked on the set of that film. Maybe I’ll still find this one day, but for now, this seemed too perfect not to share.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/naja30/if_you_think_your_career_path_is_bad_think_that/
I went to check HBO Rome’s scene because while the whole whistle thing and countermarching are hugely anachronistic I thought it might represent Roman fighting a bit better. But all I could think was “why are they just standing there?
Reminds me of something that happened to my wife at Pensic (long, long ago). Her unit was told to stop a unit–wipe them out if they thought they could, but mostly they were there as a holding force. The enemy unit had precisely the same orders. So they stood out of range of each other and just….stood there. A few personal grudges got settled, because why not, but the armies just….stood there, until the unit my wife was opposing got flanked. Makes sense from a historic perspective: why risk your life when your orders are “Hold them here”?
I imagine a lot of ancient battles looked like that. Losses in combat were relatively low; most happened when the units broke and ran. You can’t get very close to someone with a sharp bit of metal with the intent to kill without inflicting significant damage, so it’s likely that a lot of the time, units would be maneuvering around each other or stopping outside the other one’s range or otherwise not fighting. And it makes sense from an individual perspective, as fighting in armor is extremely hard work; the less fighting you can do during combat, the better.
> The Roman army will change substantially between the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (in 180) and the end of the reign of Constantine (in 337)
I’d be interested in knowing more about those changes? Like was it equipement, tactics, strategies? And what caused them?
I think the go to sources would be Adrian Goldsworthy, who has written an entire series of books on the Roman army over the centuries.
My inexpert summary: social change, different enemies, Roman adaptation, but also a lot of continuity.
On social change, there’s events like the Emperor making everyone (well, every male) a citizen in 212 CE, removing the distinction between many auxilia and legionaries. And so on, it’s a 150 year period. Armies reflect the society that raises them, as Bret often reminds us.
On new enemies, one example is the “Germans” in this period are learning from the Romans. So the “Franks” get their name from the francisca, a heavy throwing axe that their infantry threw at very short range as they charged into the enemy.
At the operational level, the Roman empire isn’t really expanding in this time, instead defending against a lot of small scale raids. (And fighting each other.) So the legion of 6000 downsizes into more operationally flexible units of 1000 or so.
There’s the usual Roman adaptability, “those guys fight well, can we copy them or hire them?” So you get Sarmatian lancer cavalry from Eastern Europe being recruited for the Roman army in Britain …
But also a lot of continuity. The core is always heavily armoured infantry, with heavy throwing javelins (becoming spiculum / martiobarbuli / angon), although cavalry are becoming more important. Even Belisarius invading Italy in the 6th century has Byzantine infantry with heavy javelins.
> So you get Sarmatian lancer cavalry from Eastern Europe being recruited for the Roman army in Britain …
That was real? I saw it in a crappy King Arthur movie and thought it was random Hollywood nonsense.
IIRC, the Romans actually made a point of moving auxillia far from their point of origins so they wouldn’t have to worry about conflicting loyalties in the event of a local uprising.
Similar to, say, a good number of the troops on the beaches of D-Day (and in other parts of occupied Western Europe) actually being Ostlegionen – the Wehrmacht did not trust them not to attempt defecting back or simply melting in the countryside, but a place whose language they did not speak was another matter entirely.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/muslims-and-foreigners-reich.html
One nitpick: A Roman woman was a citizen. She could not marry legally a man from a nation without jus connubii, just like a man could not marry a foreign woman. Her children out of wedlock became Roman citizens, and Roman women had, if they were sui juris, the capability of being legal persons and exercising other rights reserved solely to Roman citizens, like jus commercii. (If a Roman widow had been a non-citizen, her merchantile legal cases woul have been solved in accordance with jus gentium, not in accordance with jus civile.) And even during marriage, a Roman women of late Republic or the empire was not under coverture, but under the patria potestas of her father, just like her brothers.
In most Greek cities, women were not citizens in this sense.
So, the Reform of Caracalla did make also all non-citizen women Roman citizens. (And indeed, if it had not, it would have rapidly created a significant underclass of non-citizen bastards, which would be visible in sources.)
Oops, my bad, relying on memory alone. Thanks for the correction.
(It’s hardly “nitpicking” when talking about roughly 50% of the population.)
Did the Edict of Caracalla create a patria potestas over newly enfranchised citizens who had been independent adult sons under their native law?
Did it terminate couverture of wives who had been under couverture under their native law and move them under patria potestas?
I believe the francisca got its name from the Franks, as the etymology derives ‘Frank’ from old Germanic ‘spear’
I’m always curious everytime I read your article, how exactly do those cavalry fight in the flanks? Like, if another roman heavy infantry enemy is marching right to that flank, how do those cavalry plan to stop it? I don’t think running around with the horse is helping to stop those heavy infantry.
In the same vein when I hear that the light infantry ‘screen’ the flanks, I am not altogether clear about what they are doing about advancing enemies.
The way I’ve always understood it is that heavy infantry once committed to the battle are kind of stuck. They are limited in visibility and mobility except towards the front of the unit. There’s alot of pushing from behind to keep momentum up. All the stabby stabby is going on in the first couple ranks. There was alot of experimentation with the number of ranks you needed for engagements.
Meanwhile, cavalry, at this time lightly armored and equipped with lances, are running around the sides and backs looking for opportunity kills. These attacks aren’t going to be hugely effective, heavy infantry by definition being heavily armored, but over time will take strength and attention away from the front. Later era heavily armored cavalry worked a little differently.
The “screeners” are doing a few of things depending on your timeline. In the roman times, the screeners would be preventing cavalry or other light infantry from circling around your heavy infantry and doing the same opportunity attacks like cavalry. Screeners would be cavalry or other terrain appropriate troops. Also, and this is really important depending on the timeline, armies would move with all their supplies and money and loot in a baggage train. They would often fight within sight of this baggage train. If an army’s baggage train was threatened by cavalry that slipped around the front, that could cause a collapse of moral. This supposedly happened at Tours (732), the Aquitane cavalry attacked the baggage camp and Abd al-Rahman’s army collapsed. The screeners were there to prevent this
In more modern eras, the screeners were there to prevent observation of the enemy army, and also to prevent firearm armed soldiers to attack artillery behind the main line.
As far as I understand, their first goal is to send messengers to their commander about the advancing enemy, so that he can send reserves to cover this flank. Since the commander himself probably can’t see what is going on the flank this is very important. The officer of the unit on the flank of the heavy infantry battle line will also get information about this flanking maneuver and will try to disengage and retreat to some extend. to avoid being attacked in the rear.
Their second goal is to skirmish with the enemy (throw javelins, shoot arrows and so on). The enemy will then have a choice – they could either stop and form a shield-wall, almost invulnerable to missile fire (and lose initiative on this flank), continue to advance slow and steadily (but suffer some losses from missiles) or charge the skirmishers (who most likely will run away, and the charging heavy infantry will become tired and disorganized, and thus vulnerable to a counter-attack by the upcoming reserves). As far as I understand, the steady advance might be the best tactic, but it requires a lot of discipline.
Lastly, if for some reasons no reserves are available and the flank is open, the enemy have to divide their forces – some have to continue pursuing the retreating skirmishers, while others have to turn and attack the main battle line on the flank. The enemy can’t turn his entire unit, since then the skirmishers will shoot them in the rear (which is much more devastating), and the enemy can’t commit his entire unit to pursue skirmishers, since this will make the entire maneuver pointless. So the officer leading the enemy unit has to send enough of his forces to “screen” his own new flank and to leave enough for the attack. This requires both good tactical skills from him and good discipline from his unit.
Overall, the skirmishers (which can be either cavalry or light infantry or both) act both as scouts, providing information to the commander, and as “speedbumps”, making the flanking maneuver more slow and complicated for the enemy.
Additional to Angon’s good description, a light infantry ‘screen’ can be useful to hold the kind of terrain a heavy infantry army usually places on its flanks. If you’re commanding a heavy infantry force (say, a Greek phalanx), then sometimes you’ll be able to place one or both flanks of your force up against a truly impassable terrain feature such as a mountainside , a deep canyon, or the ocean. But often, you’re fighting with one flank ‘anchored’ in something a bit less impressive, such as a swamp, a forest, or a relatively small stream or creek.
If the enemy tries to march a phalanx through the forest on your flank, well, a block of heavy infantry cannot advance through a forest and remain as a block, right? Except that there’s a fair chance the individual men in that phalanx COULD pick their way through the forest (or along the steep hillside, or wading hip-deep in the river with the slippery bottom and annoyingly fast current)… it’s just that they couldn’t stay in fighting organization while doing that.
The light infantry come in handy, then, because they can put enough pressure on the enemy heavy infantry that they can’t safely split up and then individually navigate a terrain obstacle. Because if each soldier is picking their way through the forest in single file or something, the cumulative effect is to expose their weak points to any armed enemy present, including lightly armed ones.
This now makes me think that a game where the protagonist’s role is effectively to be one of these screeners, positioned in very rough terrain with limited equipment alongside a bunch of other fighters like that, and having to interdict potentially more numerous and/or heavier-equipped infiltrators could be really promising if it were to be done right.
P.S. I wonder if people bothered with light infantry screens when fighting Macedonian phalanxs specifically. After all…
https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ia-heirs-of-alexander/
Let’s start with length; one sees a very wide range of lengths for the sarisa, based in part on the ancient sources. Theophrastus (early third century BC) says it was 12 cubits long, Polybius (mid-second century) says it was 14 cubits, while Asclepiodotus (first century AD) says the shortest were 10 cubits, while Polyaenus (second century AD) says that the length was 16 cubits in the late fourth century.3 Two concerns come up immediately: the first is that the last two sources wrote long after no one was using this weapon and as a result are deeply suspect, whereas Theophrastus and Polybius saw it in use. However, the general progression of 12 to 14 to 16 – even though Polyaenus’ word on this point is almost worthless – has led to the suggestion that the sarisa got longer over time, often paired to notions that the Macedonian phalanx became less flexible.
That naturally leads into the second question, “how much is a cubit?” which you will recall from our shield-wall article. Connolly, I think, has this clearly right: Polybius is using a military double-cubit that is arms-length (c. 417mm for a single cubit, 834mm for the double), while Theophrastus is certainly using the Athenian cubit (487mm), which means Theophrastus’ sarisa is 5.8m long and Polybius’ sarisa is…5.8m long. The sarisa isn’t getting longer, these two fellows have given us the same measurement in slightly different units. This shaft is then tapered, thinner to the tip, thicker to the butt, to handle the weight; Connolly physically reconstructed these, armed a pike troupe with them, and had the weapon perform as described in the sources, which I why I am so definitively confident he is right. The end product is not the horribly heavy 6-8kg reconstructions of older scholars, but a manageable (but still quite heavy) c. 4kg weapon.
I struggle to envision any individuals attempting to go through, in your own words, “the forest (or along the steep hillside, or wading hip-deep in the river with the slippery bottom and annoyingly fast current)”…while carrying a 5.8m weapon. Hoplites from other city-states with “normal-length” spears, sure, but not this. On the other hand, our host did mention that Macedonian tactics relied on the flanking cavalry charges a lot more than most others, so I guess light infantry could be screening against those instead? (Following the logic that cavalry cannot charge over such rough ground and may even be forced to dismount and slowly lead horses by the reigns on foot over obstacles such as streams – at which point light infantry would find it much easier to fight them.)
P.P.S. Though, it’s also worth noting that according to one of the Sparta posts on here, the hoplite shield was very specifically designed to be held at an angle for phalanx fighting, and was quite awkward in scattered “duels” – which might have had discouraged hoplites from attempting this kind of an infiltration. Then again, vs. light infantry, they would probably have decent odds even if they briefly drop the shield on the ground (yes, I know the taboos against doing that for any reason were strong) and simply rely on their armour.
I have to admit, once it’s pointed out, it’s hard not to watch the scene and find the element of Russel Crowe intermittently shouting “hold the line” to nobody in particular very silly. It comes off very much “manager trying to justify being around by doing something that kind of resembles leadership”, with just a touch of “frantically commanding/reminding people to do a thing that they were having no trouble doing anyway”.
Did some people actually fight unarmored with a two-handed weapon? No shield? That sounds like an excellent way to get killed quickly.
It depends on the kind of fighting you expect to do.
Historically, Neolithic and even Iron Age nonstate societies often fight in a light, irregular style, often in broken or wooded terrain where combat distances would tend to be short. Here, the combatants are usually not constantly standing around presenting a good target for archers without the ability to frantically dive out of the way of something or duck behind a tree. Often, fighting is informal between adults who may not own much of a panoply of specialized ‘arms and armor,’ and who are making do with what they can afford and maintain.
So you’d see people who are unarmored or nearly unarmored, and who are carrying two-handed weapons. When the actual scale of combat is often “gang warfare, but in the countryside” people can get away with doing this and live. It generally wouldn’t work out too well on a pitched battlefield with armies of hundreds or thousands squaring off in the open, I imagine.
Love your content but cannot read comfortably because of the white on black.
There should be a little button in the lower-left with an image of a fire on it – if you hit that, it’ll invert the colors, giving you black on white instead of white on black.
“the armies of Revolutionary France and Napoleon subsequently were also notable for making heavy use of assault columns to enable larger and more determined but less experienced bodies of soldiers to shock enemy units (who, with more experience, might well win a prolonged exchange of fire with more accurate and quicker shooting) from a position.”
There’s a related widespread historical inaccuracy here that I would actually be interested to see you break down, specifically the famous “British Line vs. French Column”. Supposedly, the French during the Napoleonic Wars (having forgotten that the big sticks their infantry carried could shoot bullets) went around throwing human battering rams at enemy lines, and they were just so SCARY that people forgot to just shoot them until the British thought up how to clockwork fire.
This, of course, makes no sense: anyone with a brain in their head would know that an equivalent-sized unit in line would butcher a French column, and the French as much as anyone would be opposed to suicidal tactics unless they had no other choice. Column was indeed the favored French formation while *on the march*, but when they were near-contact a French unit would ideally deploy into line like everyone else. The big difference for the French was the speed with which they would approach and how close to the enemy they would deploy into line, as Napoleon’s preferred method of combat emphasized speed and force concentration above all. The French almost never threw columns at firing lines except when the column itself was ambushed (Arthur Wellington excelled at this, baiting the French to chase him over a hill then ambushing them on the reverse slope), when the column’s commanding officer erred in deploying his troops too close to the enemy, or when weight of numbers was the only advantage they currently possessed. In other words, human-wave tactics like a French column attacking a line of infantry were emphatically not the intended way the French wanted to fight, and if attempted was a sign of either a blunder or serious desperation on the part of the French.
This is my personal guess, but I think the confusion arises from British military officers describing the battles in their reports and using “column” as shorthand for any unit of regimental or greater size (i.e. “French column attacked village of X at 10:00am”). Add to this an inexperienced historian’s read of that text (“I guess that means the French attacked in column formation”) plus some good old British arrogance (“Only *we* would be smart enough to figure out that the best way to stop a column is to just shoot it!”) and you get nonsense like the Sharpe series where the French calmly march to their doom in battle after battle, never changing their tactics or learning from failure.