This week we’re continuing our three-part (I) look at one of film’s most famous Roman battle sequences, the iconic opening battle from Gladiator (2000). I had planned this to be in two parts, but even though this sequence is relatively short, it provides an awful lot to talk about.
As noted last week, this iconic opening battle, set in the Marcomannic Wars (166-180) during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180), giving us a pretty precise geographic and chronological setting, even though the battle itself is entirely fictional. As we noted last time and as we’ll see more this time, this sequence manages to strike a really unfortunate balance of doing just barely enough right to convince a lot of viewers that it must be more robustly historically grounded, when in fact it is mostly historical gibberish, employing the wrong tactics with the wrong army with the wrong weapons which it uses wrongly.
Left out of last week’s discussion, but relevant for this week’s is that this historical gibberish also goes for the scene’s antagonists. The film says we’re in Germania and credits the one speaking part in the ‘barbarian’ army here as “German Leader,” as the fellow comes out and shouts in solidly 21st century German, so presumably the film thinks these are ‘Germans.’ And that casual conflation of ancient Germanic-language speakers with modern Germans – also present, for instance in Netflix’ Barbarians (2020-2; Barbaren), where the Cherusci speak modern German but the Romans speak classical Latin – is quite common but also quite wrong. Ancient Germanic-language speakers, after all, were far more widely spread and are hardly just the ancestors of today’s Germans – this is a group that, among other things, included the Franks, who give their name to Frankia (Francia in Latin) which is to say…France. These fellows are thus ‘German’ for a definition of German that would also include the English, the French, many northern Italians, some non-trivial number of Spaniards, and so on.
But precisely because the historical moment of this film is more specific, we can be more specific: these are the Marcomanni and Quadi, the two Germanic-speaking peoples the Romans went to war with as part of the Second Marcomannic War (177-180). The Quadi lived in what today would be western Slovakia, whereas the Marcomanni’s homelands were in what today would be the Czech Republic; these are Germanic language speakers, but we’re not in Germany.1 The Marcomanni and the Quadi were two polities (of quite a few more) of a broader Germanic-language speaking ethnic grouping in our sources, the Suebi. It’s hard to keep precise track of these groups but it in the fifth century it seems like a good chunk of the Suebi, probably including the Marcomanni and Quadi (who continue to exist after the Marcomannic Wars) end up inside the Roman Empire, settled either in Pannonia, parts of Germania Superior (the upper Rhine) or – and this is a bit longer of a walk – Galicia (then Gallaecia) in North-Western Spain.
Gladiator, of course, is happy for the folks to simply be generic ‘barbarians,’ but these were real peoples. Their economy, such as we can observe, was at least partially agrarian, although our sources stress a relatively high amount of pastoralism (one suspects more ranching than out and out nomadism). Both the Marcomanni and Quadi in the second and third centuries AD are reported to have kings – although it is unclear how much power such ‘kings’ wielded – so these are not leaderless hordes either, but polities likely undergoing early phases of state formation, as a product of contact with the Romans. Equally evident in the archaeology, peoples across the Roman frontier traded a lot with the Romans, despite political friction, so these ‘barbarians’ would hardly have been unfamiliar with Roman goods or arms by this point.
And I wanted to give that background because as badly as this sequence does Roman warfare, it is going to equally make an utter mess of Suebian warfare (to the degree we can observe it) as well and it is worth keeping in mind that not only do the Romans here purport to represent a real culture, so do the Marcomanni and Quadi.
Signals and Speeches
We start with something that, as battle depictions go, I actually like: it’s made pretty clear to us that this battle has been planned in advance. Maximus’ subordinate officer Quintus clearly knows what the plan is when he frets “soldier, I ordered you to move those catapults forward, they’re out of range” because he’s concerned about “the danger to the cavalry.”
Now the problem with this line, like a lot of the dialogue in Gladiator is that beyond the immediate emotional impression – Quintus is nervous, Maximus is calm, unconcerned about the risk to his person – it doesn’t mean anything. The catapults are very clearly not out of range given that we’re going to see they have no problem at all shooting and even overshooting the field. More to the point, moving them forward isn’t going to reduce the danger to the cavalry: the cavalry is going to be charging in from directly behind the enemy, so the risk is that the catapults overshoot the enemy line (which we do see them doing). Moving them closer would increase, not reduce that risk. Moreover one wonders both how the catapults would be moved – they’re pretty bulky – and to where since they are positioned immediately behind the infantry line.
And of course, that’s the level on which one probably has to engage with the film: the scenes and lines mostly work in describing the character’s emotions, but generally carry no deeper meaning. That’s not a problem, as films go – set your brain to idle, ride the emotional waves and you’ll have a good time – but it probably cautions against making quotes from the film a cornerstone of your personality (one may note how much of today’s ‘broicism’ feeds back as much to this film as, say, an actual reading of the Meditations), because in a lot of cases, there’s not much there.
But I am happy at least that this is a battle plan which has been worked out in advance and has a prearranged signal to commence a sequence of attacks, rather than simply relying on Command Telepathy. Now, is this a good set of plans and signals? Well, no, not really. Like most Hollywood battle plans, it relies on Bad Guys who, to borrow a phrase from Parshall and Tully, “never failed to go lowing obediently to their choreographed slaughter.”2
In this case, Maximus only begins moving to join up with his cavalry, hidden behind the enemy army after the enemy have formed up at the tree line. Had they formed up elsewhere, or bumped into his cavalry, or had cavalry of their own, or intercepted him as he rode out of his army alone (through the forest around the flanks of both armies) to meet up with his cavalry, or had they spotted his fire arrow signal, or if Quintus failed to spot the signal arrow, or simply if the precise timing didn’t go off right (a few too many minutes shooting catapults, a too-slow infantry advance, the ‘barbarians’ holding at the tree line rather than charging, any of which means the enemy’s infantry is not engaged with they become aware of Maximus’ isolated and unsupported cavalry), the entire plan would have collapsed, which is why pre-modern armies generally didn’t rely on such intricate, precisely timed plans.
In any case, Maximus gallops out to his cavalry – evidently so far off the field that they needn’t fear being seen or heard as they greet his arrival, but close enough that they can gallop the entire distance – to give a speech. We’ve discussed the standard structure of a general’s speech before: an invocation of the character of the soldiers, an acknowledgement of the danger they face, the profits of victory and consequences of defeat, the basis upon which the general is confident and then an emotional appeal. Maximus’ speech doesn’t really succeed on this basis. The only component he squarely hits is the profits of victory – he’ll be back on his farm and “imagine where you will be, and it will be so.” The problem, of course, from a motivational standpoint is that this outcome has nothing to do with winning or losing the battle; these men could flee the field on their horses to the same effect.
And, because this doesn’t fit anywhere else, is also makes no sense in the context of the army of the Roman Empire, which is a long-service professional army, commanded by aristocrats well into their political-military careers. Maximus isn’t going to go back to a farm in Spain after this battle, because he is a senator and thus required by law to live close enough to Rome to attend meetings of the Senate. One thing that comes out quite clearly in both Gladiator movies is that Ridley Scott doesn’t particularly understand, or care to understand, the political structure of the Roman Empire: he imagines something much more like the United States or United Kingdom, with distinct military and political leadership classes separate from each other.
But in the Roman Empire, these were the same people; long tradition dictated that major military commands be given exclusively to senators and Roman emperors stuck to that tradition, in part because they needed the Senate (in part to supply men who could govern provinces and command armies). While Maximus will describe his position as ‘General of the Felix Legions,’ that’s not a position the Romans had. Instead, all of the Roman Empire outside of Italy was divided up into combined administrative and military districts – these are the provinces (provinciae) – each of which was entrusted to a single senator either endowed with or delegated imperium (the right to command) for a time. Principally civilian provinces were governed by senators under their own imperium, while frontier military provinces were legally governed by the emperor, but in practice had their control delegated to legati (more fully legati Augusti pro praetore, “Legate of the Emperor with a Praetor’s Authority’) who were delegated the emperor’s imperium for a given province. Those legati also had to be drawn from the Senate and in particular from senators who had risen high enough to have held the praetorship.
So our fellow Maximus here is a legatus Augusti pro praetore, probably for the province of Pannonia Superior, which has the largest concentration of military forces on the upper Danube. His buddy Quintus looks to be well into middle age (too old to be a military tribune, though both he and Maximus will have served as ‘broadstriped’ (laticlavius) tribunes earlier in their lives before entering the Senate) and so is likely a legatus legionis, a less senior senator (but still a senator) also hand-picked by the emperor to command a specific legion. For a province like Pannonia Superior with multiple legions, each legion would have its own legatus legionis who would report to the overall legatus Augusti pro praetore. Which is to say neither Quintus nor Maximus are going back to their farm after this: they’re going back to Rome to be major figures in Roman politics, living on their large estates since senators were required by law to be extremely wealthy. Maximus’ wife and child, far from being alone on their homestead, would have been at the center of a household that includes hundreds if not thousands of enslaved laborers.
Meanwhile for Maximus’ soldiers, ‘home’ is the army. These men signed up for life-long career: a tour of service in the Roman army of the imperial period was, by the end of the reign of Augustus, about 25 years long. Common soldiers that lived to retirement also didn’t generally ‘go home’ because after 25 years, the frontier was home: many had started informal families (which became formal, legal families on discharge, but only at that point), for instance. So Roman soldiers tended to settle on retirement in the frontier communities they had garrisoned in their service, leading to Roman communities springing up all along the frontier. By the reign of Marcus Aurelius this process was very well advanced and far, far more Roman citizen legionaries were recruited from Roman communities on the frontier than were recruited in Italy.
Ridley Scott seems to have confused this version of the Roman army for that of the Early or Middle Republic, where soldiers might serve for a single campaign as a citizen militia and then go back to their farms. The army of the imperial period was quite a different creature.
That Fire Barrage
Fortunately for Maximus, his subordinate Quintus is able to see a single fire arrow hefted above the tree tops, at least a mile away but none of the ‘barbarians’ who are far closer see it and think “maybe someone should check that out.” He thus sets out to ‘unleash hell’ in a massive barrage of very literal fire.
One of those ‘very specific‘ levels of brightness.
This part of the sequence is broken in several different directions, from the more obvious to the less so.
We can start with the really obvious error here, FIRE ARROWS. Now on the one hand, the Romans had fire arrows. Indeed, they had fire javelins and fire catapult shot too. Tod Todeschini has a very well put together video on medieval fire arrows going through the construction and fuel used to ensure they stay lit in flight and burn for quite some time on the target. But as he notes, as military historians have been noting for decades, is that fire arrows were pretty special purpose weapons. Putting an incendiary charge on an arrow made it heavier and less aerodynamic, so you were trading range, accuracy and penetrating power for the fire, but the fire doesn’t give you any real lethality against an army that the arrow doesn’t. For the arrow to seriously burn someone, it is going to need to penetrate their armor and lodge in, at which point the more immediate problem that person is going to have is being shot by an arrow.
The rest of a battlefield is generally going to be pretty ignition-resistant. Soldiers, being humans, are made up of about 60% water and so do not burn readily. Most of their equipment is also going to be pretty slow to burn, being metal or wool (the later of which might seem very flammable, but wool has to hit almost 600°C to burn, which is quite a lot of heat to get out of an arrow). Shields, of course, are made of wood, but almost invariably faced with hide (as would have been the case with all of the shields in this sequence – both the Roman scutum and Gallic/Germanic oval shields are faced in hide).3 Getting a shield to ignite faster than the fellow simply pulls the arrow out is going to be pretty tough too. And then there is grass and trees, which are also mostly water and generally resist ignition unless they are very dry, conditions which do not happen all that often along the Rhine or Danube.
Meanwhile, we should also just note that the incendiaries that the Romans – or any pre-modern society that aren’t the Byzantine’s with their Greek Fire (developed about four centuries later than this battle, so having Greek fire here is the equivalent of having a line of M1 Abrams tanks show up during the Eighty Years War (1566-1648)) – had access to were not the modern petrochemical-based incendiaries we see here. Nothing the Romans could put in a pot was going to explode and shower massive curtains of fire the way we see here (which honestly looks like it is trying to evoke napalm, first deployed in 1943).4
But fire arrows (and javelins, and catapult shot) were standard tools of warfare from antiquity through the Middle Ages, so they must have been good for something, right? And they were! They were good for naval battles, sieges and attacks on wooden forts. Against a large target (building, wall, ship) made of wood that is going to sit still for a while, an attacker can throw lots of fire munitions at it, which will stick into the sides of it or splatter on the decks and keep burning. Note in the Tod’s Workshop video how his fire arrows are designed to keep burning, not necessary for maximum heat, but for a strong, sustained burn. In a siege of naval battle scenario, there’s a good chance that, if you fling enough fire munitions this one, one of them is going to start a fire that gets out of control. At the very least, controlling the fires diverts enemy resources away.
But in a field battle like this? Fire arrows look cool, but are worse than useless, inferior to non-incendiary versions of the same projectiles.
The next problem is the nature and range of the barrage: we’re shown an absolutely fearsome amount of lethality delivered on enemies that are very far away and have no way at all to shoot back in kind. But as as we’ve discussed fairly exhaustively at this point, even the most powerful bows are not this lethal in massed shooting and certainly not at this range. To very briefly summarize those rather long posts: the energy arrows can deliver drops off fairly rapidly over range, making extreme range shooting less effective. More to the point, opponents in armor or – as in this case – with shields can protect themselves quite completely, reducing the ‘hit chance’ of arrows to almost nothing, well beyond the point where an archer at this range might discharge the whole contents of his quiver without actually wounding anyone. Catapults, be they stone or arrow throwing, might – by virtue of flinging a heavier projectile – smash through a shield and engage at somewhat greater range, but of course also shot much more slowly.
Instead, massed archery shooting, even assisted by catapults, at this range would be tactically annoying, rather than devastating: not so much ‘unleash hell’ as ‘unleash mild irritation.’ Lethality would, of course, increase as the distance closed but the archers stop shooting when the legions advance so that isn’t a factor here. Now ‘mild irritation’ can be meaningful on a battlefield. If, as at Carrhae (53 BC), you have some means to both keep up shooting long-term and provide meaningful pressure, it can attrit down an enemy force over time quite badly. Alternately, it can goad an enemy into attacking, perhaps over poor ground, as at Agincourt (1415). But even with the most powerful pre-modern bows, massed archery at this range isn’t going to be very lethal and the Romans probably didn’t have the very most powerful historical bows, although Roman archers, recruited in the auxilia from cultures with archery traditions, were using recurve composite bows (and thus probably the best bows available at the time).
Which in turn explains the next problem here, which is that, as we’ve already noted the Romans never brought this many archers to a battle. Readers used to the extremely high lethality of archery in video games may have been a bit surprised by my suggestion last time that the dedicated missile troops (archers and slingers) of a Roman field army in this period probably made up less than 5% of the total force, but that starts to make sense when you realize that in most contexts, archery was a niche combat specialty with a few very powerful use cases but which could be basically nullified by heavy infantry with shields.5 You brought a few archers for the moments that required them, but unless your fighting style was built around archery, that was generally all you brought.
And here it is worth noting (not for the last time) that it isn’t just the Roman army getting misrepresented here, but also the Quadi and Marcomanni. These guys are shown in the film with an array of shields, some circular, some rectangular, mostly a lot smaller than the scutum and mostly curved. But in practice, we ought to see mostly a single kind of shield, a flat, center-bossed oval shield of significant size, basically identical to the shield most of the Roman auxilia infantry would have been using (and the shield that, after the third century, the Romans themselves will be using). Such shields show up, inter alia on the Column of Marcus Aurelius which, again, depicts this campaign. A shield like that would offer a lot of protection against arrows and rather than a hodge-podge of men with and without shields, the entire Quadi/Marcomanni line would be carrying them, presenting a solid well of shoulder-to-ankle shields. And as we’ll get into in a moment, they’d be deployed in fairly close-order, in a formation not all that different from a phalanx.
So even if the Romans did bring this many archers, and they wouldn’t have, the massed long-range arrow barrage wouldn’t have accomplished much of what we see – where in the film it creates chaos and heavy casualties. The icing on top of the ‘Hollywood nonsense’ cake here is that of course the barrage has to be delivered as a volley, with ‘knock!’ ‘draw!’ and ‘loose!’ given as commands. As we’ve discussed, this seems never to have been done historically, because it really couldn’t have been. Instead, if you were going to use archers, you’d simply tell them to commence shooting (to my knowledge, we do not know what that command would have been for a Roman army of this period or earlier)6 once the desired range was reached, which would be substantially closer than this. The catapults, by contrast, might have started their work earlier and their heavier bolts and stones – able to pierce or smash shields – might well have had a significant morale impact, though given the limited number of engines7 and slow rate of fire, the casualty impact wouldn’t be significant.
For an actual Roman army, this wouldn’t be a problem, because whatever missile infantry they had were, as noted, relatively small numbers of specialists with specific roles whereas the main effort of the battle would be handled by the heavy infantry. Which brings us to:
The Infantry Advance
As the barrage continues, the infantry is ordered to advance. This is, in theory, the one part of the sequence that really is a core part of the Roman way of fighting: a direct infantry advance against the enemy over open ground. But once again far more of it is wrong than is right, to the point that the moments of “that’s a thing I remember from a history textbook” like the testudo are mostly deceptive rather than informative.
The initial infantry advance looks like this:
The Roman legionaries marching in a series of long, thin lines (and one small half-dozen man clump for some reason), closely packed, shoulder to shoulder. I wonder exactly how this got set as the blocking, because Ridley Scott had not (at this point) directed an 18th or early 19th century war film, but this is very clearly an 18th or early 19th century musket line formation. I wonder if perhaps they were using reenactors here as extras and so ended up with nice neat musket lines almost by force of habit. In any case, I should note that these are very much parade ground musket formations; as several of the books we’ve reviewed have noted, in actual – 18th century musket – combat these formations were often looser and more flexible.
But of course the problem here isn’t that these are parade ground formations, but that they are musket parade ground formations and the Romans, somewhat famously, did not fight with muskets. I realize this joke is getting tiresome, but having the Romans form up like this, a formation 1500 years too early would be like having a line of M1 Abrams tanks show up at the Battle of Catalaunian Plains (451) and somewhat worse than doing modern infantry tactics treating bows like rifles and machine guns during the crusades.
So how ought it look? First, the maneuvering units here would be cohorts of 480 men, ten to each legion.8 For comparison, these blocks seem to be 2-3 ranks deep and about 15-20 files across, so maybe 30-60 men in each. But even a Roman century in this period was 80 men and it is pretty clear that by Julius Caesar’s day, the tactical unit was no longer the two-century maniple (two 60-man centuries for a 120 man unit) but rather the six-century cohort (six 80-man centuries for a 480 man unit).9 The centuries themselves were organizational units, rather than tactical ones (at least in a large-scale battle), so we ought to see an advance in cohorts, with each cohort clearly visible as a distinct block of soldiers.
The formation those cohorts would adopt would also look very little like this. The Romans didn’t fight shoulder-to-shoulder like this for the obvious reason that this tightly packed, no one has any space to use their weapons; such tight formations are fairly exclusively a feature of gunpowder armies. Even pike formations were not so tight. Instead, the Roman standard fighting formation10 each man probably occupied about 135cm of horizontal space (‘frontage’). Visually, on the march, that’s going to read like a gap between soldiers shoulder-to-shoulder larger than the space (about 45cm) that a human takes up: the line is going to be 1/3rd body (45cm) and 2/3rds empty air (90cm). That is, by ancient standards, one of the looser ‘close order’ formations (c. 90cm of frontage per man was probably more typical, a 50% body, 50% air formation), but then the Roman fighting system, focused on sword use probably demanded a bit more space, while the deeply curved nature of the Roman scutum (that big shield) provided the necessary protection in case an enemy tried foolishly to move into the space of the intervals.11
The Romans had formations to tighten up those gaps (particularly to resist arrows) but they’d space out again to actually do any fighting. We’re less well informed about rank spacing (the ‘vertical’ intervals – chest-to-back) – Polybius (18.30.6-9) doesn’t say while Vegetius (3.14-15) says six Roman feet (c. 177cm) but does so in the process of describing formations that seem much later, if they existed at all – but we can be sure it probably wasn’t very tight, as the Roman fighting system doesn’t rely on bringing multiple ranks into range at once (the way the Macedonian sarisa-phalanx does).
Finally, these units would be simply a lot larger in terms of number of men. 480 men, organized into 8-deep files, with the 135cm facing discussed above are going to occupy around 80m end to end and probably around 10m front to back; a cohort would thus basically fill the width of a soccer/football pitch from one side to the other (sideline to sideline, not goal to goal). Rather than these tight, thin, fragile-looking shoulder-to-shoulder lines, a cohort in battle formation would be spaced and sized something more like this (each of those blue dots is one of our fellows from the spacing chart above):
In short, each cohort would be a pretty massive block of armored men with large shields moving forward. Even though there’s a lot of empty space in that formation, I suspect even looking at my lame chart your eyes quickly understood it as a single coherent thing, a ‘block’ of figures – it feels tighter and more intimidating than it might strictly be in inches or centimeters.
Of course that block isn’t the whole of a Roman army. Rather, each legion was ten of those blocks, probably still arrayed in three lines (probably 4-3-3 for cohorts in each line, front to back) and you’d probably be seeing at least two legions advance together (side to side), flanked by auxilia heavy infantry on either side (perhaps in a somewhat tighter formation, given their weapons). The whole army – two legions and flanking auxilia (but not cavalry) – would probably have been around a mile wide (accounting for intervals between cohorts and such).
That’s not very much at all like what we see and frankly the real formation would have been rather more impressive and intimidating thing than what is on screen here.
As the legionaries advance in the sequence, we see a few things I want to note. First, the men are shown couching their pila under their arms, hedging them forward over their shields, which would be a pretty strange way to hold a spear but is an even stranger way to hold a javelin. On the one hand, I’m happy that we actually see these fellows holding pila (so often left out of film depictions of Roman soldiers) but on the other hand pila are not spears, they are heavy javelins and at no point in this battle do we ever see a Roman throw their pilum. I see all the time the popular conception of these weapons makes a great deal about how they might double as a spear in a pinch and I suppose they might but they are not well designed for it at all. Instead, the pila are thrown and then you engage in close combat with your sword.
Then we get the one part of the sequence of infantry everyone remembers, where the ‘barbarians’ loose one volley of arrows and the Romans adopt a sort-of-kind-of testudo in response. This one tactical maneuver is generally the only thing most people know about the Roman army and so this one bit does a lot to enhance the apparent credibility of the scene. Which is unfortunate, because this testudo is formed wrong and being used in the wrong place.
On the first point, when we see Roman testudo formations, they’re not crouching, stationary formations, but instead designed to be capable of movement. They’re also not formed like this – where because the men are already marching in an modern musket formation, the testudo they form is very wide and extremely (about three men) shallow. Instead, when we see the testudo depicted in artwork, it is invariably deeper than it is wide suggesting that it is formed out of a marching column.
But the other problem here is that there’s little reason for the Romans to form a testudo here. The pervasiveness of the testudo in the popular imagination (including adorable ‘children form testudo‘ videos) is such that folks assume that it was the standard fighting formation, but it was in fact a quite specialized formation mostly for sieges. After all, as we’ve noted before, the Roman shield provides ample protection for arrows on just about any front-facing trajectory; the scutum covers most of the body, after all. For an archer who is on the ground in front of you, there is little reason to need to place a shield over your head because the arrows aren’t going to be plunging down at such high angles (and if they are, they’ve lost a lot of energy and you have a helmet). The situation in which a formation might be worried about arrows or other projectiles plunging down is in a siege, where the enemy archers are up on a wall or tower and thus able to shoot downwards, over the shields of the advancing Romans.
Instead what we see is that the standard Roman response to enemy arrow attack in open battle was to close up the formation so that the shields more nearly touched and advance in close-order, only to spread back out into fighting order as they came into contact with the enemy.12 So as cool as it is, we shouldn’t see a testudo here and even if we did, it ought to be a forward moving formation and even then, we shouldn’t see pila poking out of it like a hedgehog, because that’s now how the pilum is used.
Intermission
I must pardon the readers who have ended the last section with the understandable expectation of finding legions clashing with Marcomanni warriors,13 but this post is already six and a half thousand words long and we’ll have quite a lot to talk about with the actual fighting next week.
Instead, I want to stop to note again the impact of the approach here towards historical verisimilitude. As we’ve now demonstrated, very little of what Ridley Scott shows on screen is how a Roman army operated, but almost all of it is presented in a way to fool a viewer into thinking this is more or less how a Roman army operated. This is not a case of an obvious fantasy setting or a scene that is taking clear liberties viewers might recognize. Instead, there’s clear care here to get a bunch of surface-level signifiers of accuracy – the testudo (done badly), the distinctive Roman equipment (also not done particularly well), the presence of catapults (including some clear anachronisms) and of course the decision to situate this battle in a specific war under the reign of a specific emperor – all of which seems calibrated to convince a viewer that someone has ‘done the research.’
But that’s not the case. Or more correctly, some folks had done the research and been brought on the project and Ridley Scott ignored them, with historical advisor Kathleen Coleman famously requesting the studio remove her from the credits because of how comprehensively her “hundreds of hours” of work advising was ignored. Naturally for the sequel, Scott found a more pliable, less qualified historical ‘advisor,’ (the sort whose CV lists advising credits but not, you know, any actual education or publications) for a film that is somehow even less historically grounded. I don’t have a problem making fantasy films set in the past, but I do think Ridley Scott in particular has a habit of making movies that very deliberately trade on the perception of some degree of historical groundedness (even for fictional narratives) and then, of course, gets very upset when historians then assess that groundedness and find it lacking.
What I find most disappointing though, is the lost opportunity. The last time a director seriously tried to accurately recreate a Roman army in the field, it was 1960: we knew far less about the Roman army and the technology to put it on screen was far more limited. I am often asked by students or members of the general public what movie depiction does the Roman army best and I am generally left at something of a loss because none of them do it particularly well. By contrast, while results have been mixed, there have been really meticulous efforts to recreate the tactics of the First and Second World Wars (at this point we have a ‘try to get everything right’ treatment of nearly every sort of warfare in WWII), the American Civil War, Pike and Shot and even a remarkable rendition of the Battle of Gaugamela (331) from the otherwise decidedly mixed Alexander (2004).
But no one seems to even really try to put a Roman army on screen, using the weapons they’re described as having, in the formations we’re told they used, at scale. HBO’s Rome comes the closest and still can’t resist inventing things (holding on to baldrics, etc.). The irony is, I think showing a Roman army functioning correctly would be such a surprising, somewhat alien experience to a modern viewer that it could be really very striking.
Alas, instead, next week: the confused melee!
- The film calls this the Battle of Vindobonia, which would put it at modern Vienna, Austria, presumably because that is the known location where Marcus Aurelius died, but he died in a Roman fort on the Roman side of the border, whereas this is clearly an offensive operation into Marcomannic or Quadi territory. Among other things we don’t see here that we’d see if we were at Vindobonia is the freakin’ Danube River which is not a small or easily missed river.
- Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword (2005), 52, delivered as a criticism of the war-gaming and planning of the Imperial Japanese Navy prior to the Battle of Midway (1942).
- Of course many ancient Greek shields, particularly the aspis, were faced in bronze, even less combustible.
- Having napalm during the reign of Marcus Aurelius is the equivalent anachronism as having a line of M1 Abrams tanks show up…basically in this battle during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, because to be honest at this point the 40-year gap between napalm and those tanks is a rounding error.
- For the Total War fans, for instance, shielded infantry in Total War games generally block around 30-50% of arrow ‘hits,’ and goodness knows when your archers are shooting into a solid shielded unit, you feel the 50% damage reduction. But imagine a more historically accurate reduction of upwards of 75-85% of hits – your archers would be doing essentially nothing to the target.
- I won’t say we don’t know at all because I wouldn’t be surprised if a command for this is reported in a Byzantine military manual, of which quite a few survive, but I can’t claim to know them all well enough to say for certain.
- Vegetius 2.25 suggests one engine per century in a legion, which would net out to something like one catapult for every 160 or so men (a century being 80 men plus accounting for the auxilia), but while the Romans clearly employed a lot of catapults, I don’t know that anyone accepts that this figure obtained in practice. Vegetius, it must be remembered, is writing a military manual in the late fourth century about how much better Roman armies were in the good ‘ol days. His account is thus deeply colored by nostalgia, but also mashes together around four centuries of Roman military practice and is thus to be read with a critical eye and more than one grain of salt.
- The first cohort was sometimes larger, in a bit of organizational complexity we need not delve into here.
- We’re not told but it stands to reason the difference in century size is the velites: the manipular legion had attached light infantry (the velites) who were tactically separate but organizationally included in the centuries of light infantry. A manipular legion had 1,200 velites divided evenly between 30 two-century maniples, so that neatly attaches 20 velites (again organizationally, not tactically) to each century of heavy infantry, making its actual organizational size 80 men, even though it was tactically a unit of 60. When the velites drop out of use, those 20 slots become legionary soldiers, leading to a battlefield unit of 80 in the imperial period.
- Discussed in M.J. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-Republic: A Reassessment” Historia 63.3 (2014).
- Foolishly, because that enemy would find themselves stuck between four Romans (the front rank and the second rank), two of whom are not otherwise engaged and attacking from opposite directions. Such a foolhardy fellow would be cut down basically instantly.
- Numerous examples of this noted in Taylor, op. cit.
- I will never stop stealing this joke from Parshal and Tully, Shattered Sword (2005), 229. In my defense, I have obtained the permission of one of the authors to do so.
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lol at the first two sentences being “This week we’re continuing our three-part (I) look… I had planned this to be in two parts, but…”
We know, Bret; we know.
I haven’t even read the article past the first paragraph, but I want to say that one of these days, our good host is going to come in at a shorter series than initially projected. And then the world will come to an end.
I will be even more lost & distraught than I am during Gap Weeks!
It is a little known fact that in the Bible, one of the signs of the apocalypse is Bret writing *less* than intended
If the world comes to an end right in the middle of an ACOUP series, that would certainly be one way of preventing that series from overrunning its originally intended length. Perhaps, even, the only way.
So perhaps the casuality is the other way around. The world doesn’t come to an end because an ACOUP series is short, the world comes to an end and then the ACOUP series is short. 😉
OR, the length of these articles is the only thing keeping the world running.
I view it as masterful casting of shade. “I thought I could cover the problems of this 12-minute segment in two posts, but….”
Also yes!
Thanks! That clears it up a lot. I didn’t realise they actually went into that much detail in our historical sources. Lucky us that they did.
We’ve detected Ridley Scott’s WordPress account…
I think it’s actually more complicated: we do know a fair amount, but it is cobbled together from critical analyses of numerous sources, none of which focuses very directly on the questions Bret is addressing here.
While the Marcomanni obviously didn’t speak modern German, I think representing their language as German is the best option if you’re not going to speculatively reconstruct a proto-language.
AFAIK, we don’t know if the Marcomannni spoke a West or East Germanic variety. If it was West Germanic, any of the modern West German languages would be about equally closely related to theirs. But standard German probably has fewer loanwords than Dutch (or Afrikaans or Yiddish or Frisian), and *many* fewer loanwords than English (or Scots), so in terms of vocabulary it’s a good choice. (If they spoke an (extinct) East Germanic variety, then any modern Germanic language would do and perhaps you could argue for Icelandic on linguistic conservatism grounds, but this movie was sadly made before the discovery of Hafthor Bjornsson)
In terms of ancestry or genetics, saying that “These fellows are thus ‘German’ for a definition of German that would also include the English, the French, many northern Italians, some non-trivial number of Spaniards” is misleading. A very small fraction of current French, Italian or Spanish ancestry is of Frankish/Lombard/Visigothic origin. English Germanic ancestry is higher (I think recent estimates say around 30-40% of English DNA derives from the Anglo-Saxons, at least in the southeast?) but still smaller than the Celtic or pre-Celtic component. If you want close genetic relatives of the ancient Germanics, Germany and perhaps the Netherlands are the closest fit.
Yeah, it would have been more accurate comparison to say they are Germans in the sense the English are or in the sense French, Portuguese and Italians are the same ethnicity. There is some similarity in language and culture and some general recognition of that, but that very much isn’t one of the primary identity bubbles.
If you want close genetic relatives of the ancient Germanics, Germany and perhaps the Netherlands are the closest fit.
What about modern Czechs and Slovaks (since Bret mentions that’s the approximate location of the battle). Are they mostly (genetic) descendants of the Marcomanni etc., or is most of their ancestry from the Slavic migrations of a few centuries later? (The language is West Slavic of course, I’m asking about the genetics).
Apparently they are about 35% Slavic in ancestry. The Slavic migrations generally weren’t a complete population replacement, but they seem to have been far larger than mere elite replacement. So Germans are going to be genetically closer (though they have some Slavic ancestry too, perhaps 20% in eastern Germany!)
Slavic migrations were a large enough and dominate enough proportion to almost completely overwrite the pre-existing culture. Anglo-Saxons are similar in that regard. Despite genetics suggesting the resulting society was less than half Anglo-Saxon by ancestry, there seem to have been oddly little cultural influence on balance. The Celtic Britons had much less linguistic influence on English than the Norse or the Normans.
Norman linguistic influence is really an outlier among all language events everywhere; nearly all of the words of both languages were retained, and both sets of grammar continued to be in use after the merger stabilized. Other than that, it’s more accurate to say that Celtic Britons had earlier influences that are harder to detect because of the later influences. We now know for instance, that the ‘th’ phoneme in English entered in Wessex and is Brythonic, but for most of English history was thought to be derived from Norse contact.
Source for that? I thought “th” is reconstructed for Proto-Germanic. The thorn rune well predates the Anglo-Saxon migrations and it’s still found in Icelandic today in addition to English.
There is also the theory, propounded by John McWhorter, that the use of “do” as an “empty” auxiliary verb reflects Celtic, in particular Cornish, influence.
There is no other language where “I do not have” is a feasible construction: it would be “je n’ai pas” or “jag har inte” or whatever, but no need for an auxiliary which adds no content.
Genetics can be useful sometimes. Like people have suggested the Slavs rapid expansion was in large part assimilation and pidgin adaptation. But they had at least as large a genetic impact in the Balkans as the Anglo-Saxons in England. Except the Balkans is nearly 4X as large and much more populous. Plus of course the Slavs are also overrunning Central and Eastern Europe. All of this in a couple hundred year period Perhaps the Byzantines knew what they were talking about when they claim to forcibly resettle cumulatively hundreds of thousands of Slavs. That still leaves the question (a better plow seems a bit much by itself?) why the Poland/Ukraine/Belarus borderlands suddenly turned into an infinite spawn point. But the focus on the Germanic migrations is arguably Western European centrism. In linguistic impact, and probably also numbers, the Slavic migrations were larger than all the Germanic migration groups combined.
Or to put it in numbers terms ~1 million might be a reasonable estimate for the combined total Germanic migration into the former Western Roman Empire from the Visigoths to the Lombards. I think it is quite plausible the Slavic migration into the Balkans alone roughly matched that total.
Horse nomads have been bordering that area for ages (among other things, they inspired the centaurs of Greek mythology several centuries before this time) but if they got aggressive/organized, they would have the ability to defeat the local farmer infantry, sending them running for terrain unsuitable for the horses (and willing to fight any infantry standing in their path). Did that perhaps happen, again?
By which I mean, the PIE expansion started from vaguely this area, and I understand it to have been related to the operational mobility advantage of cavalry. (I’m putting it this way because I’m under the impression that they fought as either shock cavalry or possibly as mounted infantry, unlike the later horse archers.) And horse-nomadic incursions into agrarian Europe would repeat with the “Attila” Huns, the Avars, the Magyars, the Cumans, the “Genghis” Mongols.
If you’re going to use a modern Germanic language, at least have the decency to use Dutch. German is a particularly poor fit because of the second consonant shift, while Dutch phonology has one or two relatively conservative traits (preservation of a spirant /ɣ/ instead of /g/, limited umlaut) that might make it the least bad choice. Vocabulary is not a problem because you can have native speakers write the dialogue without any loanwords, which would be trivially easy with so few lines
Re: No good depictions of the Roman army in film
Battle of Zama: Carthage vs Rome – Scipione l’africano (1937)
Well, it has battle speeches, pila-throwing, and anti-elephant plans. OTOH it has a lot of cavalry, who clash to form a disordered cavalry melee, followed by later disordered infantry melee. And I can’t visualize what’s going on in the battlefield. So… better than Gladiator but not great?
Also to the positive: Scipio appears to have musicians and mounted couriers to relay his orders rather than fire arrows.
I guess being done in Italy in 1937 would make it easy to:
1. Want to make the Romans look awesome
2. Avoid cinematic tropes rooted in WWII experience…
It would admittedly be temporally difficult to use WWII cinematic tropes in 1937.
Watching these old films I’m always shocked at all the animals they used, and the way they used them. It really makes me understand why later on they started saying “no animals were harmed” on the credits. This looks really rough
It would be quite interesting to have a post devoted to this scene one day. For one thing, it actually provides us with not one, but two pre-battle speeches, from Scipio and Hannibal, and just those could be analyzed according to the same template provided to us all the way back in the Helm’s Deep series.
(Can’t be bothered to do a full breakdown myself, but the one thing which immediately jumps out is how obviously Scipio is speaking to the real intended audience of Mussolini’s Italians rather than the ostensible audience of his Republic-era soldiers. The appeal to the glorious past when Rome’s best days were actually roughly 2-3 centuries ahead of them is, by itself perfectly fine – the “Fremen” post listing all the Roman writers from that period going on and on about decline and decadence attests to such – but “Make her once more the ruler of the world” only makes sense to those who already know of the Roman Empire eventually turning the Mediterranean into “a Roman lake” and would have sounded nonsensical at the time.)
The scene also provides at least an oral description of what appear to be accurate anti-elephant tactics (as described in a post on here), so there’s that.
P.S. According to Wikipedia, you can actually spot watches on the hands of some extras and telephone wires around the place in some scenes if you watch closely, which led to quite a debate if they ought to have been cut out. (Nowadays, of course, we can “fix it in post” – although that still failed to prevent things like GOT’s Season 8 plastic water bottles from slipping through.) That 18-minute scene also represents almost a quarter of the film’s total runtime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipio_Africanus:_The_Defeat_of_Hannibal
The page about the director (Carmine Gallone, who was ultimately responsible for over a hundred films between 1913 and 1962) also claims that
About Scipio l’Africano, Gallone is said to have remarked “If the film does not please il Duce I will shoot myself.” The film in fact did not impress Mussolini, but still premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was quite successful.
None of that is referenced though, so… On the other hand, the claim that Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Inno a Roma composed for this film was at one point under consideration for the replacement national anthem does have a reference.
Typo hunt:
“siege of naval battle scenario” > “siege or naval battle scenario”
“‘knock!’ ‘draw!’ and ‘loose!'” > “‘nock!’ ‘draw!’ and ‘loose!'”
“that’s now how the pilum is used” > “that’s not how the pilum is used”
“the Byzantine’s with their Greek Fire” > “the Byzantines with their Greek Fire”
“the Roman standard fighting formation each man probably occupied” -> “in the Roman standard fighting formation…”
“… the scenes and lines mostly work in describing the character’s emotions, but generally carry no deeper meaning.”
This is where I disagree with you. These lines DO have deeper meaning–characterization. It’s important that Maximus be portrayed as calm, decisive, and brave. This contrasts with Commodus’ cowardice, lack of decisiveness, and franticness. The main thrust of the movie is, after all, the contrast between Maximus and Commodus as individuals.
The battle itself is almost a throw-away thing–it’s there to grab your attention (which it does), and to quickly establish Maximus’ personality. Nothing else really matters. This is evident by the fact that we are given no information on the strategic importance of this battle. Where, when, and why it’s fought don’t matter, because they’re all beside the point. The point is, Maximus is a brave and capable military commander, the very type specimen of “Good Roman Citizen”. Everyone else in the scene is just there to illustrate this.
I think this is why the director paid so little attention to the specifics of the battle: It didn’t matter. If he got every detail 100% accurate, it wouldn’t have impacted the film’s themes or central plot.
“Nothing the Romans could put in a pot was going to explode and shower massive curtains of fire the way we see here…”
Minor quibble, but this isn’t true. Various powders the Romans absolutely had access to, such as flour and saw dust, can be made to explode like that. It’s not a particularly dangerous sort of explosion, compared to modern weaponry, and it would be really tricky to make a fireball like that happen with those components, but it IS within the realm of possibility. I’ve got relatives on fire departments who’ve experienced flour mills exploding, and it’s no joke!
I don’t think you could make a flour or sawdust incendiary produce huge clouds and curtains of fire like that unless you launched them at something that was already burning. You’d need to first disperse and then ignite, and I’m pretty sure any practical Roman-era incendiary device that could be launched from a catapult would just result in in, essentially, the equivalent of dumping out a bag of flour over an already-lit candle.
Which might be pretty dramatic, don’t get me wrong, but I doubt you’d get huge cinematic blasts of flame.
Being an artilleryman, I’d like to point out that real artillery doesn’t produce massive gasoline explosions. The grenade blasts are rather dull puffs of earth flying upwards.
This video shows pretty nicely what a major artillery strike looks like: https://youtu.be/AFQPWiU19a8?si=tEt-YYDeyJM7edUi&t=3m15s
Drama is not without purpose in battle, though. Look at the blowing of the Horn of Helm Hammer-Hand. Okay, by itself, it’s just a horn. But in context–with Aragorn showing Anduril, and Rohan charging out, and…I forget who, it was Eomer in the movie but the book is different….showing up, blowing the Horn BROKE the Uruk-Hai.
And I’ve gotta say, having been on a shield wall, if something literally exploded in flame in front of me, I’m gonna be slightly disturbed. Granted, my unit was kinda stupid–our default was “At a walk, advance!”–but most people don’t train as much as us and flash-bang devices are a thing for a reason. If you’re a Germanic kid who’s on campaign for a bit to gain status and loot, seeing a giant fireball in the path you’re trying to walk through well before you meet the enemy is going to have a profound psychological impact. And ultimately, that’s what battle in that time was about–remember, most casualties were in the route, not the battle.
Do I think it actually happened? No, obviously not. The same effort could be directed in a number of different directions with significantly better effect–trust me, break a few limbs with slings or arrows and it’s going to very quickly sap the enemy’s will to fight! Or use something like pitch or something else that keeps burning–walking through flame is something most people really just won’t do. But it’s not technically impossible. And if they COULD do it, I’ve got some fairly compelling evidence, in the form of incident reports and discussions with people who have been in such explosions, that it would be effective. The real limiting factor is prep time. Making this actually happen would require significant preparation, which obviously limits it’s viability in the overwhelming majority of situations.
That’s just a very long way of saying it describes the character’s emotions. I find Bret’s point to be that the memorable lines don’t really provide any substantive insight into or commentary on subjects related to society or purpose or things like that, despite being given a cadence suggestive of them doing so.
Frankly, the pervasiveness of such lines is part of why I honestly don’t like Gladiator all that much.
This reminds me a bit of “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” where the emotional content was loud and clear, even though the meaning was unintelligible.
Although, on reflection it might be more like “insert technobabble here” lines – best just to accept that Data did something clever, and not think too much about what “multimodal reflection sorting” means.
“That’s just a very long way of saying it describes the character’s emotions.”
That’s sort of like saying that “Romeo and Juliet” is merely a very long-winded description of character emotions. Technically it’s true–but it ignores a fair amount of depth. Maximus is saying those things for a reason. Sure, that reason makes no sense if you’re using “Gladiator” as a textbook for how Rome fights; however, it makes a great deal of sense if you view it as a study in contrast between the characters of Maximus and Commodus.
These emotions have a source. Maximus very clearly finds the source of his emotions in ideals, specifically the ideals of a republic–the whole “The most valuable thing in Rome is a citizen willing to die for Rome” thing. Commodus finds the source of his emotions, in contrast, in self-aggrandizement. Maximus’ statements are PRIOR TO the battle, whereas Commodus’ statements are AFTER the battle. Commodus wants to perform a public, showy, but ultimately irrelevant sacrifice; Maximus wants to actually WIN.
If you look at the scene from the perspective of “Does this align with what we know of Roman history?” than I agree, there’s no substance there. Maximus portrays a childish view of the Roman Republic ideal citizen-soldier, and that’s about all you can say. On the other hand, if you view it as purely a character study, and specifically a contrasting character study, there’s some depth there.
He doesen’t even portray the idea of a roman citizen soldier: Where doing the proper sacrifices afterwards would certainly be a big part of!
He’s not portraying the Roman idea of a Roman citizen soldier. But the audience for “Gladiator” is not Roman. When historical accuracy comes into conflict with conveying the message of the film, a director’s obligation is to choose that which best conveys the message.
The line “Save the bulls, honor Maximus” was necessary because it was a concise way to illustrate the contrasts between three characters, and to illustrate their relationships. It showed Commodus–arriving late, in a coach, safely and pampered–in contrast to Maximus–someone who put the effort into winning the battle. It showed the relationship with Marcus and the two–he valued Maximus, but did not value Commodus. And all of that directly leads into making Commodus’ betrayal make sense. Remember, the whole theme of the movie is the contrast between these two characters–in war, in love, in politics, in death, etc.
Could they have done it without that line? Sure. They could have shown Maximus giving a heart-felt sacrifice, while Commodus gave a more lavish but fundamentally empty one, for example. But there are two problems. First, most of the audience does not want to see a Roman sacrifice. We came for the fighting, not slaughtering animals in a ritual that was by definition Pagan (remember that the US audience, where this film was aimed, is largely Christian). Second, it would take far, far, FAR longer to convey the message that way. And film is a compressed medium.
There’s another aspect: We see Commodus speaking of sacrifices, not MAKING sacrifices. It portrays Commodus as someone who’s words mean nothing. In contrast, Maximus is shown as someone who keeps his words. We as the audience don’t need to see the sacrifice Maximus makes; we know enough to assume that he’s done the proper Roman things.
Would more historical accuracy have helped? Eh, I’m on the fence, honestly. Some wouldn’t have hurt (some, of course, WOULD HAVE hurt the movie). And I can certainly see the frustrations of a history professor with the liberties taken! But as far as the movie as a work of art is concerned, I think many of the suggestions here would have been detrimental.
@Dinwar, I agree with you that the message is more important than historical accuracy, and that in some or many cases historical accuracy would hurt a film, not help.
What makes Gladiator or the more recent Napoleon such a cause of frustration and target for pedantry is that Ridley Scott himself keeps boasting about how historically accurate his films are, how much effort went into researching the period. If he kept quiet, or argued as you do that he’s sacrificing accuracy for entertainment / theme / character, it would be different. People being people we’d still be nitpicking, but for the most part a lot more kindly.
(remember that the US audience, where this film was aimed, is largely Christian)
To a much greater extent 25 years ago, when the film was made, than today. The drop-off in Christian self identification and belonging is striking and surprisingly recent.
I think this is why the director paid so little attention to the specifics of the battle: It didn’t matter.
Then why did he pay a consultant to deliver information about how the battle should be conducted?
>> I see all the time the popular conception of these weapons makes a great deal about how they might double as a spear in a pinch and I suppose they might but they are not well designed for it at all.
Off the top of my head: didn’t Caesar’s “secret 4th line” placed obliquely behind his cavalry at Pharsalus keep their pila in hand and use them in melee against Pompey’s cavalry? Isn’t there also an account in Caesar of a cohort not having time to throw it’s pila and instead using them in melee, including a description of how bent and out of shape they ended up? I think Arrian’s “Battle order against the Alans” also has pila used in melee in it (although it might be hasta)? Apologies for the question marks, I’m not well placed to double check sources ATM. I’d be grateful if someone could verify / refute some of these, or provide more examples.
This makes me think that it might be Roman “doctrine” (to the extent the term is appropriate) to keep a pila in hand when engaging cavalry. Which sort of makes sense: a gladius might have too short reach if you to reach an enemy sitting up on his horse with a long spear / lance. Though the fragility of the long iron shank of a pila does make it seem rather unsuited to prolonged use; but that might not matter much. It might also simply be that timing a pila throw against charging cavalry so that they’re close enough to have an effect while still having time to draw a sword and brace yourself is impractical.
I’ve also heard some “historians” claim that legionaries threw their pila and engaged with swords on the attack, while kept them in hand when on the defensive. I always found this an odd claim though, because legionaries almost always *advanced* into melee, rather than waiting to be charged (cavalry being a potential exception).
“Order of battle against the Alans” is online at various places and actually quite short. Against cavalry the front three/four ranks are to lock shields and keep their pila in hand to thrust at the horses, noting that they will probably bend if they actually hit something.
It seems likely that the Romans are doing the classic infantry defence against cavalry that lasted all the way to the Napoleonic horse and musket era: present a solid line of pointy spears / pilum / muskets with bayonet that the enemy horses won’t want to get too close to.
Thanks, my google-fu on my phone let me down. I was also trying to find the original Latin to see if it used pila or hasta, but then I remember the original is in Greek so my goal was pointless.
That said, I think “Battle Order” would be an interesting topic for out host to cover. As you said, it’s relatively short so could be done in 1 post. The question of whether it was ever used (or intended to be used) by Arrian, or whether it was just theory-crafting is an interesting one; as well as pondering how well it would have actually worked in practice.
“As you said, it’s relatively short so could be done in 1 post.”
Are we reading the same blog?!?
From a recent Lindybeige video on warhorse training, I recall the claim being made (by someone who trains horses for re-enactors) that the biggest problem with getting a horse to charge is that the horse needs there to be a gap it can run through.
The secret to training a horse to charge an infantry line is to take the horse when they’re young and repeatedly ride them at lines of men who then, and this is important, all get out of the horse’s way just before it reaches them. Do this enough times, and the horse will subconsciously expect any line of men to get out of its way. Then it will charge an infantry line just fine… However, after the first time this happens on a battlefield, the horse may be ‘ruined’ in that even if it survives, it may well have learned not to expect people to get out of the way, and may no longer be suitable for shock cavalry tactics. This helps explain why cavalry are so expensive to maintain, because you have to not only feed a warhorse but train them and they may well be a “one-use” item when it comes to fighting in actual pitched battles.
Notably, this also means that any dense, close-order formation is a viable anti-cavalry defense to some extent, even if your weapons are superficially unsuited for fighting a horseman. The horse, when considering the prospect of charging a shield-wall, isn’t really looking at how pointy the spears are. It’s looking at how there’s a solid line of big rectangular objects with a bunch of vicious tool-using plains apes standing around behind them.
So just closing into formation and forming a shield-wall can fend off or at least badly disrupt a cavalry charge if the enemy’s horses aren’t 100% ideally trained to think that your infantry won’t magically dive out of the way at the last minute.
That makes sense, because it’s similar to training a horse to do water jumps for three-day eventing. Horses are skeptical about jumping into water because they don’t know how deep it is, so you do all your training with water only a few inches deep. Then in a competition, the horse will be willing to jump into one or two foot-deep water. Afterwards, you have to go back to training with shallow water until he forgets the unpleasant experience.
“The Romans almost always threw the pilum rather than holding it as a spear,” “the Romans would throw the pilum on the attack but hold it on the defense,” and “the Romans almost always attacked rather than defending,” may not all be true statements, but they would, if true, fit together neatly into a self-consistent whole.
Yes, fair enough. The impression I got, however, was that people were saying using a pilum in melee was relatively common (though maybe not the majority use case), something like 40% : 60%. Which is a very different ratio than the “almost always” of Romans attacking which means something more like 99%.
Arrian wrote in Greek, so the term “pilum” didn’t show up in his work per se. The first three rank were armed with the “kontos” and they were supposed to “paiein e akontizein” these spears, which to me implies that they were designed to be effective in two different form of attack; my guess would be thrusting and throwing. Meanwhile, the fourth rank had the “logkhos” (probably best rendered into English as “longchos”) that they would “hyperakontizein,” implying a type of javelin that could be lobbed high above the first three ranks. Neither of these rule out the pilum but I’m inclined to think that at least one of the “kontos” or “longkhos” wasn’t the pilum, and maybe neither one was.
While Arrian did not use the word “pilum”, the translation into English is that these are spears with a long iron shank that will bend after impact with sword or body. I’d say the “kontos” is a pila.
My source for Roman equipment is Phil Barker, Wargames Research Group. Auxiliary infantry (formerly socii) were armed with javelins instead of pilum, and they are present in roughly equal numbers to the legionaries. He also writes that by the 3rd and 4th centuries CE some Roman infantry were also carrying new types of javelin, lancea and spiculum; and these could have been present earlier.
So yes “longkhos” not pilum, either auxiliary or new style legionary throwing spears.
That’s possible, though in that case I still find it odd that Arrian chose “kontos” rather than the more commonly attested “(h)yssos” as the Greek translation for “pilum.”
I would tend to agree with you on that. That he uses 2 different words strongly suggests that they’re not both pila, unless he’s going out of his way to distinguish the heavy and light pila (which may or may not have been a significant distinction in the legions). I’m also warry of back projecting the non-pila javelin’s of late antiquity onto Arrian’s 2nd Century. Especially as he was himself heavily looking back 5 centuries prior.
And thanks to you both for the detailed technical discussion. It really makes this comment section worthwhile.
I want people who say Pilum bend to get an iron bar and really try and bend it.
Pilum aren’t designed to bend.
Tod’s experiments point pretty well to the idea that they were designed to penetrate, and bending & getting stuck in the shields was just something that happened as a consequence of that. They totally *do* bend, because they have a lot of mass and momentum behind them, but making that the point of the design seems pretty dumb and it kind of amazes me that myth has stuck around so long.
The descriptions of inaccurate testudo make me wonder how much of Ridley Scott’s understanding of ancient Roman tactics is colored by Asterix.
I was going to reply to say that the 1992 Asterix arcade game did a significantly better job of it than Scott did.
I have to disagree about Barbarians. It is a German production and most of the main characters are Cherusci/most of the scenes happen among the Cherusci. So the Cherusci are speaking modern German for the same reason Maximus and Commodus speak modern English in Gladiator: to make it easier and more enjoyable for the audience to watch. As I understand it in the English dub the Cherusci speak English while the Latin remains subtitled, so I am a bit confused where the idea that the series conflates modern and ancient German comes from.
Also, the Alemmani and Bavarii were both Seubian peoples like the Marcomanni!
So there are good odds modern High German is descended from dialects pretty similar to the people in this show. Obviously the linguistic evolution over 1500 years means someone time teleported wouldn’t be able to communicate. Its fine, and similar to, say, using Italian speakers for Latin or English for Anglo-Saxon.
Also in general I don’t think Germanic is a nonsense category either except to the extent you treat them as because of that considering themselves the same nation. Obviously English and Germans and Suebi and Franks don’t see themselves as the same. But there would have ~similar religion. Also the languages would have diverged less. Some 500 years after this movie, North Germanic and West Germanic speakers were still able to semi-communicate in England.
I think Germanic becomes a kind of difficult category because while there are western-german groups that are fairly culturally close, some other groups like the goths are *very* culturally distinct.
Are the modern “Alemannic” (Swiss-German) and “Bavarian” (=Austro bavarian) speech varities descended from the languages of the ancient Alemanni and Bavarii, or have those names just gotten attached to the modern languages for different reasons?
Thanks for the information about Czech/Slovak and English genetics, very interesting!
Its the same people and dialect! The High German consonant shift is though to have started sometime in the 2nd-4th centuries, long before Alemannia and Bavaria were reduced to Frankish vassals. Long enough ago it is quite possible Marcomanni might well have been speaking specifically Old High German! There hasn’t been population replacement. The border between Bavaria proper and the Franconian and Swabian areas added in 1815 would be familiar to Charlemagne…Basically the old tribal areas became the Stem Duchies which then in turn influenced the boundaries of the Imperial Circles and so on… (sort of similar to how the English shires in many places match the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms borders).
That’s really interesting! I think genetic and linguistic continuity with the past is often underrated, but it’s still fascinating to know that this is another example.
It does surprise me a bit that Austria and especially Switzerland ended up writing the same language as the various regions of Germany though, instead of developing written standards of their own.
I admit, as a German, I would find regional dialects funnier (and more accurate) than High German.
While I don’t know how exactly people talked back then, what they certainly didn’t have was a common language for the whole area that is Germany nowadays.
So whenever people from more than one tribe appear, they should be speaking different dialects. As for making them speak the exact kind of language they would actually have spoken … is that even possible? I can’t imagine they left many written records.
Of course, in a German movie, wherein the Germanic tribes are supposed to be the “other”, it would be smarter to not make them speak modern German, but some version old enough modern German speakers only almost understand it. Not for the historical accuracy, but for the feeling.
I have the mental image of some german watching this hypothetical production and >90% of the “german” cast is speaking “german” in the same way the old man from Hot Fuzz is speaking “english”.
Annual reminder that Schwarzenegger doesn’t dub himself in his movies because the German audience wouldn’t be able to take his Austrian accent seriously.
> Annual reminder that Schwarzenegger doesn’t dub himself in his movies because the German audience wouldn’t be able to take his Austrian accent seriously.
This also reminds me that in theory, Canadian productions (i.e. various animated shows from Teletoon/Cartoon Network like Total Drama) ought to have the capability to have the same cast not only perform in English, but also dub themselves in French. In practice, I am not sure if something like that had ever happened – certainly not for Teletoon/CN shows, to my knowledge. What’s more, cartoons which are meant to be screened in both Canada and continental France/Belgium tend to get two French dubs with two different casts – one for Canadian audiences (and with a different cast from the main version also) and another for continental ones. Similar occurs with Spanish and Portuguese – there are often dubs in both continental and Latin American versions of those languages.
And as strange as it might sound to a non-speaker of either, this actually does matter. Cartoons like Total Drama or Hazbin Hotel, which have a musical element to them, currently provide one of the seemingly few opportunities* where you can actually listen to the efforts of different casts’ side-by-side, and the differences are often striking. Sometimes, the casts in two versions of the same language, singing what in theory should be the exact same sentence, seemingly have not a single word alike. (The song below, in the aftermath of the unfaithful kiss which spurred the series’ infidelity arc (yes), is a decent example of that – particularly as it’s set during the Ancient Greece challenge parodying the tale of the Erymanthian Boar.)
https://youtu.be/i4hBq96VVXA?t=210
The opportunity to compare performances in over a dozen languages at once is, IMO, stunning – even if in this case, the quality of the performances tends to be highly variable. (Italian and Latin American (Venezuelan) Spanish versions are consistently considered superior to the original English, versions in languages like continental French, Hungarian or Dutch only occasionally exceed it, most versions are considered somewhat worse, and AFAIR, Romanian, Canadian French, Taiwanese Mandarin and Hebrew tend to be significantly inferior.)
*You can also do that in video games which have been dubbed into multiple languages, and that is often pretty cool, but switching between them on the fly to replay the same segment obviously takes time – particularly as many games force one to restart from the main menu first, and the videos comparing different performances don’t seem to be done that often for video games in my experience.
“So the Cherusci are speaking modern German for the same reason Maximus and Commodus speak modern English in Gladiator: to make it easier and more enjoyable for the audience to watch.”
It also effectively signals Otherness in the language of film. While there are exceptions (Mel Gibson comes to mind), when a film maker wants us to sympathize with someone in the past (or of an alien culture, like in fantasy) they make the person speak English, often with a British accent since Hollywood is in the USA and this signals “Like us, but different” in USA brains. By making the Barbarians speak German, they show that they are Other, someone we’re not supposed to side with in this instance. The language they speak has the viewer automatically focus on Maximus and what he’s doing.
Further, the fact that most people in the USA don’t speak German renders the lines unintelligible to most people–which is fine, since as I said before the whole battle is a set-piece to show Maximus’ character. The Barbarians are incomprehensible (to the average viewer) because they don’t matter, they’re just part of the scenery.
In Gladiator, the Marcomanni speak modern German to create a feeling of otherness, because it was made for an English speaking audience who doesn’t speak German. In Barbarians (that is, the 2020 TV show), the Cherusci, who are the focus of the story, speak modern German to create a feeling of “like us”, because it was made for a German speaking audience – in the English version the Cherusci are dubbed in English to create the same feeling. Both stories use modern German in opposite ways.
you are damned dogs from Chieftain Leathermud
Why weren’t they speaking in Zulu? They were singing in it!
“These fellows are thus ‘German’ for a definition of German that would also include the English, the French, many northern Italians, some non-trivial number of Spaniards, and so on.”
I feel the need to point out that this wouldn’t be a problem if English did the sensible thing and called Germans either vaguely like ‘Deutsch’ sounds to them (e.g. Danish ‘Tysk’ or Dutch ‘Duits’), or picked a specific tribe to name the whole thing (e.g. French ‘Allemand’).
It is pretty clear that the English are at fault here for calling it ‘German’ despite the English themselves being ‘German’. Through two separate invasions.
It would’ve been so easy to call them ‘Saxons’ (after the Ottonian line’s tribe/area of origin of the early HRE), but nope! Gotta be special.
Guess then English will just have to deal with ‘German’ having a multitude of different meanings that other languages avoid entirely.
Unfortunately, English already does what you suggest. It just does it wrong. The inhabitants of the Netherlands are called Dutch. That’s why, this word having already been assigned, English needs to come up with a different word for Germans. (And then to confuse everyone even more, in the US it’s done the correct way with the Pennsylvania Dutch.)
So what you’re saying is that if the HRE had never assumed Dutch independence (in 1728, it seems; the Dutch themselves never declared independence from the HRE in the first place and would have a seat in the new German Union from 1815- 1890 courtesy of its personal union with Luxemburg, too), there’s a chance that English would get this right?
Only a chance, since apparently, ‘German’ in the English sense appeared in the early 16th century, but still.
No, sadly there’s still no chance. The same people (roughly) that dictated the ‘no split infinitive’ grammar rule for English also went around Latin-sourcing as many country names as they could manage.
Actually, “English” does follow the same kind of derivation, it just wasn’t from Saxon.
Specifically, IIRC It goes “Angles-Aenglish-English. (And England was, IIRC, originally “Angle-Land”- Land of the Angles)
“Saxon” does give us “Essex” (“East Saxon”), “Wessex” (“West Saxon”) and “Sussex” (“South Saxon”)
There used to be a Middlesex (Middle Saxon), but um, it mostly got swallowed up by London…
And funnily enough, all the Celts called the English Saxons.
And today was when it finally dawned on me that this is the origination of “sassenach”.
Probably because Saxon was a descriptor of a person that used a certain type of weapon. They probably didn’t actually call themselves that. Wessex, Sussex, Essex maybe came from some military organization they had in those areas, maybe even a hint of a remnant of auxillia organization; area of the western warriors, made up of the various tribes like the Hwicce and others, see the Tribal Hideage.
I disagree; the continental Saxons definitely named themselves thus, I do not see why their cousins in Essex etc. would not.
I was surprised about the suggestion that roman legionaries needed such a large amount of space between each file to fight effectively. It feels like that might be the case if you had large weapons that needed swinging (two handed weapons perhaps), but the gladius is a short thrusting sword which feels like it needs very little room to be effective.
Also, don’t we know that you can fight effectively when men are shoulder to shoulder? Isn’t that how a anglo-saxon shield wall worked? What am I misunderstanding here?
The gladius isn’t *that* short and it can cut just fine, and this is explicitly what Polybius says (18.18.8-9): “but as in their [the Romans] mode of fighting each man must move separately, as he has to cover his person with his long shield, turning to meet each expected blow, and as he uses his sword both for cutting and thrusting it is obvious that a looser order is required, and each man must be at a distance of at least three feet from the man next him in the same rank and those in front of and behind him, if they are to be of proper use.”
The notion of the gladius as an extremely short pure-thrusting sword is the result of a few statements in the sources and misleading comparisons to later medieval swords being exaggerated over and over again. The blade lengths of most gladii are 55-70cm (cf. c. 75cm for a medieval arming sword); they’re shortER, but often not ‘short.’
If I am not mistaken, gladii of the Imperial period are (at least generally) shorter than earlier Republican ones? Maybe this indicates the tendency to fight in more tight formations during the period of Early Empire? Later, of course, this tendency was likely reversed when Romans switched to using spatae.
IIRC the most common explanation is an increasing emphasis on the thrust since the main threat to a roman legion ends up being another legion.
And the emphasis on the thrust allows more tight formations as well, since you need less space to thrust than to cut.
Also, I suppose a legion in a more tight formation brings more swords per meter, and so has some advantages over a legion in a less tight formation.
Even without the gladius being particularly short, it still surprises me that the Romans felt they needed so much space between individuals. A denser formation would allow numerical superiority at the point of contact – which is usually critical.
Did the Romans adopt such a wide spacing because they thought it was the sweet point in the trade off between individual martial effectiveness and numerical superiority? Or was it to enable them to match an enemy in the width of the battle line while keeping a large number of reserves? Or was the formation only so neat with spacing while manoeuvring, but would organically compress (the 2nd rank fighting through the gaps in 1st) once melee was engaged?
The presence of second and third lines of soldiers in a “checkerboard” arrangement makes the ‘greater density of combatants at the point of combat’ trick largely irrelevant, because if the enemy actually does have more resolute combatants willing to stand in line against you at the point of combat, then the first two lines of your “checkerboard” telescope into each other and you end up in a big shoving match with shields and stabbing.
But making sure that during maneuver your soldiers have enough space that they don’t stumble into each other and can maneuver around obstacles (e.g. a fallen log or a large rock on the ground) is pretty valuable.
But the checkerboard quincunx is a pattern with gaps *between* maniples / cohorts. Telescoping into each other removes the gaps *between* those units, but not the gaps between individual soldiers *within* each unit. So the Romans still have the issue of severe numerical inferiority at the point of contact in this scenario.
Now this may or may not matter tactically: because each soldier fights better with more space, or the Romans are sufficiently armoured to just take a beating until the enemy tire and then counter attack. But it’s still highly noteworthy and shouldn’t be swept under the carpet.
Actually, it was mentioned a while back- while Romans used a wider width than average, their opponents weren’t using shoulder-to-shoulder formations either unless they were formed up to resist a cavalry attack.
Partly because if you are formed up shoulder-to-shoulder, then that makes it significantly easier for archers to hit.
@sstabeler There’s a big middle ground between “standing should to shoulder” and having space for two more guys in between you and your neighbour! Low density formations weren’t to make yourself a harder targets for archers. The exact opposite in fact: the denser formations were precisely for closing up shields to provide better defence against missile fire. Our host literally says that in this very post: “The Romans had formations to tighten up those gaps (particularly to resist arrows) but they’d space out again to actually do any fighting.”
@sstabeler, forming up shoulder to shoulder makes it easier for enemy archers to hit shield or armour, but *harder* to wound or kill someone.
Humans are not bad at judging the flight of fast moving objects, see cricket/baseball. Against individual arrows coming from the front it’s possible to lower your shield to stop you being hit in in the shin, or raise your shield to not get hit in the face, or duck your head so you get hit on the helmet top rather than the face.
Against lots of arrows, keep your head down and your (large) shield up. The danger is arrows coming from your front right where your shield isn’t. As with the Greek hoplite line, moving closer to your neighbour on your right means that their shield is now protecting you as well.
And for the second, third, etc ranks, any gaps between the front rankers are gaps that arrows can coming flying in through and hit you. Sure, someone directly in front of a gap will just shoot straight down between all of them, but it won’t take much of an angle for an arrow to hit someone behind the front rankers. And the people behind have a much worse view because of all the bodies in front of them, hence much worse chance of blocking.
I don’t know if the Romans rotated between soldiers in a cohort in the middle of the battle like in HBO Rome. But if they did, then the wide space would make sense. Also the space would enable back ranks to throw their pilla over the front ranks.
“numerical superiority at the point of contact”
one thing is you don’t really need numerical superiority at the first rank if the second rank can also attack with a long range weapon through the gaps, which the Romans could with their pilla. The Macedon phalanx also allows four back ranks to poke their pikes through the gaps in the first rank.
Shieldwall, however, requires a tight front rank to make the shields overlap, but it makes back ranks unable to see anything in the front.
I’ve raised this point before. It’s absolutely 100% possible to thrust, slash, and chop in dense formation. I’ve done it. I’ve been on the receiving end of it, and even with blunt weapons and significant armor it hurts. The idea that you need a lot of space between you to effectively use a weapon is not tenable once you’ve put it to the test. You can do MORE with a loose formation, but I’ve got the dents in my helm to show that slashing works just fine.
If you’re using spear and shield tactics–like 99% of the ancient world, pretty much everyone not Rome, did–being shoulder-to-shoulder is even less of a problem. You’re not going to be slashing anyway, and you have a very limited frontage to cover with your thrusts. Spears CAN get in each other’s way, but a few hours of training takes care of that. (Remember, shield-and-spear spears are not pikes, they’re much shorter and weighed differently.)
I think the bigger thing is that most battles involved a lot of not fighting. If you’re within sword-thrust of one another people are going to die quickly; that is, after all, the point of swords and spears and maces and axes. Shields help, but they’ll only reduce the attritional rate, not stop it. So people avoid putting themselves in that position unless they’re compelled (see Sun Tsu’s comments on putting your men in positions where retreat is impossible) or have overwhelming odds (they’re flanking, or hitting to support some other unit, or just massively outnumber the enemy, stuff like that). Note that most casualties happen in the route, not the first attack–suggesting that people really, really don’t like being that close to hostile enemies trying to insert sharp bits of metal into vital organs. What you’re going to see is a lot of units moving around trying to gain such advantage prior to closing the distance. For THAT, yeah, loose formations are better. Loose formations appear larger and more impressive, which breaks the enemy will to fight, while also avoiding getting in each other’s way and allowing people to vary walking speed without too much disruption of the ranks.
It’s also important to remember that we’re not seeing the whole line of battle here. Bret discusses, in other blog posts, the presence of skirmishers and the like, who can harass the enemy from between and, likely, within the formation. You also have people moving about within it–Rome was famous for rotating people in and out of the front ranks, and that works best with space between people. So there would be a lot of people moving around within these formation. (There’s something similar in Medieval dances–you can switch partners if you’re fast enough at it, often without anyone knowing. We call it sharking, not sure it had a name back then.)
Finally, there’s psychology. Or maybe philosophy. Rome famously valued individual valor extremely highly. Other cultures valued unity more highly. I know my group valued unity–our strength came from our ability to stand together against anything. Neither is right or wrong, to be clear (nor are they absolutes; every group falls somewhere on that spectrum, and we’re talking about emphasis). But it means that Roman soldiers are going to be more inclined to want to have room to show off. They were willing–as the number of battle-scared senators demonstrates–to take some significant risks to accomplish this. A group more inclined to group solidarity would tend to favor formations that didn’t create such risks.
My view is that loose formations were used for most of the maneuvering stage. Then they’d clam up tight to charge or receive a charge. Even if the field manuals say otherwise, that tends to be how people move in such situations.
What are some movies that accurately depict Civil War battles?
I dunno why but for complete fantasy battle id Love your look about the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Battle. would be lots of fun if hard to deal with.
but yeah folks doing it bad badly is bad.
I actually think its sequel, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian had a substantially larger and more impressive battle. (The fact it had a considerably greater budget – $225M vs. $180M – certainly implies as such as well.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiU719_RxOw
Note – “more impressive” does not mean “accurate” in any way, shape or form – after all, it features things like one of the Isekai Kids’ horse jumping on top of a testudo formation (conveniently, none of them have any spears at hand) and the guy does not killed immediately, which are certainly…not good. Even so, I’m not sure if it is necessarily worse than Gladiator’s (or, say, Rings of Power’s battles) per se. So, maybe our host would want to analyse it after all – though, from his perspective, it would probably make a lot more sense to wait until Greta Gerwig’s attempt to adapt the same material is out. (Still think it’s a massive waste of her talents that she’s agreed to that in the first place, but oh well.)
Our good host was distracted enough that he forgot his usual paragraph where he usually ask readers for Patreon support…
I am excited – but in retrospect not surprised – to learn that Dr Devereaux has also read DM of the Rings.
> the shield that, after the third century, the Romans themselves will be using
This is a bit out of your period but – do we know why they switched off the scutum? Was it tactically superior, or late imperial budget cuts, or just the creeping la-Tène-ization of the Roman military? Or something else?
He’s mentioned in the past that Roman equipment ‘standards’ were not actually uniform standardization. The Legion would have some replacement equipment to sell to soldiers, but initial equipment usually arrived with the recruit and was owned by the soldier, who could also choose to replace it with captured gear or buy it from camp followers or locals. So there was probably always some unstructured A/B testing of equipment going on and everyone would know (or at least have an opinion) if the legionary replacement stuff was not as good as enemy gear; this common knowledge would drive both individual purchases and the government’s purchases.
It’s my turn to be pedantic!
Footnote #5 references projectile lethality in the Total War games, but Dr. Deveraux left a few details out that would enhance his argument. He’s correct in that shielded units get a 30-50% chance to flat-out block any projectile, but the projectiles that make it past the shields are then affected by the unit’s armor which further reduces the lethality of any incoming projectile. Projectiles are quite lethal in the Warhammer games, but in titles like Rome II, shooting at an armored and shielded unit from the front really does have a casualty rate of 15-25% at best! And that’s for titles where units have hit point pools and can therefore be wounded by non-killing blows. In pre-Warhammer games, units had just one hit point, so a shot that made it past the shield, penetrated the armor, but didn’t wound the solider does nothing!
But Brett’s point, outline in a recent post about archery volleys, is that there should be an ~80% block by shields and then a reduction of an arrows impact by armour and then a roll to see if a wound is debilitating. That TW games do the later two, does not mean that they underestimate the former. Indeed, they underestimate all three. A realistic casualty rate is <5%, not 20%!
Also, obligatory note that unmodded historical Total Wars were always a bit of a mess from the historical perspective, in much more egregious ways than efficiency of archers. But that’s what mods are for.
In most decent historical TW mods, shooting heavy shielded infantry head on is usually a waste of time (and arrows).
One of the standard things you can do with a bow is zone shooting: loose close to vertically to drop the arrows down on people atop a wall, behind a barricade, or protected by a line of shieldbearers. Of course this cuts range (one of the medieval textbooks suggests beginning to learn zone shooting at 100 cubits and working down to 20 cubits in stages) but its one of the simple counters to shields held in front.
Tacitus is pretty clear that Germani fight looser and from longer measure than Romans (won’t say in looser formations because its possible they had none).
The range drops but also the impact of the arrow is massively reduced. Instead of a flat trajectory at 50 metres/second or better, you’re now basically dropping the arrows from a height. The arrow goes up with energy from the bow, which is quite a lot, but it comes down solely due to gravity. Arrows are reasonably aerodynamic but they are also light with a high surface to volume ratio which means lots of drag and instability as they fall.
So yes you could hit somebody behind a shield wall or barricade with zone shooting, but your chance of severely wounding somebody, even bare skinned, is much lower.
Have never tried it myself (ask again in a year or two) but people who actually fought against zone shooting and could not shoot back say things like “and the pilgrims took shelter in a ruined castle and barricaded the gates, and the Turks approached and showered them with arrows from above until all were killed.”
Just realised I’m wrong about the cause of energy loss. The falling arrow can regain most of the velocity and thus impact force, since the deceleration due to gravity on the way up will be equal to the acceleration on the way down.
The real problem is that shooting up at a high angle is awkward, stopping archers from using full draw length and all the body muscles. With a heavy hunting or war bow you’d be losing a lot of power compared to normal horizontal shots.
And accuracy is going to be awful even against a big target like a cohort. The arrow is now in flight for possibly ten seconds or more, so any error in aim (which is “at the sky” rather than an actual target to begin with) will be magnified, and any gusts of wind have much more time to push the arrow off course. (And there’s more wind at even low altitudes than near the ground.)
I would be interested in reading more about these pilgrims. I suspect that they couldn’t effectively fight back so the Turks could could take as long as they needed to get shots in the right zone.
I think you’re right about the energy loss. It’s obviously not lost to gravity (because it’s a conservative field), but it is lost to air resistance. A high angle trajectory means a lot of time spent in the air. It also means that, as the arrow is at the apex of it’s trajectory, it’s moving very slowly – less than terminal velocity – which means it stays below terminal velocity as it falls back down. This moment of slow movement and high curvature also increases the odds of the arrow tumbling rather than staying nicely aligned, increase air resistance losses and generally making it more ineffective.
Anna Comnena tr. August Charles Krey “But above the shore of the sea, near the aforesaid Civitote, was an ancient, deserted fortress. Towards that fortress three thousand pilgrims (of the Peasants’ Crusade) rushed in flight. They entered the ruined fortress in hope of defense. But finding no gates or other obstacles, and anxious and deprived of aid, they piled up their shields for a gate, along with a huge pile of rocks ; and with lances, wooden bows, and slingstones, they bravely defended themselves from the enemy. But the Turks, seeing that they were having but little success in killing those inside, surrounded the fortress, which was without a roof, on all sides. They aimed their arrows high, so that, as they fell from the air in a shower, they would strike the bodies of the enclosed Christians, destroying the poor wretches; and that all the others, at the sight of this, might be compelled to surrender. In this way very many are said to have been wounded and killed there ; but the rest, fearing yet more cruel treatment from the impious enemy, could not be compelled to come out either by force or by arms ….”
Of course indirect archery (or shooting three arrows in a second and a half and hitting a target every time at 75 metres, or taking five arrows in your draw hand and loosing them one after another as fast as someone operating a single-action revolver, or taking a rabbit with an arrow from the back of a galloping horse) is a difficult skill. The Turks didn’t rise from Siberian shepherds to lords of the Eastern Mediterranean by being lazy!
Problem 1: you’re not working with any proper numbers, so you can’t be right or wrong. What’s “most of” or “reasonably” aerodynamic or “high” A/V ratio? It’s not on the level of the worst phrases in scientific literature I’ve come across (“at least partially compensates”) but still allows an extremely broad range of interpretations.
Problem 2: fluid dynamics is underestimated in how difficult it is to predict even qualitative effects. Better to rely on simulations or experiments. Surely some research must’ve been done for distribution of energy delivered by arrows depending on various material parameters (size, density, rigidity…) and launch velocity/angle.
Measurements other than projectile mass and v0 are hard because arrows, especially arrows in zone or long-ranged shooting, are not highly precise. At least one project borrowed sensors from the British army.
Russ Mitchell has some informal thoughts on what kit works better and worse for zone shooting in the Journal of Medieval Military History although he warns that he was never a serious archer and zone shooting is not for amateurs.
I’d add to @scifihughf’s excellent explanation that, while such a “vertical” shot would be ineffective at stopping an enemy advance (because of the very low rate of casualties it would inflict), it might be decent as a denial-of-area tactic. Even very low rates of casualties would eventually take their toll (physically and psychologically) against a target that just sits somewhere and takes it.
The same is likely true of the use of field artillery by the Romans. Unlike Napoleonic artillery, it’s not effective enough to blow a hole in an enemy line in the time it takes for it to advance against your own position. But it is enough to force a reaction out of enemy occupying a position – be it retreating further to safety or committing to battle on less favourable ground.
I don’t know if any type of archery ever “stopped an enemy advance” in the way that machine-guns can just kill anyone who tries to approach them across an open field. That was not what made the bow the weapon that made you a king.
Indeed, very rarely. But there’s still a lot of difference between “we have a few minutes to disrupt this formation as much as possible with arrows, so our heavy infantry has an easier time breaking it” and “these pilgrims are barricaded inside some ruins, we have all day to slowly whittle down their numbers”.
Even machine-guns do not stop good infantry (hence the barbed wire). They spread out, drop down, move in short dashes whenever out of the firing arc, then throw grenades or snipe the gunners when close enough. Patient, deadly work, and slow. Hence the machine-gunners covered the rear in retreat, and Australian troops in World War I (1918) sometime shot German machine-gunners for the offence of ‘surrendering too late’ – putting hands up when the attackers were about to pounce and after they had taken casualties.
I think that’s the wrong standard to use, though. Remember, the point of battle isn’t to kill but to stop the other guy from fighting, and most casualties in any battle were in the route. You don’t need to slaughter the entire unit to stop them from entering an area–you only need to injure or kill enough that the rest say “Screw this, I’m not paid enough”.
There are two broad fundamental forces–both psychological–at play for the advancing infantry. On the one hand discipline, loyalty, shame, and the like–cohesion, in other words–would push the unit to advance. On the other hand self-preservation and gut-liquidating fear would push you to retreat. And it takes remarkably little for the latter to win. Look Helm’s Deep–fictional, sure, but in a highly realistic way. The Uruk-Hai were broken not by being slaughtered, but by 1) a sudden attack on one quarter (bad for the people immediately involved, but not devastating to the army); 2) the appearance of an ancient sword; and 3) a horn being blown. Only one of those caused any actual damage; the rest were PSYCHOLOGICAL blows.
Arrows would do both. First, they rip, tear, and kill. Maybe not a lot, but if you’re standing next to the guy who loses the number of his mess it’s going to be a powerful experience. Second, they scare the crap out of you. The experience of being under fire–even ineffectual fire–is terrifying on a level that’s impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t gone through it. While it’s entirely possible to push someone to run into areas where such fire is occurring–done it myself a few times, and I’m not military–it wouldn’t take much to push the unit over the edge and into “You know what, I’m just going to wait until they run out of arrows” mindsets. And as soon as a few people do that, you lose the shame aspect of the cohesion equation–“I’m hanging back to protect Joe, not because I’m afraid!”–and you very quickly get the whole unit either stopping or running.
Something struck me that you probably weren’t going to touch on in this series, but which you may know the answer to:
If memory serves (and it may not as I haven’t watched the movie in ages), we later see Quintus dressed as a Praetorian. Presumably this was a reward for supporting Commodus, but you saying that Maximus and Quintus are likely Senators in their own right made that jump out at me. I’m sure Quintus’ real life counterpart would not have done this, but let’s say a random Centurion, not an aristocrat and thus unlikely to advance much further in the ranks, supports Commodus’ coup.
Did these kinds of “transfers” happen in real life? Would our Centurion be likely to switch from the legions to the Praetorians? And would such a man be likely to consider it a reward?
Yes, there were transfers between legions and praetorians, and yes, moving to the praetorians was a promotion. If nothing else, the pay was much better. This held for regular infantry, cavalry, and centurions.
Ah, thanks for that.
“I am often asked by students or members of the general public what movie depiction does the Roman army best and I am generally left at something of a loss because none of them do it particularly well.”
In that case, which would you say is the least bad at it, then?
Two questions:
1. You say the imperial legions fought in a 4-3-3 formation – but that would mean lines 24 men deep, no? Or am I missing something?
2. Speaking of the HBO series Rome, do you have plans to write about it sometime? To me it’s interesting as a forerunner of Game of Thrones; the replacement of all the real rumors of scandal from that era (or of Portia’s character) with turning Atia and Servilia into conniving bitches says something about how prestige TV likes its women, and helps ground some adaptation choices D&D made in Game of Thrones. I assume the rest of the show has similar problems but I don’t know enough to spot them other than Atia’s character. (Doesn’t the scene in which Vorenus is elevated to the Senate make the Senate look like a UK/US parliament with constituencies rather than as the actual Roman Senate?)
(1) The confusion is in the terminology. There were 3 lines of cohorts (4 cohorts in the front line side-by-side, 3 in the other two). Each cohort has 8 ranks of infantry, as per Brett’s picture (although this might have been anywhere from 4 to 12, much is uncertain). The standard picture is that the gaps between the cohorts would be as big as the cohorts themselves are wide, and arranged in a quincunx or checkerboard pattern: although whether that was only for manoeuvring and whether the gaps would “close up” before melee contact is open to debate. This is closely related to the old “maniple swap” question”, if anyone ever conclusively solves that they’d invent a Nobel prize in History just to give it to them.
So, you could picture it as legions deployed 24 men deep, but it’s not monolithic like a Classical phalanx would be. For a start, because of the spacing (both laterally and in depth) between the cohorts it takes up far more space than that. You could argue that the 7 cohorts of the first two lines form a front line 8 men deep arranged in a W (from the checkboard nature of the deployment), with the last 3 cohorts forming a reserve. Or something in between the two extremes. The real point is that the difference between lines of cohorts and ranks of men matters a lot when it comes to tactical flexibility and manoeuvring.
(2) I don’t know what Brett intends, but Adrian Goldsworthy has a series on his YouTube channel where he dissects the episodes in great depth (about 1h per episode)! His style is a little less acrimonious than this blog, but he is a military historian and author who knows his stuff and explains things clearly and rigorously. I mention him on this blog repeatedly (the same way I mention this blog on his channel) because there’s a great deal of overlap in potential audiences.
How did the presence of the Emperor himself in a province affect the authority of the “legati Augusti pro praetore”? Marcus Aurelius is in Pannonia, so shouldn’t he be in command rather than Maximus? And if Marcus is too old to lead near the front, could he not appoint anyone he wanted to command at a given battle, rather than just the governor of the province?
It sounds like there’s a bit of “hyperreality” going on with the Romans. Everyone is so familiar with how they look in fictional media, that we forget the fiction isn’t real, so it makes the real stuff look fake. Like when people see the real statue of liberty, they’re often disappointed that it isn’t as big as it’s made to look in movies.
Re, battle scenes: it sounds like that would be quite difficult to film. First you’d get a lot of low-paid actors crushed together in a melee, hitting each other with melee weapons. Even with fake weapons there’s a real chance of injury, and it’s tough to CGI the melee weapons. Then, because they’re all crushed together, it’s hard to really see what’s going on. Much easier to do a long-distance arrow/catapult attack with CGI projectiles.
Worth noting that Frederick II of Prussia employed a similar stratagem (attack the enemy from one side with the main army, and with a body of cavalry from the opposite side) at Torgau (1760) – just that here it is the main body of the army having to march miles and miles around the enemy, while the cavalry has the straight attack route.
Of course, in the event, the agreed-upon schedule for both parts of the army to attack at the same time cannot be kept up with, and so the Prussian army takes horrendous losses before finally both bodies come to bear and overwhelm the Austrians caught between them, which leaves later historians and military theorists divided as to if this was an innovative plan of attack foreshadowing later developments or just an over-complicated flight of fancy which should never have been put to practice.
“that casual conflation of ancient Germanic-language speakers with modern Germans – also present, for instance in Netflix’ Barbarians (2020-2; Barbaren), where the Cherusci speak modern German but the Romans speak classical Latin”
Just a point of order here – the Cherusci speak modern German in that show because it’s a German show made by Germans. That’s like saying Gladiator is inaccurate because the Romans are all speaking English.
“long tradition dictated that major military commands be given exclusively to senators and Roman emperors stuck to that tradition, in part because they needed the Senate”
“all of the Roman Empire outside of Italy was divided up into combined administrative and military districts – these are the provinces (provinciae) – each of which was entrusted to a single senator”
Nope.
A large part of provinces was entrusted to procurators and prefects – who were emphatically NOT senators.
Egypt was a major military command – and the military and administrative commanders of Egypt were emphatically not senators.
“is likely a legatus legionis, a less senior senator (but still a senator) also hand-picked by the emperor to command a specific legion. For a province like Pannonia Superior with multiple legions, each legion would have its own legatus legionis who would report to the overall legatus Augusti pro praetore.”
That´s the popular explanation of Roman army of early Empire.
But look at the battle of Teutoburg Forest.
The overall legate was Quinctilius Varus, a senator.
So far so good.
He was in command of 3 legions.
Thus he should have been accompanied by 3 other senators, legates of his respective legions?
Nope. The account of the battle does mention 3 officers besides Varus. But their title assignments do not fit.
A Numonius Vala is called a legate – but he is found commanding the cavalry, not one of the three infantry legions.
Two more officers named Ceionius and Eggius are mentioned – but called “prefects”, not “legates”.
Now going two centuries later…
In 235, we see a Maximinus Thrax, a commander of a legion, being made Emperor – and it seems clear that he was not a senator before.
Was he unique outside Egypt in being a non-senator legionary commander? Or was it a recent development in 235?
Or did non-senator legionary commanders exist (besides the senatorial ones and outside Egypt) some time before 235? Or actually throughout the Empire?
I got the impression Quintus was the (or a) Praetorian prefect, although that might have been a promotion he got from Commodus.
As to the M1 Abrams running joke… chronologically, sure, but I don’t think it’s an enormously helpful comparison because the rate of military technological progress over the relevant time periods was so different.
In 1415, gunpowder was starting to appear on European battlefields – hugely expensive, slow, inaccurate, rare. The stars of the show were heavy (melee) infantry, heavy cavalry, and in some armies, pikemen and archers. In 1915, every soldier had a rifle, machine guns and accurate artillery were common features, soldiers no longer wore body armour as standard except on their heads, and cavalry was rapidly being driven off the battlefield altogether. Pikes and archers were long extinct.
In 200 BC, the most expensively-equipped soldiers on the battlefield wore mail armour and carried a sword. In AD 300, the most expensively-equipped soldiers on the battlefield… wore mail armour and carried swords. And that would remain the case for the best part of a further thousand years. There were some developments in artillery as antiquity progressed, but as has been noted in this and previous articles, artillery was not such a major part of ancient (or medieval) battlefields – outside sieges – that it changes the game: Roman battle was driven by the mail-clad infantryman. The kit did change a bit and there are some obvious visual differences over time, but a soldier transplanted from Zama to Adrianople wouldn’t have much difficulty understanding the field and his equipment would not be obviously obsolete. The same soldier would probably not feel *too* out of place, militarily speaking, if he stumbled into Stamford Bridge or Hastings, either.
But move our English archer from Agincourt 40 miles up the road, and 500 years in time, to Ypres, and it’s a very different story.
So I don’t think it’s *really* fair to say that some of the things the Romans are throwing around in the movie are like having an Abrams at [insert battle] because the effective disparity is so much bigger in the latter case. Sure, it’s still wrong.
Yeah, I wanted to write about the Abrams joke too…it’s a good joke for sure, but OGH of all people should know that technological advancements are not linear. Also, it’s a bit rich to dissect other people’s departure from historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment, only to then do the exact same thing yourself.
Thank you for writing knowledgeably about a point I’ve been wishing I could make as well. It might be an effective comparison for the purposes of the initial shock to point out the gap in YEARS, but not even close to accurate for an example of the gap in development of technologies (which as you say, still exists, is still wrong).
So I made a map on what I think occurred at this battle, its just a bit of a doodle though you might be interested in it. Would explain some of the misunderstandings of the fight I guess.
The map: https://ia600309.us.archive.org/9/items/hpscan-20250615033020957-2025-06-15-033155019-1/HPSCAN_20250615033020957_2025-06-15_033155019%281%29.jpeg
The battle was probably based on the following fights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arausio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aquae_Sextiae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bibracte
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vosges_(58_BC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Axona
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sabis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Angrivarian_Wall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Abritus
Ridley Scott’s very first feature film (to my knowledge) was “The Duelists”, which is set during the Napoleonic Wars. So he might well have been rather set in his musket-deploying ways by the time he did “Gladiator”.
“The Duellists” doesn’t feature much in the way of infantry tactics, though; apart from the duels between Feraud and d’Hubert, the only fighting in it is a skirmish with four Cossacks during the Retreat from Moscow. So it probably wouldn’t have had too much direct influence on Scott’s later depictions of large troop formations, although I suppose he might have done some study of broader Napoleonic warfare when he was directing it, which could have had some effect.
It seems like Maximus is supposed to be based on Cincinnatus, who is a commonly cited figure in Roman “history” for exactly the general who is called in to lead a war but just wants to farm.
What was his deal in the roman leadership structure, is this a misunderstanding of his story? It’s so prevalent in the common conception of Rome that this is actually what people i tend to talk to think was the common way of leading armies, which Gladiator i think also fell prey to.
Would love a short post or fireside on what Cincinnatus’ deal was and how the myth of the General On Call Who Wants To Farm has percolated from Rome through western history to George Washington and then into modern media.
It’s a misunderstanding of chronology. Cincinnatus’ dictatorship was in 458 (and maybe again in 439) BC, this movie is set in 180AD, more than 630 years later – akin to having a George Washington – as a Virginia Planter – show up for the Sixth Crusade in 1228 alongside Frederick II.
The Romans had a completely different form of government in 458 (the Early Republic). Indeed, the 450s is so early that Cinncinnatus is already a dimly understood, legendary figure when we first meet him (to the point that we’re not really sure that second dictatorship in 439 was him (he’d have been in his 80s) or perhaps a family member with the same name. At the same time, the idea of a former consul who drives his own plow was itself a kind of nostalgic view of the past, a way of the Romans imagining their society was once much more egalitarian and idealized than it really was.
So the difference between ‘Maximus’ and Cincinnatus is that Cincinnatus as we know him is basically a made up character concocted in the Middle Roman Republic (c. 300-100BC) out of a dimly remembered probably-but-maybe-not real figure in the Early Roman Republic (509-300, but in this case 458 on the dot), whose model of politics stopped being even remotely relevant in the Late Republic (100-31BC) when his legend as we have it is being written down, after which the Roman system of government changes entirely in 31BC into the Empire, the first form of which we call the Principate (31BC-284AD) which is already two *centuries* old by the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius.
“At the same time, the idea of a former consul who drives his own plow was itself a kind of nostalgic view of the past, a way of the Romans imagining their society was once much more egalitarian and idealized than it really was.”
And the Roman republican historians also saw it as needing explanation.
Their explanation was that Cincinnatus was impoverished: when his son Caeso was accused of killing, the father posted a heavy bail, but the son fled abroad and the father was forced to sell most of his property to pay up.
Compare Agrippina the Younger who worked for living, diving for shellfish.
It was not normal practice for princesses of Imperial family to do such humble physical work (as opposed to maybe spinning or weaving) for living. But it did actually happen. It was a humiliating, short-of-death punishment for a disgraced noble.
I imagine it’s not so much Maximus being based on Cincannatus as the legend informing the idea of how to depict a virtuous Roman general. It’s just that it’s not really applying the context fully.
Mind, I think it might have been informed even more by Tom Hanks’ character in Saving Private Ryan. Perhaps not in the specifics, but in the dramatic underpinnings of “this person is a hero because they’re good at war, but primarily driven by what they were doing before going to war and a desire to live long enough to return to that”.
Great article! It’s a pity there isn’t really a movie you can point to with a good depiction of a Roman battle.
One thing I do want to point out (and the Coleman article linked to gets into this) is that the article might put a little too much blame on Scott. Somewhat famously, the writing process for Gladiator was a real mess, with a ton of things being added in last minute, so I’m not surprised at all that a lot of Coleman’s work didn’t make it in. But also, Scott has always been more of a visual director, so while I’m sure he was happy to stage what he thought a Roman battle might look like, it seems more likely to me he was happy to work with the script the various writers ended up providing.
I’ve really enjoyed this article series. I love the film Gladiator, and Ridley Scott is my favourite director, but it’s undoubtedly true that often he makes a mishmash of history. To some degree he can hardly be blamed: He is a film director, and his business is making compelling films. But I really do believe a huge amount of storytelling potential is being left “on the table” for Hollywood directors, because they aren’t engaging with the amount of compelling stuff history has to offer.
Anyways, that’s a digression.
I actually wanted to criticize one particular point you raise, Dr. Devereaux: You argue that in the imperial period, the Roman legion formed for battle in cohorts. Fair enough, that seems indisputably the case based on the sources.
However, you also argue that each cohort formed for battle -as a single, cohesive block-. That is, all 480 men formed for battle in a single massive formation, 80m wide and 10m deep.
To me that strains my credulity. You point out that the frontage of such a cohort would be the length of a soccer pitch, and by your own figures it would occupy 800 sq m of space.
How could such a block of men be led or commanded practically in battle? It would be hard for many men within the formation over so much space to see banners or standards. Vocal or instrumental commands would be easily lost amid the din of neighbouring cohorts also straining to maneuver, and nevermind the noise of combat and the enemy.
Then there’s the matter of maneuvering this huge block over the invariably broken and uneven terrain of a battlefield. 480 men is a very large unit. The Macedonians we know mustered their phalanxes in blocks of 256 (on paper. In practice it was probably 180-200 men, given that units rarely have their full strength on the battlefield due to illnesses, losses, and injuries). The Romans of the mid-Republic seem to have fought in maniples of 120. These “handfuls” of soldiers were easier to lead around and maneuver by their smaller size as a group and by the maintaining of intervals in the battleline to give them space to move.
So why would the Romans of the Empire give up the many advantages of the maniple in order to muster in a huge, cumbersome block? It seems to me to be a lot of tradeoffs, and for what advantage? As Dr. Devereaux himself notes, and as Polybius himself wrote, the Roman mode of combat doesn’t necessarily benefit from having any more ranks or more mass behind the leading combatants.
I admit I am less well-read in the imperial era of the Roman army. I am most familiar with Polybius and Caesar. And yes, Julius Caesar describes battles with the cohort as the primary maneuver unit and measure of strength, but I can’t recall him every saying that cohorts formed for battle in single blocks.
In the later musket era, an infantry battalion was typically 500-800 men. However, when a battalion was formed up for battle it didn’t form one single undifferentiated mass but rather was formed up into a number of companies. While the battalion was the principal fighting unit, it still used the company sub-units as the basis of organizing its movements. In combat, the company officer was still a significant leader much as the Roman centurion was.
While the cohort had become the principal tactical unit by Caesar’s day, the cohort still consisted of centuries and (I think, this may be controversial) maniples. I would theorize that the Roman cohort, like the later Napoleonic battalion, formed up in a series of centuries or maniples, and used these sub-units for organizing movements in battle. So if you saw a cohort in battle formation, it would likely consist of a number of smaller blocks of soldiers with some intervals of space between them.
I think this would make a lot more sense given the manipular origins of the legion. As well, the limitations and challenges of leadership, maneuver, and communication on the battlefield I think would demand the Romans maintain smaller, handier battlefield sub-units beneath the cohort.