This week at long last we come to the clash of men and horses as we finish our three-part (I, II, III) look at the iconic opening battle scene from the film Gladiator (2000). Last time, we brought the sequence up through the infantry advance, observing that the tactics of the Roman arrow barrage and infantry assault weren’t very Roman at all and were poorly executed in either case.
This week, we’re closing out the battle with the final, confused melee as the infantry, barbarians and cavalry all come together in a swirling mess. As we’re going to see, not only did Roman warfare seek to avoid such a swirling mess on the battlefield, so did the warfare of Germanic-speaking peoples like the Marcomanni and the Quadi – the ostensible enemies in this scene – who fought in spear-and-shield walls that relied on keeping formation every bit as much as the Romans. Meanwhile Maximus, who is supposed to appear supremely capable, comes off as a deeply incompetent Roman commander who ought never have been trusted with command.
The result, as we’ve seen so far, is that while the Roman army in Gladiator is a lot of folks’ standard reference point for the Roman army, it doesn’t function very much like a Roman army. Instead, its historical groundness is largely deceptive, getting just enough of the obvious things close enough to right for an audience to largely accept the things which are wrong.
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The Barbarians
But before we dive into the clash of infantry, I want to turn our focus briefly and look at bit more closely at the Marcomanni and Quadi in this scene, because they are done even worse by it than the Romans, by some margin, in how they are equipped, dressed and how they fight.
What we see of our ‘barbarians’ is all over the place, but mostly conforms to the sort of ‘barbarian chic’ I have complained about in the past: lots of leather and fur, dirty clothes and earth tones. In equipment, we see few helmets, an absurd variety of shield shapes (most rectangular to some degree and curved) and a lot of axes (because barbarians love axes). Their formation is likewise poor: they form a vaguely linear mass, but when the arrow barrage starts, we see men running around in every direction, with no particular order or effort to retain formation. When they charge, there’s no effort to retain any kind of order, they simply rush forward in a rolling mass.
The one interesting quirk, of course, is that their leader speaks flawless 21st century Bundesdeutsches Hochdeutsch – an awkward and unfortunate equating of modern Germans with ancient Germanic-language speakers, as we noted last time – and they use the pre-battle murmur call from Zulu (1964). That murmur call was, so far as I know, entirely made up in 1964 and isn’t any less made up in 2000, but it is actually a neat film reference in that it encourages the viewer to think of how the white North-and-Central Europeans in this scene are the ones in the position of the “other” like the Zulu were in the 1800s, at the ‘business end’ of imperial exploitation. In that, it mirrors the earlier lines about who would “know when they are conquered.” Again, I am not entirely hostile to Ridley Scott and he’s at his best with these sorts of general themes, in the same way that Kingdom of Heaven (2005)1 is mediocre as a history of the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem but fantastic as a study of how internal politics and ideologies impel states into foolish, counter-productive wars.
But the rest of the depiction is pure nonsense. What ought we see?
Instead of leathers and furs, in terms of dress, we ought to see the Marcomanni and Quadi wearing wool tunic and trousers, probably dyed in fairly bold primary and secondary colors. Given the poor weather, they might wear cloaks (also wool), but generally people don’t wear cloaks into battle (whatever fantasy fiction has told you). Helmets, by this period, should be very common; those without metal helmets would likely have a textile or leather head protection, but I would expect metal helmets for most warriors. Body armor would be rarer, but a noticeable number of these fellows should be in mail or scale armor: while Roman artwork loves the trope of the ‘unarmored’ (often nude) barbarian, in practice these fellows have been exposed to Gallic mail armor since c. 300 BC and have been living next to – and often fighting in (as auxiliaries or allies) – the Roman army for generations, leading to the adoption of a fair bit of the Roman (particularly auxiliary) kit and tactics.
In terms of weapons, their shields should be broadly of a single type: a long, flat oval shield (sometimes these are hexagonal in Roman artwork, but I wonder if that was just an artists’ way of making them look foreign; oval seems more common) running from the shoulder to the shin, with a metal boss at the center. Such shields would be faced in hide (giving them a smooth appearance) and brightly painted. The primary weapon of basically everyone would have been a thrusting spear, a version of the one-handed omni-spear, as their primary weapon. Swords, of a type similar to the longer Roman spatha (still a one-handed sword) would be a more common backup weapon, particularly for the wealthy, but everyone should have the spear. At this date, I’d expect to see few axes, particularly not among the wealthier warriors (like the leader, who wields one).
In formation, we should be a little wary of our sources: the trope of the untutored barbarians who fought without units, order or formations is very strong as a form of ethnic stereotype against Celtic- and Germanic-language speakers in Greek and Roman literature. We get hints this stereotype isn’t quite accurate, like Tacitus noting that Germanic warriors were divided into units recruited from specific villages, at a specific strength (100 strong) and drawn up not in a mob but in an acies, a battle line (Tac. Ger 6.5-6). What we should expect here is is a shield wall formation, probably somewhat more tightly spaced than the Romans.
In fact, such a Marcommanic or Quadi shield wall wouldn’t have been very different in organization or capability from a hoplite phalanx of the Greek world during the Classical period (admittedly, that’s five centuries earlier at this point): a close order formation of effectively militia-soldiers, recruited by neighborhood. Command and control would have been similar too: a Greek phalanx was also something of a ‘dumbfire missile’ – once it advanced, there was little the general could do to maneuver it. Greek generals, like what we’re told of Germanic-speaking kings, led from the front, attempting to inspire by example, rather than command (Tac. Ger. 7). The formation might not be rigid, but it would be recognizable as a coherent battle line and there would be some effort, if simply for self-preservation reasons, to keep that formation more or less together in the advance.
That is going to play into how these formations would, at last, clash.
Infantry Battle
There’s something of an irony in this scene that, as we discussed last time, Ridley Scott has tried really hard to give the Romans all of the visual signifiers of a highly comeptent, disciplined, capable army, from their technically sophisticated artillery barrage to their neat marching formations, clever tactics like the use of a (badly formed) testudo and so on. Those details are wrong, but we’re clearly meant to be impressed by how disciplined, trained and skilled the Romans are. We’re supposed to be really impressed by just how formidable Maximus has made his army, how impressive the Roman military machine is.
And then the charging Quadi and Marcomanni just casually sweep over these badly formed formations improperly using their weapons, with the battlefield dissolving into near total chaos almost instantly. In the first instant we see those thin, fragile looking Roman musket-line formations both bend backwards at the edges and clump up, with large numbers of ‘barbarians’ rushing into the intervals unopposed, leading to the entire formation devolving almost instantly into a series of isolated ‘islands’, ‘tactical clumps,’ surrounded and being lapped on all sides by enemies. By the time Maximus has been unhorsed and is fighting on the ground, the battle has devolved into a series of confused duels, with no clear front line or formations to speak of, and it’s equally clear the Romans have taken heavy losses. We’re supposed to conclude that Maximus has a really badass army, but if this was how an actual Roman battle went, what we’re actually seeing is that Maximus is terrible at this and so is his army.
As you might imagine, this is not how the Romans fight, both in terms of tactics but also in terms of results. The Roman Empire, after all, employed a long-service professional army of hard-to-replace professionals. That army was, in absolute size, enormous – 300,000 to 400,000 men, far larger than the largest mobilizations of the Roman Republic – but it also covered some 3,000 miles of frontier on three different continents. The Roman Empire could tolerate isolated defeats or long campaigns, but overall the Romans needed to be able to win their battles decisively and generally quite one-sidedly; indeed one of the factors in the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west was that the Roman qualitative edge – the better tactics, soldiers and equipment – didn’t vanish, but was merely reduced (mostly by the ‘barbarians’ getting better at doing war Roman-style), leading to increasing strain on limited resources. In short, Roman victories tended to be lopsided in part because they could be and in part because they needed to be.
So what ought we be seeing?
As noted last time, the Romans ought to be advancing in cohorts, blocks of roughly 480 men, 60 files wide and 8 ranks deep, with fairly wide spacing, with the cohorts themselves set in two or three lines, with visible intervals between cohorts both laterally and vertically. Auxilia cohorts would likely be deployed to the flanks ad light auxiliary or allied troops might skirmish out in front of the formation or in the intervals between the cohorts. In terms of the size of those intervals, we don’t know precisely, but reasoning from the manipular legion of the Roman Republic, where we have better sources, they probably tended to have 10m of interval for every c. 25-30m of unit over the front. So we might expect a cohort to be about 80m wide, with perhaps c. 25m intervals on either side.2
You will often hear it said that the Romans advanced silently, but this is actually a question of considerable debate in the scholarship.3 In practice, our sources are mostly silent on this question and when they’re not silent, they give us confusing and varied reports: Romans sometimes advance silently, frequently raise a loud cry (the clamor) immediately before throwing pila and engaging, sometime drum pila against shields during the advance or to intimidate the enemy – and then in all of these we need to be wary of literary embellishment. The most common solution in this case is probably a relatively silent advance, with the legions raising a loud rolling shout right as they reach javelin-range (about 20-30 meters).
The Marcomanni and Quadi, meanwhile, would have formed into a shield wall-style line, probably without unit intervals (so it is a single long line), but not shoulder-to-shoulder. Instead, we probably ought to expect that each warrior occupies about 80-90cm of lateral space (making the formation a little under 50% empty air).
Gladiator really wants this to be a scene about how good a soldier Maximus is, but what it keeps showing us is how he very nearly loses to a deeply incompetent, poorly equipped enemy.
While Hollywood loves passive Roman formations receiving ‘barbarian’ charges, in practice both formations would likely advance steadily before ending with a charge over the last few dozen meters before contact. Roman sources describe the coming together of Roman armies with words like concursus (a ‘running together’)4 so we know the Romans charged rather than walking into contact. At about 25m, the Romans would volley their first pilum, sending a shower of heavy javelins into the enemy ranks, likely timed to coincide with the shout (the clamor) and then the rushing onset of the Roman battle line; the second pilum could be thrown on the run or simply dropped if need be. Battles in which lines closed too rapidly for pila to be thrown are known from antiquity.
The question of “what happens when two battle lines collide at speed” is one of those enduring scholarly debates – mostly carried out in debates about hoplites – which we won’t settle here. I’ll offer my own view, which is I suspect they did collide at speed (though not, perhaps a dead sprint) before ‘accordioning’ back out to fighting intervals. Romans and ‘barbarians’ both in this moment have some flexibility of movement, both side to side and forward or back from the enemy, but they’re going to want to try to roughly maintain their relative position in formation, because they’re relying on the men to their sides to protect their own blindsides.
What you’d thus have would not be a confused mass of fighting or the isolated little ‘islands’ of Romans we see in the film, but rather a single solid line of ‘barbarians,’ pressed by large, coherent blocks of Romans with small intervals between them. A few Marcomanni or Quadi warriors might get the bright idea to run into those intervals, but they’d learn their folly quickly, as they’d be flanking themselves between the rear ranks of each Roman cohort, who are not actively engaged – and many of those Romans will still have had a pilum to hand. I should note that the Roman military oath swore, “not to leave or retreat from one’s post for flight or terror, unless in order to pick up a weapon, pursue and strike an enemy or to save a citizen” – the exception neatly in place to let a Roman soldier dash into the interval to strike down an enemy fool enough to try to run through it.5 Even if a warrior ran through the gap, they’d simply find themselves facing the next line of cohorts, off-set from the first to cover these exact intervals. Instead, I’d expect the ‘barbarian’ line to flex and waver, but generally hold as a line, not advancing far into the intervals.
The fighting, rather than taking place everywhere, would be taking place along those lines where the front of the cohorts met the Marcomannic and Quadi shield wall. Here, we’d likely see the same tactical interaction taking place in many individual combats at once: the Roman’s gladius (of a high imperial type) at c. 65-70cm is obviously far shorter than the enemy’s c. 2.5-3m long spear, so the Roman has to advance through his opponent’s reach advantage to strike. However, the Roman has an enormous shield and heavy body armor, which he can use to block his opponent’s weapon in order to advance into his own ‘measure’ (the reach of his weapon) at which point his sword is much more capable of thrusting (or cutting) around his opponent’s (also quite large) shield and the Roman’s heavy armor gives him a pretty decisive advantage.
Further aiding the Roman would have been that shower of pila just before contact, disabling men and shields and thus creating gaps and opportunities to exploit. Remember: a Roman can advance a short distance out of position for the purpose of striking an enemy. Likewise, the rear ranks, if they still had pila or could spot any usable missiles on the ground, were perfectly capable of throwing them either over top of the line or between the men in front of them. A wounded Roman could be relieved by the man behind him – after all, it was permissible to advance to save a citizen, so if the fellow soldier in front of you was wounded or knocked down, I think the expectation is that you rush forward to take his place so he can withdraw through the fairly wide tactical spacing to the rear (and you have a big shield with which to do it).
In practice, unless the initial rush of Marcomanni and Quadi was sufficient to sweep the Romans back – something that usually only happened in ambushes or other forms of tactical surprise – the attrition on that front line of fighting is likely to favor the Romans by a lot. As a rule in pre-modern contact (‘shock’) warfare, armored heavy infantry can inflict absolutely staggeringly lopsided slaughter in close combat against less well armored infantry: the heavy armor doesn’t just keep the Romans from being killed, it allows them to be more aggressive, advancing through their enemy’s striking distance more safely to ply their own weapons, which in that closer context (sword’s reach rather than spear’s reach) are a lot more lethal. Combined with Roman drill, the result was that these sort of pitched head-on-head engagements tended to go very badly for Rome’s enemies and to do so quite quickly.
If Maximus’ army was up to ROman army standards, his cavalry ought to arrive to find an enemy line already collapsing from casualties and thus rapidly collapsing morale. The fact that Maximus needs to bail out his own infantry line – in an army where the heavy infantry makes up three-quarters of the total force – suggests that far from being a great general, Maximus is quite bad at this and has under-prepared his army. Which bring us to:
That Cavalry Charge
With Maximus’ infantry being overrun and falling apart in an open field engagement, it falls to Maximus to save the day with his cavalry. As we’ve already covered in the previous sections, this is itself an oddity: the Romans rarely expected cavalry to play a decisive role in winning their battles and Roman generals in this period (and earlier periods) wouldn’t accompany the cavalry either – expecting to win with their infantry, they tended to position themselves behind the infantry to be able to command. Moreover, Maximus’ cavalry appears to be entirely, or at least mostly composed of legionary cavalry, but in practice the overwhelming majority of cavalry in Roman armies in this period were auxilia cavalry; each legion’s small detachment of 120 cavalrymen was more for scouting and messenger work than combat.
And yet we’re not even close to done with everything that is wrong about this part of the battle.
To start with, as alluded to before, the positioning of Maximus’ cavalry, effectively behind the Marcomannic army, is wild. It would, of course, be almost impossible to conceal such a flanking force of cavalry from an enemy, especially an enemy that knows the ground better than you do (because they live here). Forests often act in strategy games as default ‘concealment,’ but large bodies of cavalry are both very visible and fairly loud, so bringing this cavalry close enough to take part in the battle makes it nearly certain they would be spotted. If spotted, they’re in quite a lot of trouble, as they’re too far away to be supported. So the most likely result of Maximus’ strategy is defeat in detail: he’d arrive at the end of his long ride away from his army to find his cavalry gone – engaged, defeated and scattered hours earlier while he waited for his envoy to return – shortly before his infantry was overrun and defeated.
I can almost imagine how scathingly an author like Tacitus or Ammianus would report such a defeat, laying the blame with Maximus for arrogantly sabotaging his own negotiations by foolishly moving his cavalry in an obvious aggressive ambush position and then failing to prepare properly for the actual battle.
But assuming Maximus’ cavalry remains undiscovered, this is still a pretty terrible plan. The problem is terrain. I find a lot of folks are used to thinking about terrain much in the way that strategy games often do, which is that terrain offers relatively mild buffs or debuffs to specific unit types which generally ‘wear off’ the moment the cavalry exits the unfavorable terrain, which tends to make things like forests at most mild inconveniences to move through.6 But in actual practice, dense old-growth forest might as well be a wall for cavalry as battle conditions: not a mild inconvenience but a nearly absolute barrier.
Horses, after all, did not evolve in dense forests, they evolved on the rolling flat grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe. It is very easy for a horse to injure itself moving through a forest unless it is on some kind of path: forests, after all, tend to be full of uneven ground, concealed small holes, fallen tree trunks, roots, undergrowth and all sorts of obstructions which can be hard to see (for either the horse or the rider) but which can easily damage a horse’s long, relatively fragile legs. Even at a slow pace, a rider would need to be careful in this terrain; at a gallop riders would almost certainly injure their horses – a bad footfall leading to a tumble that could kill the rider and would certainly permanently lame the horse.
One assumes the film can get away with this on screen because they’re not filming in an actual forest, but in a tree-farm, a kind of terrain that did not exist in antiquity, with nice, relatively neat even-spaced rows of trees on relatively flat ground with all of the obstructions and underbrush cleared away (and then probably further cleared and made safe during set preparation). So even if undiscovered, the practical result of Maximus’ cavalry charge would be dozens of lamed horses and injured or killed riders and a charge that fell apart from terrain long before it got within sight of the enemy.
Of course Maximus’ own handling of the cavalry is little better. He immediately spurs them to a gallop – rather than letting the horses advance more careful in such difficult terrain – and repeatedly orders his cavalrymen to “hold the line.” This is one of those lines that is intended to sound cool, but not to actually mean anything; to ‘hold the line‘ is to hold position and formation against enemy attack, an injunction, generally to infantry, to stand their ground. But this order cannot be to the infantry, who surely could not hear it. Here it is, I suppose, an order for the cavalry to hold their formation in the advance (which is simply not what this command means), but that’s also quite stupid: these men are galloping through a forest and so cannot hold tightly to their posts, because they will need to swerve or slow down to avoid the trees and other obstructions. Meanwhile he keeps shouting it like this is supposed to motivate the cavalrymen, who in practice can’t move any faster than their horses in any event.
Also, it sure is nice for Maximus that someone came through here in advance and made sure all of the trees were neatly space in rough rows and cleared out all of the underbrush and low-hanging branches. Who knew the ‘barbarians’ kept such neatly trimmed tree farms?
If it did somehow reach the enemy, Maximus’ cavalry would run into more fairly immediate problems because they’re carrying the wrong weapons. We see his cavalry – and Maximus himself – wielding gladii and oval shields. The shields are basically correct, but the other weapons are wrong. For one, the primary weapon of Roman or auxilia shock cavalry is going to be a cavalryman’s spear (generally a hasta in Latin), because a charging cavalryman wants a weapon which can reach beyond the head of his horse to strike an enemy. A sword would only ever be a backup weapon and in this case that sword would not be a gladius, but rather the longer spatha. Both derive from the La Tène sword tradition, but whereas the gladius of the imperial period is a shorter variant of a Roman variant of a Celtiberian variant of an early La Tène sword, the spatha is an only modestly altered Roman variant of a much longer late La Tène sword. The length, of course, is a great advantage on horseback where a rider is above any target he intends to swing at.
What line, Maximus? Where do you see a line to be held? Who are you even talking to?
Once again we can ask what ought we see?
Well in the first place, in a battlefield that has dense forest on both sides, we might not expect to see much cavalry at all. There’s simply no good terrain here to use them on. In these sorts of cases in the sources, we often just don’t hear what the cavalry was doing (rear security, most likely), sometimes for the whole battle and sometimes the cavalry becomes ‘visible’ again when it pursues fleeing enemies. It would not be at all unusual, from our accounts, for the cavalry simply not to be utilized here in the pitched battle – instead, the cavalry’s work would have been in scouting and screening the army as it matched here and pitched camp.
Assuming there was an open flank where cavalry could be employed, the Romans tended to post their cavalry on either flank of the army, with the intent that it screen those flanks, keeping the heavy infantry component from being enveloped. Since this wasn’t the main effort, the general didn’t accompany the cavalry. Instead, this task would be assigned in the imperial period to some of the more senior equestrian (as in the social rank)7 officers in the legion, whrd o show up variably in our sources as praefecti alae or praefecti equitum, while the senatorial legati took command of the main heavy infantry component, the legion. Out on the flank, the ‘Roman’ (mostly auxilia) cavalry would mostly be sparring with enemy cavalry and light troops rather than charging directly into opposing close-order heavy infantry.
The immediate problem is the victor is a masculine noun which can sometimes play as an adjective, but Roma is feminine, so if we wanted to say ‘Conquering/Victorious Rome’ we’d say Roma Victrix. That said, I can’t call to mind any example of Roma – a word that is going to conjure both the city and the goddess – being described as victrix. Cicero describes the res publica as victrix at one point (Ep. ad Brut. 1.10.2), although he uses a form of the verb to be, so he’s using victrix as a noun, not an adjective.
The deeper problem is that the structure here implies ‘victrix’ as an epithet of Roma, which as far as I know, it isn’t; instead victor is an epithet of Jupiter and Hercules. Nike (the Greek word for ‘victrix’) is an epithet of the goddess Athena and that gets translated into Latin as Athena Victrix, but Athena is very much not Roma either. Roma’s more common epithet, that we see on coins, is Roma aeterna, “Eternal Roma.” When Roman armies wanted to invoke victory as a battle-cry, well, that was a different goddess – Victoria, naturally, and they’d shout her name (which actually happens, e.g. Caes. BG 5.37).
So this is both grammatically incorrect Latin, but also theologically incorrect Roman religion and so something I have a hard time imagining a Roman would say, another example of the remarkable carelessness of this scene.
Melee
If Maximus thought it was important enough to keep a cavalry formation – he does spend all that time shouting ‘hold the line!’ to his horsemen, after all – he certainly doesn’t succeed. Even before he’s left the trees, his cavalry have lost any semblence of a tight, linear formation and by the time they arrive at the rear of the Marcomanni and Quadi, the battlefield is a confused, jumbled scrum.
Every so often, when I am teaching about ancient warfare, well meaning students will ask me how a given set of equipment or fighting style works once the battle has descended into the sort of confused, jumbled melees that Hollywood loves. Of course the answer is they don’t. No one’s fighting system or equipment is designed for this sort of confusion, because it simply wouldn’t be survivable and what most men want even more than winning a battle is to survive the battle. As you might imagine, such a confused battle would be insanely lethal: without a consistent direction of threat, soldiers couldn’t defend themselves effectively with their shields, instead being attacked from behind or the sides (while focused on an enemy in front of them). The whole thing would resolve very quickly, but it would resolve with both sides taking overwhelming casualties. As we’ve noted before, contrary to popular culture which tends to imagine that battles mostly involve killing the enemy, casualties in ancient battles tend to be around 10% of the total force engaged.
As a result, no army wanted the battlefield to devolve into such absolute confusion – Roman armies least of all. A general that allowed a battle to get this out of control was quite a failure. As fun as this sequence is, this is one of its problems: it wants us to understand Maximus as an extremely capable commander, but keeps showing him commanding very poorly.
As a result, there’s no much to say about the confused final scrum of this battle except that the Romans didn’t fight this way and neither did the Marcomanni or the Quadi. But I do want to note that even how we see the Romans (and especially Maximus) fighting is wrong. In particular, we see Maximus and other Romans doing a lot of sword parries – blocking an enemy blow with their sword – but that’s also not how the Romans fight. You can parry with a gladius or a spatha and certainly this must have happened, but the weapons are not ideal for it: the weapons have very small guards (the bit at the base of the blade that protects the hand) generally made of wood rather than metal, so there’s a good chance the opponent’s sword is going to ride down your blade into your hands. Instead, a Roman – infantry or cavalry – defends himself with his giant shield, with the added advantage that, having caught an enemy strike with your shield, there, you can be making your counter-stroke in the same time.8
It would have made even more sense for this Roman to have a shield.
Also note how many dead Romans we can see in these scenes? This battle did not go well.
The related problem in the scene is that almost none of the Romans seem to keep their shields once the confused melee starts. It is really hard to get good screen-caps of this, because of all of the really quick cuts and the frequency with which Scott has people in the foreground run in front of the camera, which obscures a lot of the action, but I’d hazard by the time Maximus is on the ground, maybe one in five of our Romans still has their shield. Abandoning your shield in battle was a serious offense (because the assumption is that the only reason you’d drop your shield is to run away)! Precisely because the Roman combat style, focused on the gladius rather than on a spear, requires the Roman to advance through a spear-wielding opponent’s reach, you need that big shield to block, because your opponent will get to swing first.
Confusions and Conclusions
The battle ends with scattered Roman survivors standing over heaps of corpses, both Roman and enemy. We’re supposed to come through this scene thinking that Maximus is a very capable commander, a grim, focused, effective military man of the sort that Rome needs. But to be frank, actually knowing the Roman army, he comes off as a remarkably poor Roman general, the sort of fellow who needs to be sacked to a back-bench position in the Senate and then encouraged to spend more time on his estate.
After all, we see Maximus and his buddy Quintus come to this battle supremely confident. Quintus even quips that the Marcomanni should “know when they’re conquered.” And then they go on to very nearly lose the battle, despite every part of their over-complicated, baroque battle plan going according to the plan. Maximus nearly gets himself killed playing warrior-hero rather than actually commanding his army while Quintus loses complete control of the battle the moment he orders the advance, which might be acceptable for a fifth century hoplite general but would have been totally unacceptable for a third century BC Roman commander, much less a second century AD one.
Also someone needs to pick up those standards. – I see at least two just standing in the ground on the left! Those are holy objects, if the standard-bearer falls, someone else needs to pick them up! Losing them would be extremely shameful!
Of course the point of ending the battle with scenes of wounded and fallen Romans and sad music playing is to loop back to Ridley Scott’s anti-war themes. The problem is that while Ridley Scott is notionally anti-war in his themes, his movies also think that battles are really cool and that only soldiers should run the state, which is a sort of thematic train-wreck that afflicts both Gladiator movies in particular.
Taking the entire sequence together, I think we can see how – despite being a very fun sequence – it is also very deceptive. Almost everything we see is shaped by one or more misconceptions: the army is composed wrong, positioned incorrectly, uses the wrong tactics, in the wrong formations, often with the wrong weapons, under the direction of a general we are supposed to understand as supremely capable who we see make one mistake after another and very nearly loses the battle as a result.
What is deceptive about it, however, are not all of the things which are wrong – which to be clear, are most of the things. This is not a very Roman battle. But if the film made no representation to historical accuracy or groundedness, if there wasn’t a tremendous effort to create historical verisilimitude and as such every viewer could easily intuit that what they were seeing had no real historical basis, this would just be a fun fantasy battle sequence.
It returns me to the concept I’ve used a lot in these sorts of pop-culture reviews, which is asking the degree to which a given work “makes the claim” to historical groundedness. I was asked, for instance, if I would do a similar review of A Knight’s Tale (2001) – another super-fun movie – and the answer is basically no. The reason is that A Knight’s Tale goes out of its way to avoid “making the claim” to historical accuracy, mostly notably by including a whole bunch of diagetic (that is, in the story rather than merely played over it) modern music. You are not supposed to take any part of A Knight’s Tale seriously as a historical work.9
But as we’ve noted, quite a lot of effort in Gladiator (2000) goes into the signifiers of historical accuracy, to get the feel of an accurate portrayal, even though almost no part is accurate. Gladiator is “making the claim.” For the most part, the legionary and auxiliary soldiers look like they walked on to set off of the page of a textbook illustration, even if they’re present in the wrong ratios and fighting the wrong way; the Romans show up with lots of catapults and field fortifications, both things folks often vaguely know about the Romans (but in both cases, they’re used wrong); characters shout Latin phrases even if those phrases are grammatically incorrect; they have Roman-sounding names even if those are incorrect. There was a deliberate choice to present something that looked an awful lot more authentic than the sword-and-sandal epics of previous decades. And of course the narrative is presented in a very specific time and place, under the reign of two specific emperors. It mattered a lot to Ridley Scott and his team that this sequence looked accurate, even though it wasn’t accurate.
You can see how successful that effort is simply by reading through some of the comments on the last two posts, or the response they elicited in some corners of social media – some quite strident efforts to defend elements of this sequence (including an amusing effort to salvage Maximus’ name). The efforts to defend the battle speak to the degree to which many viewers have internalized this as their vision of historical Roman warfare and of course they did: the film goes out of it way to encourage them to do so. And because this scene is so influential, even folks whose sense of the Roman army comes from, say, video games are likely to also be effectively marinated in this scene, merely second-hand.10
Which is why I thought this scene was worth talking through, because it isn’t an accurate vision of historical Roman warfare. Gladiator is, unlike its sequel, a fun movie and a good time, but if you know the Roman army from this movie, chances are you know less than nothing. Normally, this is where I’d recommend a better portrayal of the Roman army at war but to be frank, we haven’t really gotten a good one. HBO’s Rome has some good moments, but also some solid nonsense and so falls into much the same trap as Gladiator: just enough right to leave people vulnerable to accepting what is wrong. Most films can’t help but invent non-existent Roman tactics rather than showing the Roman army function as it was.
To be honest, I’d rather think this would create a space, especially as CGI is now much cheaper, for a film to ‘break out’ by delivering a radically grounded vision of the Roman army. In the meantime, if you want a real sense of how a Roman army fights, all I can do is recommend something like my own series on the Roman army of the Middle Republic.
Gladiator sure ain’t it.
- Director’s Cut or nothing.
- Intervals in the Republic based off of M.J. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-Republic” Historia 63.3 (2014), assuming a regular depth of 6.
- The notable recent treatment being Cowan, “The Clashing of Weapons and Silent Advances in Roman Battles” Historia 56.1 (2007).
- a use sufficiently common to get its own sub-entry in the Lewis and Short (one of the two standard Latin dictionaries of reference and the one I prefer), concurro II.A.2.
- Livy 22.38.4
- Bonus points to games like Pike and Shot, where moving a unit through unfavorable terrain damages their cohesion potentially permanently.
- Though the equites, as a census class, no longer made up Rome’s cavalry, they continued to exist as a social order, with a defined wealth requirement and specific privileges.
- This is another thing about ancient and medieval combat that popular culture – both Hollywood and Video Games – tend to get wrong. They imagine, often reasoning from modern fencing, a kind of ‘your turn, my turn’ exchange of alternating strikes and blocks. But what we actually see in late medieval fighting manuals – the oldest fighting manuals we have in this part of the world is a an emphasis on defense and strikes performed ‘in the same time,’ which is to say that you block with your shield in the same moment that you are delivering a strike with your sword (or, with later two-handed swords, you block in such a manner that you can smoothly transition into a strike in one motion, while still closing off an angle of attack).
- Though it does have some very loose literary riffs off of The Canterbury Tales.
- Using second-hand marinade sounds like a terrible idea, I would not recommend it.
It’s pretty incredible to reflect that the size of the Roman army is basically the same size as the modern US Army.
It’s been pointed out that the high imperial army wasn’t actually that big: Augustus famously reduced in size significantly, and IIRC the late imperial army also balloons in size.
I have a question concerning Latin. Is ‘hasta’ specifically a cavalry spear, or is it just any kind of spear? Because I seem to remember that one of the terms Polybius uses when talking about the Roman legions of around his day was ‘hastati’, which certainly seems to be related to hasta.
Now, they aren’t armed with spears in Polybius’s day, but then again none of the Roman battle terms seem to mean what you’d think they’d mean from simple etymology. But I’m wondering if this is something that maybe is a holdover from a time when the roman infantry did fight with spears, or if it’s something even weirder if ‘hasta’ is a cavalryman’s spear and not a spear in general.
The decanus/centuria thing was answered in a post about logistics: on papyrus, the Roman army would have approximately the right number of mule-drivers and suchlike (calones), 2 per contubernium, to round out the 6+2 combatants. In addition to practical benefits (the infantrymen, particularly the velites, can get themselves march-ready comparatively quickly, thus they have time before that to help out with the animals and baggage — in addition to carrying stuff themselves) and the simple elegance of the units being administratively uniform (while daily deploying in a task-organized manner), it also has a social policy side effect of putting the self-equipping heavy infantry, the poorer velites, and the even poorer incorporated non-combatants in the same tent.
The hasta, yes:
”By c. 200, the first two ranks of Roman heavy infantry have dropped the hasta (including, ironically, the hastati who were named for it) and instead are carrying a pair of pila. At some point before the end of the first century, the last rank of Roman infantry, the triarii, will also drop the hasta for some pila (though note that Roman light infantry, the velites, do not use the pilum, but rather seven lighter javelins called the hasta velitaris).”
I recommend the linked post, “How Legions Fight”: https://acoup.blog/2024/02/09/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-iia-how-a-legion-fights/
Basically, the heavy infantry component of the legion formed up in three lines: the hastati, principes, and triarii. These are basically in order of seniority, with the more seasoned troops in the back to help encourage the younger ones to hold formation.
Ironically, it’s only the triarii who still have the fighting spear by the late Republic, which is indeed called a “hasta” for them just as it is for the cavalrymen. Although “hasta” is indeed just the generic word for a spear, the same way “gladius” is the generic word for a sword. You see this come up all the time in sword enthusiast circles, we’re constantly trying to invent coherent categories and terminology and then run head-first into the reality that most of the words you’d want to build your categories around are just the local way of saying “sword”.
Roman conservatism re terminology can be summed up by a century not being a hundred men, spearmen not having spears, the “first guys” fighting in the second line…
There’s a bit of a challenge in dealing with precise weapon terminology because generally speaking our elite literary sources prefer to avoid technical language as a matter of style.
Generally a hasta is a one-handed thrusting spear, whereas telum indicates a range of spears, javelins, even arrows or darts. But the light javelins of the velites are described as ‘hasta velitaris,’ and there’s also a word, iaculum, to mean ‘thrown weapon.’
There’s also lancea, which gives us our word ‘lance,’ and often means a heavier, thrusting-only cavalry spear, but all of these words get used pretty broadly.
The upshot is none of these words (and we haven’t even gotten into import words like gaesum or sarisa; lancea, I should note, is also probably not originally a Latin word) are specific, technical words.
“The Marcomanni and Quadi, meanwhile, would have formed into a shield wall-style line, probably without unit intervals (so it is a single long line)”
I’m confused, does “single long line” just describe the continuity of the formation? Or do you mean there would actually be a single rank, with no depth at all?
Continuation of the formation, undoubtedly. I don’t know about Marcomanni, but similar formations were something in the order of 8-16 ranks deep.
I’d imagine a continuous formation. If it were only 1 man deep, it’d be very fragile both in morale (no encouragement from behind) and in shock (no-one to replace casualties, leaving gaps in the line). It’d also lead to a ludicrous frontage if the forces are close to comparable numbers
“Or do you mean there would actually be a single rank, with no depth at all?”
Lol that reminds me of the Lannister formation against Dothraki charge.
Same. It also reminded me of an all-time great exchange in the comments of the post devoted to that battle. (Which, as we know, shouldn’t have happened at all, because their raid was pointless as they would have had eaten all the food on that long journey before getting any to King’s Landing – but then again, no food would have had ever gotten from the Reach to King’s Landing over that road for the exact same reason, so King’s Landing should have never been anything like the Imperial Rome-sized capital we see in the show/books in the first place – and probably would not have become a capital at all.)
https://acoup.blog/2019/10/11/collections-the-preposterous-tactics-of-the-loot-train-battle-game-of-thrones-s7e4/
Hergrim* > The Brabançons at Bouvines drew up in a circle that consisted of two ranks of spearmen and a single rank of men with polearms, whose job was to rush out when the spearmen stalled the charge and kill the cavalry before they could retreat. The Scottish schiltrons were also apparently drawn up only two deep at Falkirk, and the “Las Siete Partidas” speak of infantry drawn up in three ranks (although in this case I have suspicions that this was a blend of Vegetius and Arab history).
> So, it did happen, and it seems to have been used specifically against cavalry when it was employed, but I don’t think it was particularly common or the sign of someone who had many choices. The Brabançons were definitely not in an ideal situation, essentially making a suicidal last stand, and if the Scotts were only two deep at Falkirk, later formations were denser. And, while the thin lines might have stopped the cavalry, the rapid destruction of the Brabançons by the French infantry demonstrates the uselessness of such thin ranks in general.
LightningDOG 507 > Not to be too pedantic, but Falkirk was a crushing defeat of the Scots, wasn’t it?
Tom > It was. And Bouvines was for the coalition (of which the Brabançons were part) too.
So, we can be quite confident that “single rank, with no depth at all” is NOT what was being implied.
*Hergrim is/was an r/badhistory poster who argued quite extensively (though, to my mind, with limited effectiveness) over on that subreddit in defence of GOT vs. some of the arguments in “How It Wasn’t” series.
As a relatively new discoverer of this blog site, will you ever do a series on the Parthian or better yet, the Sassanian armies? If not (understandable), any reading material recommendations other than shitty Osprey Publishing books?
Um, there’s a recent Brill’s Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires (2025) which I need to work through, but you may find yourself somewhat deterred by the $194 price tag.
Maybe see if your library can get a copy?
For the broad tactical sort of thing, you can check out Edward Alofs’ Studies on Mounted Warfare in Asia, which are freely available online
Hiding heavy cavalry (in specific) in trees isn’t a modern delusion. In Caxton’s edition of Le Morte Darthur, as early as Book I chapter 14 we find Merlin proposing to hide ten thousand knights in a wood, to form a decisive “bushment” in the coming battle (same in the Winchester MS except variant spellings). It works: but then Merlin is a great magician.
Hiding in a foest is one thing, charging through a forest is something else completely.
Where from did Arthur get 10 000 knights to hide in forest, and how big was the rest of his army?
The total of Roman army in Britain about 130 AD was:
3 legions (with 120 horse each)
39 ordinary auxiliary cohorts. Assumed 2/3 of them cohortes equitatae (number not directly attested), which would mean 26 mixed cohorts, with 120 horse each
6 millenary auxiliary cohorts – again assuming 2/3 of them (4) mixed with 240 horse each
10 ordinary alae (480 horse)
1 millenary ala (720 horse)
Note how all the units are multiples are 120 horse. This gets 3+26+8+40+6=83 multiples of 120, making 9960 horse total.
Compare Henry II. Who in 1160s, according to Cartae Baronum, was owed service of something like 5300 knights from the whole England, and actually managed to mobilize something like 3500 to expeditions to Wales. The rest paid scutage or were posted elsewhere.
So how did Arthur reach 10 000 knights?
Le Morte D’Arthur is mostly an abridged translation of thirteenth century French romances, with fantasy numbers. But many sober chronicles have inflated figures. Sir Thomas Malory let them stand. Even though his description of the Roman War shows some real-life campaigning experience. As for this army, it was actually borrowed from two Kings of imaginary realms in Gaul.
Not sure if my long answer went through. The short answer is that the numbers in medieval romances are as unreliable as those in some medieval chronicles
King Arthur gets ten thousand nights for the same reason that Agamemnon gets to have a fleet of a thousand ships deployed against Troy for ten years straight. These are mythological characters and the forces attributed to them are mythological in number and nature and should not be treated as realistic.
The chapter I cited involves coalitions of allied kings for and against Arthur, and throws around numbers like fifty thousand men and ten thousand dead. As Merlin as tactical adviser indicates, this is not serious history.
Thing is, if you look at the part of the Iliad where Homer reels off the size of each contingent (2:584-862, Fagles translation), it’s actually a weird mix of “These are probably mythological numbers” and “no, actually, these numbers kind of make sense.”
For example, most of the contingents get nice, big, round numbers that seem to fit the mythological pattern–Agamemnon, of course, has the most with a hundred; the Pylosians, led by Nestor, bring ninety; Argos and Crete each bring eighty; Sparta and Arcadia each contribute sixty; the Boeotians, the Athenians, and Achilles’ contingent each bring fifty; and the Phocians, Locrians, Euboeans, Buprasionans, Dulichonians, Aetolians, Phylacians, Triccans, Magnesians, and Eurypylus’s and Polypoetes’s contingents bring forty apiece while the Aspledonians and Calydnaeans each contribute thirty.
But others get numbers that are a little harder to just dismiss that way. The Cyphians bring twenty-two ships, Ajax’s contingent from Salamis and Odysseus’s Ithacans each have twelve ships, the Phereans bring eleven, Rhodes contributes nine, Philoctetes brings seven, and the Symians, led by Nireus, bring three ships, and he is accounted “a lightweight with a tiny band” (2:771).
YMMV on how far you want to take this, of course, but I’m not going to just reject all the numbers from the Iliad completely out of hand.
The Iliad’s ship numbers might contain some authentic information, but given the origins of the ‘text’ (oral tradition songs that appear to have emerged during a period when literacy in Greece had lapsed) it seems more likely that the lyrics as a whole (again, the Iliad was intended to be sung, not read like a document) were constructed with “sounds good in dactylic hexameter in mind” and “mentions all the big-name heroes who are considered important on the list.” It’s possible, again, that some authentic elements were on the list, but there’s no way to know; it’s not so much that the list is definitively false as that there’s no way to use it for evidence.
The Matter of Britain is worse in that at least with the Iliad we can verify that the Trojan War or something like it probably happened. With King Arthur’s wars… not so much.
To be fair, these warriors are described as “ten thousand men on horseback, the most part men of arms”, so these were not ten thousand knights, nor even ten thousand cavalry – this unit might include some mounted heavy infantry and mounted archers as well. Also, this warriors are from Benwick/Bénoïc (probably eastern Anjou) and Gaul/Gaunnes (either France in general or western Anjou), not from Britain.
(And of course Le Morte d’Arthur is fantasy with fire-breathing dragons, giants, sorceresses and so on, not a historically accurate source. By the same logic you may ask how Mordred during the siege of London was able to use “great guns” in the 6th century AD.)
On Mordred, that’s easy:
It’s for the same reason commentary on his being a snake is sometimes mistakenly attached to his name, that is to say he actually had a couple of pythons, he invited everyone to the gunshow, he had the beauties Righty and Lefty, he had some seriously sculpted muscular arms is what I’m saying.
…
/Joke
Thanks for supplying the details. I am working on a phone, and left them to anyone who wanted to look up the reference. 15th-century Malory’s source here seems to be the 13th-century Prose Merlin of the Lancelot-Grail (aka Vulgate) Cycle, although elsewhere he uses the later “Post-Vulgate”Suite du Merlin.
During the battle of Kulikovo (1380) an ambush cavalry regiment of Rus’ army was hidden in an oak grove on the left flank of the army. So hiding cavalry regiments in woodland seems to be quite possible even without magic.
Twice now you’ve said that the Marcomanni speak “21st century” German. This seems improbably prescient for something filmed prior to 2000.
Hey, unmitigated pedantry in the comments too!
The scene has even more anachronisms than I realized!
“which might be acceptable for a fifth century hoplite general”
Seems a bit unfair. Last I checked Callimachus reformed his victorious wings at Marathon and succored his weak center and did not gee killed until the fighting was over trying to seize the ships of the routed enemy (that is got killed playing hero when it was no longer going to be a problem). All and loosing what only about 200 men? If had won like Maxiums I don’t think he would have been able to rally his guys for a march back to Athens.
I suspect that even if a filmmaker did want to make a wholly accurate (as far as we know, anyway) depiction of a Roman battle, they would be fighting against two things: one, the expectation of how ancient battles are supposed to look (because of movies like Gladiator creating these expectations); and two, inherent issues with what kinds of things come off as dramatic and exciting on film.
To analogize to a different area with which I am more familiar, watching someone “hack a computer” in real life is just about the most boring thing in the world; there’s almost no way to make it exciting while remaining realistic. The closest anyone has ever gotten, while retaining maximal (but not complete) realism, is Mr. Robot. The showrunners went to lengths to use real-world tools and concepts, even if they took some shortcuts like omitting the 6 hours you’d spend reading documentation and trying various things that fail before finally finding a vulnerability.
The antipodal example is Swordfish, where Hugh Jackman is shouting and drinking and smoking and cursing while he rapidly codes (or hacks, or whatever the heck he’s doing; it’s unclear) using nine different monitors, which it goes without saying is not how programming works. But the scene is fun as hell. (The less said about the scene where he has 60 seconds to hack into the Pentagon while getting a BJ, the better.)
To bring it back to warfare, a completely realistic depiction of battle probably cannot be made as exciting as one that takes some liberties. I imagine a scene following a Roman legionaire who is in the front rank of the frontmost unit, in a battle the Romans are likely to win; if his unit maintains cohesion, he’s going to be mostly staying in one place relative to his fellows, and if we follow this fellow, it’s going to be much more difficult to make it dramatic than it would be if he was separated, surrounded, disoriented, etc. This isn’t to say that we therefore must make battle scenes that way, of course, and any depiction of ostensibly historical works (especially those “making the claim”) should always be matched with historical context and explanation, so that we don’t end up in a world where 99% of the people who think they know something about Roman warfare learned a bunch of false information from Ridley Scott.
I think if the goal is excitement, the can’t-be-as-exciting assertion might be true.
But if that is not the primary goal then we have more room to disagree. As a recent example we have Warfare. As an older example: the beach landing in Private Ryan is vastly more effective than, say, the bit where dude shoots a Tiger with his pistol and WOW IT EXPLODES and then OH YEAH P-51 USAAF USAAF USAAF!
The beach landing of course still takes a lot of liberties, but is much more grounded than P-51s acting as A-10s and destroying a Tiger without any meaningful collateral. For that matter, the bit earlier in the final battle where infantry crawling on a tank get cleared off by an AA gun is likewise a lot more grounded and a lot more effective than the P-51 rescue.
You made me rewatch clips from that final battle now. Interestingly, to me it seems like both Saving Private Ryan and Warfare actually feature a very similar deviation from what we would have expected in reality – the armoured vehicles use their weapons (and particularly, their support weapons), a lot less than we would have expected them to.
That is, if the Tiger actually wanted to finish off the American guy with a pistol slumped next to the motorbike, then the radio operator, sitting next to the driver, would have simply opened fire from the “bow” machine gun placed in an embrasure right next to driver’s hatch while remaining protected by all the armour – since he was conveniently right in front of them, and it’s not like the operator would have been busy with radio at that moment. (And the dedicated gunner could have had shot from the coaxial machine gun too, if he wanted.)
Likewise, there is that immediately earlier scene where mortar shells are tossed point-blank and take out a bunch of Germans who are apparently too dumb to do anything besides running forward and don’t think of, say, simply throwing a couple of their own “potato mashers”. Instead, the mortar crew scatter when the tank shows up right behind them…and it just lets them flee without doing anything besides maybe ineffectually trying to ride them down – as opposed to hosing down everything in front of it from both the coaxial and the bow machine gun. (Shooting at the infantry right in front of the tank was such a rare opportunity that every nation dropped those bow machine guns as soon as the war ended – so you can be sure an opportunity to use them for what they were designed for would NOT have been missed.)
And for that matter, the scene where “Molotovs” thrown from the balcony are used to take out a Marder (Nashorn? It would have to be one of those two, but I’m not actually sure the film’s design is truly authentic to either vehicle) isn’t impossible or perhaps even implausible – but the way it’s shown does seem to require a deficiently produced vehicle and/or a particularly poorly-trained crew, since ALL of those German self-propelled guns with an open superstructure had a machine gun mounted in one corner of it for self-defence (conveniently omitted from film’s design), and it specifically had high firing angles to be able to engage aircraft* – and of course, to suppress windows/rooftops during urban warfare. It obviously wasn’t foolproof (Soviet SU-76s had the same thing, and there were still recorded complaints a single (un)lucky grenade toss in urban engagements could kill everyone but the driver), but in the film, they aren’t even trying to use it.
And IMO, the strangest scene in Warfare is near the end, when the squad being rescued runs towards the rear ramps of the two Bradleys while discharging their M-16s vaguely at the nearby roofs for the sake of suppressive fire…while the Bradleys themselves just sit there silently, their barrels also pointed upwards and towards the roofs, yet doing absolutely nothing – even though they have not just the 25mm Bushmasters, whose ammo capacity is admittedly somewhat limited, but also the coaxial machine guns, which effectively exist for this exact purpose and are obviously going to be incomparable more effective at suppression than the scattered bursts from the infantry rifles. I suppose the director needed some deviations from common sense to keep some tension in what was always a David vs. Goliath battle depicted from Goliath’s side.
The other thing is that the soldiers in it appear surprisingly reluctant to use their medkits – from my impression, they were literally faster to reach for them and start bandaging in Saving Private Ryan than they were in Warfare. Though, both points are admittedly fairly minor compared to the film’s determination to say as little as possible about the conflict it’s portraying (to the point it doesn’t even really tell us what their operation was supposed to achieve) – one rather alienating to those not already inclined to have a positive opinion about it. In my 3-star review, I have referred to it as One Day in the Life of an Occupier for a reason.
*Not that the “rifle caliber” (7.92mm for the Germans) was effective at it by that point, since basically all the aircraft which could threaten armoured vehicles on the battlefield by then already had armour around the cockpit and perhaps other critical areas + self-sealing fuel tanks, meaning that only 12.7mm machine guns could be even theoretically effective against them. The USA and USSR already started to mount just those in the latter half of the war – though the former’s superior production capacity meant they could afford to stick those .50 cal Brownings not just on tanks, but even onto a whole lot of unarmoured gun tractors, while the USSR had limit the DSHK to its heavy tanks and SPGs until the war was over – and then every single nation followed suit.
So, just write a script where he is in a relatively small detachment (e.g. foraging) that gets separated and surrounded. First by cavalry, setting up a ticker for the enemy infantry to arrive, and then we can see their oppressive numerical superiority. Missiles have to be endured, and as time passes, casualty rates climb, even the living get worn down by wounds, and water bottles run empty. Does the commander even know of their predicament? That’s when the cavalry arrives (with infantry backup close by). (This could be basically the whole army; but if the army is disciplined and the commander doesn’t want this to become a battle here, because the circumstances are unfavorable, the majority of the army would be lined up on the most favorable terrain nearby and it would be the survivors’ job to drag themselves back to it, while the cavalry+infantry runs a fighting retreat around them, while the rest of the enemy army is moving this way, having been called for as soon as the rescue party was spotted.)
The reason they got cut off? It might not even reflect badly on the general. Julius Caesar on multiple occasions put his army into situations like this, including textbook “foraging in the presence of the enemy”.
I mean, it might still look like bad leadership, because a film has to do a LOT of work to convincingly convey ‘look, we might get cut off if the enemy turns up unexpectedly, but I prefer those odds to the 100% chance of starting to starve if we don’t go looking for food most days’. (especially given that for that you also need to know that they haven’t got supplies coming to anywhere nearby, so can’t just go home unless they find one of the GOT army teleporters lying around).
“a completely realistic depiction of battle probably cannot be made as exciting as one that takes some liberties.”
What if you film it from the POV of the guys opposing the Romans? Especially Germanic or Gaulish “barbarians” about to get their butts kicked?
I think most audience members would find the resulting scene confusing, and any armchair military historians in the group would denounce it as unrealistic. Our expectations have been shaped by World War I, where men advancing in ordered ranks get cut down by machine guns. A scene where the advancing ordered ranks lose a few men to arrows but arrive at the point of contact with formation intact would not seem credible to a modern audience.
As I understand, the current situation reflects a gradual evolution, as arrows were replaced first by muskets (advances in formation still effective, though the men need training and discipline), then by rifles (advances in formation sometimes work, though not at Gettysburg), then by machine guns (they don’t work, as at the Somme).
But even these are shaped by (mostly written) narratives, often inaccurate. In World War I (and II) artillery was the great killer, and even at the Somme the infantry advanced in dispersed groups.
“Our expectations have been shaped by World War I, where men advancing in ordered ranks get cut down by machine guns”
Did that actually happened? After Franco-Prussian war and Russo-Japanese war, they should know what machines guns were and what not to do when facing them.
Shouldn’t our expectations have been shaped by World War II more? Anyway if most of the audience had little knowledge of WW1 then a scene where men advancing in ordered ranks get cut down by machine guns would seem really stupid.
If it’s World War II, then Maximus has executed the prototype of Operating Sickle Hook, advancing mobile troops through the forest to take the enemy in the rear.
Isn’t this essentially what happened to the British on the first day of the Battle of the Somme
>The antipodal example is Swordfish, where Hugh Jackman is shouting and drinking and smoking and cursing while he rapidly codes (or hacks, or whatever the heck he’s doing; it’s unclear) using nine different monitors, which it goes without saying is not how programming works.
Shouting and drinking and smoking and cursing are accurate parts of programming though. WHY ISN’T IT WORKING!
Getting separated from your troops is a concern for a modern infantry soldier. Even in WWI, you would be surrounded by other men within an arms’ reach or so during combat. With linear tactics, you are always in the formation. Only when you are applying fire and movement tactics in WWII style (or German WWI Sturmtruppen style), you are far enough from your nearest mates that the being separated is a realistic possibility, and even then, it requires you to mess up: it is a foremost concern of every soldier to keep tabs on others in the squad and advance at their speed. Most likely, you have failed to keep pace with everyone else. If you happen to lose the others, then you keep on moving towards the objective on your own or with those you meet on the way, engaging and eliminating enemies you see, hoping that you find others in the objective. Being both separated and “disoriented” is something that should not happen at all.
However, even if satisfying from a story-telling perspctive, this is still very undesirable situation. In practice, separation happens to the worst men in the unit. It is not about a heroic individual but about a guy who loses his nerves under fire. In reality, some people don’t even need a real combat situation, but lose it even when the “enemy” is firing blanks.
“1917” did this sort-of correctly: instead of a guy separated from the unit by mistake, you are following the exploits of two runners. That is a good choice: a messenger is legitimately away from the unit, and about anything can befall to him. And a man selected as a messanger is a good soldier by definition, because nobody is going to trust a message into the hands of a bad soldier.
Regarding the confused melee and the sword parries, I’m wondering if the staging is a result of safety concerns. I would imagine breaking up the lines lets the camera focus on a smaller group of two to four fighters (with a few others milling about in the background, out of focus). Those few actors’ actions can be carefully choreographed stage combat, which for swords means taking turns to make easily-parried blows.
This point has been made in comments for other recent posts, on archery and cavalry charges. As a film’s safety officer, you absolutely do not want a few dozen minimally-trained extras firing arrows, or trying to ride while holding a lance in couched position. I’d guess two lines of a few dozen closely-spaced extras swinging swords and thrusting with spears would also be vetoed.
I wonder if any anime has done a good Roman battle. No safety concerns there. They’ve done Roman baths…
Ad Astra: Scipio to Hannibal gave an excellent take on the Punic Wars…
but it’s a manga, no anime adaptation 🙁
The camera gets so frantic, though (showing battle as a frantic experience; no complaint there), there was room for some good ol’ fashioned editing tricks if they’d wanted to get closer to accurate — like, Romans throw pila with no barbarians in frame, cut to barbarians reacting to pilum hits, that kind of thing. Likewise, wanting to focus on small groups shouldn’t necessitate breaking up the line, just show sections of it at advantageous angles. I would think such a renowned director would be a deft hand at that stuff when he wanted.
This! I keep seeing comments here along the lines of “no one’s going to film realistic ancient battles because they’re too dangerous”, as if we don’t have over a century of collective experience at this point in faking dangerous things for cinema. There was a comment not long ago about how we’d never see slingers on camera because of the danger, and in about five minutes off the top of my head I’d come up with a safe way to fake it, and I’m not even a filmmaker. There are all sorts of tricks that can be employed to fake things that would be dangerous in actuality while still looking believable.
Give some talented filmmakers funding, knowledge of how ancient battles actually worked, and motivation, and I bet a lot of people would be surprised at how good a job they could do.
Filmmakers are not asking CAN we do this, they are asking whether the time / money / people spent on doing something new will make their film (or TV show etc) better than investing the same time / money / people on something else.
Good example is CGI, Computer Generated Imagery. According to Ed Catmull the head of Pixar, they were asking themselves can we make a full length CGI movie in the late 1980s. Answer: Yes! So why didn’t Toy Story come out until 1995? Because the next question was how much will this cost? and at the time the answer was way too much money. (Not for animators, the cost of the render farm of hundreds to thousands of computers that generate the final frames.)
Making movies, or even TV shows, is fantastically expensive and risky. If it’s not that important to the story you want to tell, minimise the risk by choosing something you know you can find people to do, on time, under budget. For all that we like to analyse the battle in Gladiator, it’s just under 10% of the total runtime and the presence or absence of thrown pilum, Germanic mail shirts, etc; doesn’t stop it being a successful film.
For your slingers example, can we show slingers in movies/TV? Sure! My Amazon Prime is currently full of ads for David vs Goliath, with a sling being prominent.
For a more generic battle scene, the production team knows that they can get extras to do archery, that the safety and insurance people will give the OK, and the battle can be filmed on such-and-such days. Adding slings would mean risk: how long will it take to make the slings? Will the safety / insurance people say it’s safe enough, or demand changes? Do we need extra instructions for the camera crew? … Any delay might mean hundreds of people having nothing to do and disrupting the production schedule.
I recall someone associated with the TV show Babylon 5 comment on complaints that the stars weren’t moving in the window on the station control room.* The gist was they would have to spend $70,000 on a “star wheel” just as a starter, for an effect that only an insignificant number of viewers would notice and care about.
* Which they should be because that room had artificial gravity which meant it was in the spinning section.
I am willing to cut at least some slack to the ‘cavalry charge in a forest’ nonsense (which also afflicted Game of Thrones and many other productions) because I assume it’s mainly done out of practical necessity. Unless you are Sergei Bondarchuk and can conscript 15,000 Red Army soldiers to be your extras, it is very difficult and expensive to hire, costume and coordinate enough actors for multiple convincing battle scenes in an open field. Shifting part of the action into the woods allows a director to use a fraction of those numbers, while the audience can keep their suspension of disbelief intact by assuming that “there’s a thousand more men following them behind those trees”. Not ideal, but if the alternative is viewers getting the equally erroneous assumption that all historical battles were over in thirty seconds or only involved a few hundred combatants, it could be worse.
Moviemakers’ habits coincide well with Bronze Age Scale. Make the fighting polities (be they kingdoms or otherwise) basically city-states, with one central settlement of a few thousand and the outlying villages under its control. Then the armies really are only a few hundred people; the marching distance to the enemy capital really is only a day or two; the king (or other commander) really can just shout orders and expect a large chunk of the army to hear it, without needing to work out in the background a consistent signal code (never mind showing it to the audience before the battle). And while there unquestionably is some accumulated traditional wisdom about how to do strategy and operations, depending on their personality traits a king can absolutely choose to ignore that, giving a hefty get-out-of-jail-free card to cover a wide variety of mistakes by the filmmakers.
If one wants to, they can even file the serial numbers off Genesis 14, no really. (Clearly the people who wrote it considered it to be the sort of thing that can happen in their historical period.) It conveniently tells us that Abraham had 318 military-age men “in his household”. Let’s say that a movie-worthy victorious exploit would be defeating a foe despite 10:1 numerical disadvantage (by a night raid on their camp), which would put the combined army at ~3000, split between four kings, at ~750 soldiers per king. Furthermore, it also very conveniently tells us that the strategic picture is that after being subjugated, these kingdoms would only stay conquered for twelve years before rebelling — and that, in addition to there being a whole lot of them in a limited geographic area (already plenty of material for shifting diplomacy), there are also a bunch of not-monarchical-in-the-same-sense polities scattered around, and these can join the fun at any moment.
You can cut *production* some slack, but not the movie itself. The movie is the end product and has to be critiqued for what it is on screen. If you can’t do a scene the way you want for reasons of practicality or whatever, you can always choose to not do it at all.
One note: Sergei Bondarchuk (the director of 1967’s War and Peace) did NOT “conscript 15,000 Red Army soldiers” for that film – for the simple reason that the Red Army (or, more formally, Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, generally abbreviated to RKKA) was already renamed to Soviet Army in 1946.
Essentially, Stalin felt that the old name had too much of Trotsky’s legacy and carried too much of an unspoken obligation to use it for the purposes of “worldwide revolution” to assist other “red” forces elsewhere – while the change of name symbolized that the USSR withstood its greatest challenge and it had become a crucible to forge the all-new Soviet identity. It’s also worth noting that the contrast between the Soviet victory (no matter how high the cost might have been compared to Stalin’s early goals to wrap it up sometime in 1942) and the general failure of most “red” uprisings/movements elsewhere up until that point (i.e. Finland, Hungary, and of course, Spain) made the former look and sound a lot better. Nowadays, of course, people mainly remember that Red Army won the war while the Soviet Union failed, so the impression is the opposite of what was intended at the time.
It is also worth noting that those 15,000 soldiers were only a fraction of the 120,000 people recorded to take part in the making of the film – turns out that tooth-to-nail ratio applies to film-making logistics as well! The production also involved (Wikipedia quote) “The collections of 58 museums and set decorations (from weapons and equipment to carts and snuffboxes) produced by over 40 factories. Over 9,000 costumes, 12,000 shakos (military caps from the period), 200,000 buttons. 8 bridges were built, 3 of which were over the Dnieper. In order to conceal wires, telegraph poles and other modern objects, 200 trees and 500 bushes were placed onto the sets. The territory used for the Borodino battlefield was filled with tents and soldier effigies.” One may call this wasteful for sure, but same could be said of a great number of Soviet projects – and most of them did not leave a legacy anywhere near as appealing as this.
I was rereading the Dothraki series and wondered how many animals nomads actually have. The rough numbers I got for modern Mongol and Iranian nomads were:
Mongol Nomads Livestock per Capita:
3 Horses
1 Yak/Camel
4 Cattle
30 Sheep/Goats
Iranian Nomads Livestock per Capita:
3 Donkeys/Mules
1.5 Cattle
18 Sheep/Goats
That’s a lot of animals! Average household size in both cases is 5-6 people! So each family has *hundreds* of animals. Obviously most of the time nomad populations would be relatively dispersed for grass logistics reasons. Genghis Khan’s armies alone would have had something like 1 million horses. The nomad population under his control would have had tens of millions of livestock.
You can see the Mongols are quite a bit wealthier in nomad terms than the Iranians (incidentally modern Iranian nomads actually own very few horses, something that didn’t use to be the case). From what I’ve read, Iranian nomads are living very much on the edge as they are gradually squeezed out and the nomadic population is in decline in absolute, not just relative terms.
Mongolian nomad life of course sucks and is desperately poor in a lot of ways, but by modern nomad standards (a very low standard!) they are doing pretty well economically. And as ~35% of Mongolia’s population is nomads and half the remainder still live in a Ger, they are much more culturally influential and mainstream than anywhere else.
Kazakh pre-Stalin nomad numbers per-capita roughly:
2 Horses
3 Cows
11 sheep/goats
That’s assuming all the livestock was theirs, which while most was, is of course not true. So probably worse than the modern Iranian nomads. They were having semi-regular famines even before Stalin did his thing, so seems plausible enough.
Incidentally Dr. Devereaux did not really talk about goats in that series much compared to sheep. The sheep-goat ratio varied widely. Mongols are roughly 50-50, Iranians 80-20 in favor of goats, Kazakhstan 80-20 in favor of sheep. My guess as a nonexpert would be goats are better for worse terrain. Kazakhstan is mostly flat, Mongolia mixed, and Iranian nomad areas mostly quite rough.
My guess as a nonexpert would be goats are better for worse terrain. Kazakhstan is mostly flat, Mongolia mixed, and Iranian nomad areas mostly quite rough.
I’ve also heard (both from books and from farmers) that goats are worse in terms of competing with agriculture (i.e. they will eat nearly anything, including people’s crops and incipient orchards), so maybe in Kazakhstan that was more of a concern than in Mongolia?
Keep in mind the length of the leg. 🙂 If you have sheep or goats, you are basically locked from long migrations. Sheep can travel a few hundred kilometers twice an year to better pastures, but it takes weeks while goats are notorious for being stubborn and hard to herd enmasse. Add to it that goats are not as economically productive as a sheep and you will discover them in much less regions, primarily mountains.
Regarding the number per household, keep in mind that you might have big variance in ownership. A big rich clan might have lots of slaves or poor servants to take care of big herds while most families would have subsistence count of animals, enough to get by and trade for necessities, but not much more. If you have more than you can protect, some youngster from hte neighboring clan will come and collect them, repaint them in a neutral color or reassamble them and sell them for spare parts so that he can afford a wife.
So a smart patriarch, if he has more livestock than he can protect, co-opts the youngster from a neighboring (poorer) clan by inviting him to marry one of the patriarch’s daughters. (Or two of the daughters, call them Leah and Rachel.)
On the one hand yes, on the other hand, Jacob is as rich as young men can get. In Genesis 14, his grandfather had 300+ military-age men in his household. It’s also illustrative of the social class that Leah and Rachel each come with their respective personal servant/slave. The latter are not even considered worth mentioning, other than the role they play in creating the next generation.
Of course, this is because if/when a patriarch realizes they are going to give a hefty to some son-in-law anyway, they might as well look for one who has the power (and the established track record at protecting flocks) to not have the dowry stolen from them in short order.
I do not know about historical mongol grazing practices, but I know about the different grazing methods of modern goat and sheep:
Sheep mainly eat soft grasses and saplings, stuff that grows close to the ground. Their grazing is not particular harmful to soil structure. Goats on the other hand prefer to eat bushes and branches. Goats will often climb trees to get to the twigs at the tops. Goats also do not fear thorns or other spiky parts.
That is why you use goats to clear blackberry brambles, but you use sheep to clear the remains from a harvested field.
So, if you have a mountaineous region with a lot of shrubbery, you will probably keep goats there. If you have poor grasslands, more likely sheep.
Goats and sheep also eat different things; sheep (and cattle and horse) are grazers and eat grass, while goats are browsers and eat broad-leaved plants, meaning “pretty much anything that isn’t grass.” The ratios might change based on the mix of plants available for foraging.
That’s exactly right, goats are browsers. Which could be an advantage, if you’re in an area where there are lots of wild plants for them to eat, or a disadvantage, if you’re in an area with, say, a lot of fruit growers who don’t want their saplings to be eaten. In Kazakhstan (which is where apples originate) that might be more of an issue than in Mongolia.
I worked with one community where the village council actually enacted a municipal ban (not sure if it was formalized or just customary) on goats, precisely because they were creating too much problems for farmers. Sheep were not really an issue there (possibly because it wasn’t really a grassland environment, possibly because of cultural reasons).
I just re-watched the scene, and one thing that strikes me is that most of the “confused melee” stuff doesn’t happen until after Maximus’ cavalry arrives. Before that, there is one shot where the Germans are pouring through a gap in an otherwise intact Roman line—which, okay, sure should’ve have just resulted in them getting stabbed from both sides, and was probably done because it was easy to get the extras to do safely, but the point is it’s not complete chaos *yet*.
Because of this, if we’re willing to take at face value Maximus’ cavalry seemingly arriving in one piece rather than laming half their horses, that really should’ve been the end of the battle, as the Germans find themselves caught between two different groups of Romans. But we are actually shown, on-screen, a chunk of the German army doing an about-face to meet the cavalry charge—which is really quite impressive on the Germans part!
Yeah, it’s kind of weird to make Maximus’ big move this elaborate cavalry ambush, and then portray it as not really accomplishing much as what is supposed to be an exposed flank manages to brace itself despite the fact that it really should be outpaced by the horses.
It’s one of those curiosities of the typical Hollywood approach to these kinds of battles. That there needs to be a certain sense of fair play to them, such that it’s anybody’s game, rather than having one side come in with a move that completely breaks the other. Even Lord of the Rings did that (even if in their case it was often a prelude of “the orcs just aren’t motivated enough to actually maintain their formation up until contact”, and then that can be the thing that breaks them).
This afflicts games as well – a war game where one side had basically no hope of winning (as was quite often the case historically) would be no fun to play.
I don’t know, there’s a few that play that quite well with the player being *on the losing side*. Halo Reach is the first that comes to mind, though that does still find a less 100% futile narrative for the player to play through in the context of a loss of a war.
With an explanation so thorough on their tactics, honestly I’m baffled by how the Roman’s ever managed to lose a battle.
That probably varies a lot depending on time and place, but I think in many cases will often come to some combination of “superior numbers”, “good use of terrain to limit the Roman advantage in direct contact (if not outright ambushing them)” and “giving them the runaround until they’re exhausted and then engaging when they won’t be able to bring their advantages most to bear”. Possibly also that, as you get into the later empire and the armies become more auxiliary heavy, the commitment to the cause necessary to be confident that they won’t start falling back at first contact becomes diminished.
Something that I think might have coincided with enemy armies becoming more dependent on heavier cavalry, that Roman infantry at least at the time were less suited to withstanding.
Well, my totally unprofessional answer to that is: they didn’t. Seriously, between the Punic wars (Hannibal!) 200 BC, and the decline (300+BC) Romans were mostly winning, and expanding their empire. They might lose sometimes when surprised/overwhelmed by some sudden attack/rebelion, but once the Rome gets serious about fighting you, and sends the proper, consular army against you, you’re doomed.
Sorry, I meant 300 AD, obviously
To prepare for asking question “how”, let´s start with “when”. So collect examples between 200 BC and 300 AD? Mainly Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_external_wars_and_battles
some supplementation
*Battle of Callinicus, 171 BC. Consul Licinius Crassus in command, held the field but with great losses
*Battle of the Port of Carthage, 147 BC
*Battle of Noreia, 113 BC. Consul Papirius Carbo in command, survived
*Battle of Suthul, 110 BC
*Battle of Muthul, 109 BC. Consul Caecilius Metellus in command, survived
*Battle of Burdigala, 107 BC. Consul Cassius Longinus in command, killed in action
*Battle of Arausio, 105 BC. Consul Mallius Maximus in command, survived
*Battle of Protopachium, 89 BC
*Battle of Mount Scorobas, 88 BC
*Battle of Halys, 82 BC
*Battle of Carrhae, 53 BC
*Battle of Gergovia, 52 BC
*Clades Lolliana, 16 BC
*Battle of Teutoburg Gorest, 9 AD
*Battle of Rhandeia, 62 AD
*First Battle of Tapae, 87 AD
*Battle of Carnuntum, 170 AD. Emperor Marcus Aurelius present, survived
*Battle of Nisibis, 217 AD. Emperor Macrinus present, survived
*Battle of Misiche, 244 AD. Emperor Gordianus died of wounds
*Battle of Abrittus, 251 AD. Emperor Decius in command, killed in action
*Battle of Edessa, 260 AD. Emperor Valerianus captured
*Battle of Placentia, 271 AD. Emperor Aurelianus in command, survived
*Battle of Carrhae, 296 or 297.
So, what worked against Romans?
Doing a quick read through Wikipedia, the answers are, in order of how often they work:
1. Catch them on the march in an ambush (8 Times: Noreia, Muthul, Suthul, Burdigala, Gergovia, Teutoburg Forest, Tapae, Placentia)
2. Be the Persians (5 Times: Carrhae, Nisibis, Misiche, Edessa, Carrhae)
3. Have the Roman commander make egregiously bad decisions (4 Times, Callinicus, Arausio, Rhandeia, Abrittus)
4. Defeat them so thoroughly the Romans refuse to ever talk about what actually happened (3 Times: Halys, Carnutum, Clades Lolliana / 6 Times if we include the overlap with 2)
5. Fight a Roman who’s commanding a non-Roman army (2 Times, Protopachium, Mount Scorobas)
6. Fight a naval battle (1 Time: Port of Carthage)
More seriously, we can see that the Roman army is as vulnerable to ambush as any other army and that it gets into bloody but indecisive stalemates with primarily cavalry armies like the Persian/Sassanid ones, where neither side can actually dislodge the other – the horse archer can’t drive back the disciplined legionary, but the legionary can’t chase the horse archer.
Of course, even if you defeat one Roman army, you then have the problem of Second Roman Army. And Third, and Fourth… The Energizer Bunny, or Persian postman, of warfare.
The consuls of Roman Empire were not sent off to war. Nor were the consuls of late Empire. Crassus was not the ordinary consul when he was made a prop for Bacchantes. And it took Romans 33 years to ask the standards back. Antonius was defeated, too, though not made a trophy nor on a single battlefield.
Before 300+ AD, note that in a matter of 17 years, 3 emperors lost life or liberty in a battle with a foreign foe:
*244 AD – Gordianus lost a battle and his life. However, he was carried away mortally wounded and buried in Zeugma. Still in Persia, but Persians did not bother exhuming him for a trophy
*251 AD – Decius lost a battle and his life. However, he sank into a swamp and could not be retrieved for a trophy
*260 AD – Valerianus lost a battle and his liberty. He got stuffed and placed on display as a trophy… after being permitted to live his natural life, for he made a good trophy alive as well as dead. Persians had rebuffed requests to ransom him.
After AD 300… note that while Rome was destroyed, it was oddly rare for Rome to actually lose field battles!
The initial Gothic War – yes:
*377 – Battle of Dibaltum
*378 – Battle of Adrianople; Emperor Valens in command and fell in battle but not retrieved for trophy; circumstances uncertain – some accounts suggest cut down anonymously in battlefield and never identified, some say burnt in a house
*380 – Battle of Thessalonice; Emperor Theodosius in command but survived
But Rome significantly recovered from Gothic war. Afterwards…
Alaric unsuccessfully attacked Italy in 401…402 and was defeated in field battles (Pollentia and Verona). These were Roman victories.
But when Alaric actually conquered Rome, 408…410, he did not win any field battles!
*When Vandals conquered Africa 429-439 – maybe battle of Calama?
*Battle of Utus, 447, was a major victory of Attila over Rome – walls of Constantinople held, but Rome probably lost Europe in front of the walls
Battle of Catalaunian Fields was a Roman victory over Attila
When Vandals captured Rome in 455, they did not face a field army in a field battle
Nor does there seem to have been a major field battle in 476, when Rome was finally destroyed.
Part of the reason Bret is so interested in is of course that they rarely did. On a tactical level, it is a very “killer app” to field massive amounts of heavy infantry, because close to the only thing that can stand up to it is other heavy infantry. Part of their long successful streak is that except another Roman army, they faced very few armies capable of matching their heavy infantry in numbers.
On a tactical level, it is a very “killer app” to field massive amounts of heavy infantry, because close to the only thing that can stand up to it is other heavy infantry.
Not really? There are many times and places where large amounts of heavy infantry got demolished by and were strictly inferior to various forms of cavalry, and ultimately this is exactly the route that the Roman military took: by medieval times it was by and large dominated by cavalry, most often horse archers.
They just haven’t (aren’t capable to) deployed enough heavy infantry
They rarely did! Which is rather the entire point: The roman army was very successful, and won *significantly* more often than it lost, especially in pitched battles.
But a lot of times the easiest ways to “beat” a roman army seems to have been to simply draw things out long enough for some general to reovlt in some other part of the Empire, forcing the Emperor to rush to put out the fire.
That sounds pretty clear to me.
This feels like a 20th-century naval battle being won by submarine. Subs are cool, they have some uses, but they don’t have the bulk of the fleet’s firepower and they aren’t central to most naval doctrine.
This is like fighting that 20th-century naval battle in extremely shallow water. Yeah, no modern warship handles shoals well, but a submarine is going to be uniquely disadvantaged.
Maybe Ridley Scott thinks Maximus is telling the cavalry to support the infantry line? That interpretation feels the least strawman-ey.
Yeah, but shouting “Victoria!” after a victory sounds positively English. 1837-1900 English specifically.
And abandoning your shield without running away traditionally earned the death penalty, to be carried out by the front line of the enemy force.
“‘Hold the line!’
Maybe Ridley Scott thinks Maximus is telling the cavalry to support the infantry line? That interpretation feels the least strawman-ey.”
I’m confident it is literally Ridley Scott referencing whatever George Lucas was stealing from when he wrote the Gold Team (failed) attack run Death Star in Star Wars. Sub in “Stay on target!” for “Hold the line!” All of the nonsensical stuff about the cavalry in this scene evaporates once you realize that they are not men on horses but are in fact flying radio-equipped close air support bombers, it’s just that the visuals are misleading so for some reason you see animals and whatnot.
“these fellows […] have been living next to – and often fighting in (as auxiliaries or allies) – the Roman army for generations, leading to the adoption of a fair bit of the Roman (particularly auxiliary) kit and tactics.”
It had struck me somewhere in last week’s post that it was a missed opportunity not to have the Marcomanni/Quadi and the Auxilia resemble each other. Like, that could have said something interesting and grounded about how the Roman limes weren’t some impenetrable cultural force field separating radically different peoples.
And as this post wrapped up, I had a strange intuition that an animated production might be likelier to do more-accurate Roman warfare than a live-action movie. If nothing else, having things organized makes animators’ lives easier; they might be tempted to overplay standardization and coordination into an unrealistic ideal (copy-paste to victory!) but would probably be less tempted by chaotic-badass nonsense.
And much less interference by safety officers…
Have we noticed that the “Barbarians” have absolutely no cavalry in Gladiator? Which is really not historically accurate. Especially, as Rome was quite notorious for hiring, or compelling the service, Barbarian cavalry. The sources we have are quite clear that the Macromanni and Quadi did have substantial cavalry forces. Some of whom accompanied Marcus Aurelius in his suppression of the revolt by the Governor of Syria.
“That said, I can’t call to mind any example of Roma – a word that is going to conjure both the city and the goddess – being described as victrix.“
A quick search on the PackHum site of Latin texts gives one example from Livy, AUC 38.50.8.1: “ Roma uictrix uictorem Africanum expellat”. Ovid and Florus also appear to use victrix as an adjective for Roma, similar sort of situation. That’s it, though.
Three times in all of the extant Latin literature, however, seems to me to prove Bret right. Roma victrix is no Scipio victor.
And I’d not there it is used as a simple adjective, intended to highlight the inversion of the line. What it isn’t – and what I was trying to get at – is a divine epithet, or standard imperial slogan. I don’t think there is a ‘Roma Victrix’ one would, for instance, pray to. That’s just Victoria.
Did you search coins? Not trying to disprove you, because I’m with you on your argument here. It does seem like Roma Victrix is a not uncommon on coins of the Flavians (and Galba too?). It’s been a while since I studied coins much, though.
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces249412.html
https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/lucernae/90/product/servius_sulpicius_galba_6869_ad_silver_denarius_spanish_mint_tarraco__roma_victrix_roma/1683685/Default.aspx
https://es.numista.com/catalogue/pieces249092.html
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces244794.html
Was Victoria a version so to speak of Minerva? Was there a “Minerva Victrix?” Roman equivalent to Athena Nike?
Regarding the ultimate “Roma Victrix”, the copula (“is”) is frequently understood in Latin.
The point about the standards is interesting – I think the only movie / tv show I’ve seen that treated standards like they were important was Sharpe (obligatory “Major Lennox answered with his life!” here), but so many historical and fantasy movies treat them like they’re completely unimportant, only having them appear in the aftermath of battles like this, just kind of stuck in the ground somehow. Which is kind of a shame, because there’s so much intereting stuff they could do story-wise with them
But, but…he has a cousin at horse guards! And friends at court!
Were there any pre-modern armies where nepotism wasn’t a factor?
For that matter, are there any modern armies where it isn’t?
“Rome”, “The Eagle” and “Centurion” all treat legionary standards as quite important, though of course none of them is a flawless depiction of Roman warfare.
Rosemary Sutcliff’s “Eagle of the Ninth” was my introduction to being a Roman Army fanboi.
When I showed my teen-aged children the movie “Zulu”, I pointed out that the Zulu tactics were parallel to Roman tactics: shield, short stabbing weapon, coherent formations, and a strategy which mostly won. What’s your opinion of the Zulu tactics in that movie?
But the Zulus in 1879 and the German tribes in AD 180 weren’t facing gunpowder firearms. That makes a world of difference.
The Zulu military system was quite successful against neighboring African tribes at the same level of technology, but that only took them so far.
If saving a citizen is an acceptable reason for leaving the formation, does that mean that a legionary isn’t allowed to step out of the line to save an auxiliary or an ally?
Technically no, but it’s a battle, not a parade. If another legionary gets shot or stabbed because you were out of position, you’ll get blamed. If it doesn’t cause a disaster and in some tiny way improves relations between Roman and auxiliaries/allies, who’s going to care?
According to the passage in Livy, the oath was originally sworn between the citizen-soldiers informally before becoming part of the official proceedings during the second Punic war. So its purpose is to strengthen cohesion and discipline within the units and was worded that way because “fellow citizen” is the appropriate way to describe the kinds of people to the left and to the right of a citizen-soldier.
Since citizen units and allied/auxiliary units usually didn’t intermix but were placed in large contiguous blocks, the question of “I am allowed to help these people?” would not arise very often – there’s after all 10 to 25 meters between the edge of the legion maniple/cohort and the neighbouring socii/auxiliary cohort and even if an opportunity to help arises it only applies to the 20-odd people at the edge of the formation out of an legion of thousands. So the question of “Was the person you helped by dashing out of formation actually a citizen?” is basically a rounding error in the larger picture.
A story that starts from the perspective of a new Velite could be a great frame for showing off the workings of the Roman Army.
You get the arc of a kid who first experiences the shock (ha) of contact fighting as a wide-eyed support player with a front row seat. To go from the initial fear of “Oh no what have I done I’m the least well equipped person standing in between two armies”, then later as a confident skirmisher, an eager Hastati, a seasoned Principe, a wise Triarii, or whatever.
Regarding not dropping your shield: what if you get an enemy spear stuck in it, like a pilum? Or you’re unlucky and someone manages to hack it into very bad shape?
These are human beings, not robots. If you don’t have your shield but a couple of your fellow legionaries testify that your shield was broken / unusable and you stayed in the line anyway, you’ll be excused. (Unless, human beings being what they are, you’ve severely pissed off the centurion recently and he’s looking for an excuse to punish you.) If you don’t have your shield and none of your fellows remember seeing you between the start of the battle and the aftermath, that’s probably not going to go well for you.
It’s interesting to imagine a alternate version of Gladiator. Same battle, but now Maximus is portrayed as an incredibly incompetent general. The men are sad because so many of their comrades died, and the Senate is furious. He is rightfully sacked and given a chance as a gladiator only as an alternative to execution. Commodus did nothing wrong.
Tbe ACW system of political generals occasionally produced a commander of total military incompetence. I don’t believe the Roman system was capable of producing a general that bad.
So, I am not sure if Dr. Deveraux missed this line or simply did not consider it worth mentioning (or perhaps, did not consider it representative of what transpired on the screen) but we actually have the film’s own casualty count, for what it’s worth.
https://movie-sounds.org/famous-movie-samples/quotes-with-sound-clips-from-gladiator-2000/i-will-not-believe-that-they-fought-and-died-for-nothing
> Five thousand of my men are out there in the freezing mud. Three thousand of them are bloodied and cleaved. Two thousand will never leave this place.
I.e. it appears like we are meant to believe that Maximus had a 7,000-strong army (I wanted to write 10,000 at first, but “of them” clearly implies that it’s 5,000 living soldiers (2,000 healthy and 3,000 wounded) and 2,000 dead) and lost 28.6% of them dead while 42.9% have received wounds of varying severity. (We are clearly meant to think at least some of those 3,000 would have been crippled for life, and knowledge of premodern medicine makes me suspect a good number of those 3,000 would have died of infections not long after Maximus’ speech, but this line is so vague, it’s hard to say anything with more certainty.) In all, that up to 70% of the force out of commission – and all after a single battle.
For comparison: the 1993 Krivosheev estimate of Soviet casualties during WWII generally has the irrecoverable casualties from successful strategic offensives at 11-13% for the more difficult operations (Tikhvin Offensive (which made at least some supply of Leningrad possible), Stalingrad offensive, the lifting of Leningrad blockade, Third Kharkov Offensive, Battle of the Dnieper, Dnieper–Carpathian offensive (early 1944 expulsion of Axis troops from Ukraine) and the Budapest/Lake Balaton Offensive) and total casualties including the wounded at 40-50%. The (comparatively) less draining operations like Bagration, Moscow 1941-1942, the 1943 Caucasus offensives, Vyborg-Petrozavodsk offensive (vs. Finland), the Petsamo offensive into occupied Norway from Murmansk, Vienna Offensive, Battle of Berlin, etc. had 5-8% irrecoverable casualties and 20-30% total. (The simplest, like the offensives into Manchuria, Romania, Serbia and Czechia, had ~1% irrecoverable casualties and <5% total.) That estimate is predictably believed to be underestimated, but generally on the order of ~20%, and often from things like undercounting POW deaths. For a specific example like the Battle of Kursk (technically a defensive operation) a German historian in 2017 claimed this work undercounted casualties by about 40% – but that would still "only" increase irrecoverable casualties from 5.5% to ~7.7%, and total from ~14% to ~20%. (I have omitted the other defensive operations and the failed offensives like Rzhev, where irrecoverable casualty rates were generally much worse – sometimes almost total like when the forces defending Kiev were enveloped after 2.5 months – for the simple reason Maximus was not defending and achieved his territorial objectives.)
Now, those were all prolonged engagements lasting weeks or even months. Thus, a more comparable reference point for how bad these numbers are might be the Battle of Lenino – a two-day engagement in October 1943 in Belarus which is remarkable for being the first combat deployment of the Soviet-aligned Polish troops of 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division. They made limited territorial gains in the face of extremely heavy German resistance and were withdrawn from the front after losing 3,000 people dead and wounded (while the Germans are believed to have lost ~1,800), This was out of 14 380 total (including a female-only company of submachinegunners, one of whose members, Aniela Krzywoń, was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union after pulling out staff documents from a burning truck at the cost of her life), amounting to 27% casualties – and this was hardly acceptable even by the Soviet standards*, and the Soviet General Gordov commanding this front was (temporarily) demoted after this and several other high-casualty operations. (He was executed in 1950 alongside General Rybalchenko and Marshal Kulik after a wiretap revealed all three to have been strongly critical of Stalin, of collective agriculture and to have even advocated democracy.)
Hence, Maximus, according to the film’s own narrative, had suffered almost double the casualty rate of a fairly notorious Soviet-planned battle and his numbers seem substantially worse than a typical Soviet strategic offensive. (In fact, they seem comparable to the utterly notorious Rzhev Meatgrinder, with ~75% losses, of which ~25% were irrecoverable. Nobody certainly celebrated that one.) Let’s just say that your version sounds a lot more plausible than the film’s.
*In fairness, Molotov was reported to have described these same losses as “acceptable given the circumstances” in a phone call with Wanda Wasilewska, Stalin’s favourite Polish intellectual – as evidenced by her ability to hold direct phone calls with the highest-ranking members of the Politburo. But to be even more fair, Molotov had also described the 1937 purges as “necessary” as late as in the 1970s-1980s (we know this thanks to a remarkably eerie book titled “140 Conversations with Molotov”), so his estimation of what constituted acceptable human losses was clearly rather different from those of almost anybody else.
The only battle I can think of that is close is (and I feel like I bring this up a lot) the Battle of Lund in 1676: Where the 8000 strong swedish army suffered 3-5 thousand casualties and the 13,000 strong danish force suffered around 8,000 (with 2500)
IE: both sides suffered around or over 50% casualties. (the reason the battle was so bloody was that it was kind of chaotic, with lots of instances of troops breaking, but then successfuly reforming and having another go)
A stupid question – you mentioned that the military oath is about picking a weapon, strike an enemy or help a citizen. How literal was it taken, especially the citizen part? Were there fault lines between the roman legions and the socii ones? I suppose that it would be extremely stupid to get technical in the middle of battle, but people have been stupid in many situations when they shouldn’v’ve been.
Also, the oath is coming from the republican period, but was it used by the imperial legions as well or the tradition has drifted over centuries?
Edit notes:
>ROman army standards
double capitalization there
> I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
this sentence is bugging me for a long long time. I’ll be eternally grateful if you can find a moment to do it.
I think the differentiation between socii and citizen for recovery of the wounded would probably be a moot point. They fought in separate units with gaps in-between them, so the only folks anywhere near a someone who was wounded would be from their respective social units anyway.
I’m curious what a “pink gown”[1] version of this scene would look like, using modern cultural/cinematographic signifiers to convey the correct mood and character beats.
[1] https://www.exurbe.com/the-borgias-vs-borgia-faith-and-fear/
And that’s another TV series to look out for. Thanks for that, I think.
“It is really hard to get good screen-caps of this, because of all of the really quick cuts and the frequency with which Scott has people in the foreground run in front of the camera, which obscures a lot of the action”
I believe that is the point. Extreme close-ups, fast cuts, and shaky came were all the rage during that time and seemed to exist so they didn’t have to do real fight choreography or come up with visually interesting action.
The fact the Matrix movies did really made them stand out back then.
> But what we actually see in late medieval fighting manuals – the oldest fighting manuals we have in this part of the world is a an emphasis on defense and strikes performed ‘in the same time,’ which is to say that you block with your shield in the same moment that you are delivering a strike with your sword (or, with later two-handed swords, you block in such a manner that you can smoothly transition into a strike in one motion, while still closing off an angle of attack).
This is… often overstated, tbh. There is a lot of “my turn, your turn” in medieval fencing treatises as well, because it’s largely inherent to using a weapon – to strike you reach out and extend it, but after you’ve _done_ that you’re in an extended position and not structured to strike again, so you withdraw it before your next strike. Obviously with a sword and a shield you can cheat this somewhat by defending and striking at once, but you still need to recover your sword before striking again. Two handed swords give you some more flexibility to deliver second actions from the ‘spent’ position you are in after a first strike, but not an infinite amount, and people trying to insist that it’s not “my turn your turn” is the source of a lot of the historically very bad takes on HEMA.
Having said that, it does become more entrenched in later fencing texts. One part of the reason is the shift purely to one-handed swords and using only the sword; another part is conventions that arise mostly for safety in the salle when practicing before the days of fencing masks.
As far as I understand, it is also about survival in an actual duel. If you have two people with 18th century light swords, and both lunge for a lethal stab, the likely result is that you get two dead people. It is not a particularly satisfying conclusion.
Well, sort of.
It is certainly commonly _justified_ that way. However it’s also notable that epee (the sport fencing weapon which most closely reflects the play of an actual duel, and which arose after the invention of the fencing mask) has no priority system and very commonly sees fencers defaulting to counterattacking as their standard defensive action. Nor is this just a modern sport adaptation – many 19th century epee books advise decisive counter offence when they try to get close to you and do anything at all, because that basically wins outright if they’re at all hesitant or doing anything complicated.
To be honest, in HEMA we can find both takes very easily, especially in the Italian authors (which I know best).
Both systems were known since Fiore dei Liberi: the first was known as “parata e risposta”, or parry-and-riposte, and is the basic one. The second method, to defend and attack “in un tempo solo” (in one time), was considered the standard whenever fighting with two weapons, i.e. sword and any kind of shield/dagger/cape/a second sword; it was also used when fighting with a single weapon (of any kind), and it becomes the normal attitude in rapier fencing toward the late XVIth century and the eraly XVII.
It is rather common, even an advantage, to switch between these two approaches within a single bout. When two people fight with swords, it’s commonplace for them to fall into a cadence, where each side attacks in a predictable tempo. Breaking that tempo is an advantage, and one way to do that is to utilize one of the attack/defend combo moves.
I think we’re using that word differently: although it’s extremely difficult to define, tempo doesn’t mean technically “rhythmn” in Italian HEMA, and neither in modern sport fencing as far as I know; I don’t if it has assumed that meaning elsewhere.
In Battle of Kulikovo (1380), the Russians concealed a cavalry regiment in a wood which launched a flank attack on the Mongols and was the deciding factor of the battle. It is possible to conceal cavalry in a forest. https://warhistory.org/@msw/article/battle-of-kulikovo-field
Did they get the cavalry into the ambush position by riding swiftly through the forest at a gallop? Or did they slowly work their horses into a position through the trees? Did they position the cavalry before the Mongols were in a position to observe the thing being done?
Pre-positioned
Bret, this typo interrupted my reading:
whrd o show up variably
One thing that strikes me about this is that it’s a precursor to an increasingly common problem in filmmaking, which is that seemingly no one knows how to make battle* sequences anymore. It’s not just (or even primarily) the lack of realism, it’s that they seemingly don’t know how to portray the narrative of a battle. At best you seem to end up with stuff like this (or Rings of Power) where battles are essentially a series of tenuously connected or outright acausal events. More often you get a Braveheart-style rush at the beginning before the battle becomes, essentially, a moving matte painting while the main characters do main character things.
*as distinct from action/fight sequences
Has anyone ever managed to do a satisfying battle sequence in film? You mention ‘no one can do it anymore’, but I’m not aware of anyone who has done it *at all*.
Granted, I’m not a film buff so that’s not exactly saying much…
So, I take it you disagree with all of the praise our host has devoted to the pivotal battles of Jackson’s LOTR trilogy?
Sure, he’s complained about a lot of the details, particularly for Helm’s Deep, and yet, this was (a part) of his summary.
> I worry that the temptation will be to reduce my analysis to “book good, movie bad.” But I actually think that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings must stand as both one of the most difficult and one of the most successful adaptations in film history. Many of the film’s shortcomings in portraying a sense of battlefield realism have more to do with the constrains of the medium. Film is an incredible powerful medium, after all, but also a very limited one. Time is very limited and everything in a film must be compressed. Given those limitations, Jackson’s effort is nothing short of marvelous, even if it doesn’t always capture the depth and nuance of the books.
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/14/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-vi-black-sails-and-gleaming-banners/
Maybe I could take my own stab at it, but though I watch a good number of films, not that many involve large-scale fighting. Though, to think of it, it’s a fairly interesting definition question: at what point does a fight become a battle? Is it purely a “You know it when you see it?” thing, or is there a more formal boundary? Another question is whether something like Nolan’s Dunkirk (most of which shows soldiers under bombardment with no way to fight back – the only ones who ever do are the fighter pilots, and even then, not very effectively) could be said to depict “a battle” under a formal definition of things or not.
(Though, even if we say it does, I would say it also suffers from the “tenous connection” issue – in that it shows us how hellish everything is for seemingly all the Allied troops involved for 95% of the runtime – and then the final 5% suddenly have a feel-good moment where a massive number of civilian ships show up to the rescue, and the credits tell us the evacuation was actually a huge success, in spite of practically everything we have been seeing up until then. It’s even more jarring when the one civilian ship we got to observe directly was also the one where a shellshocked soldier snapped and committed manslaughter against a teenage crewmember for daring to go back. It’s still an impressive film in many ways, but the ending feels largely divorced from the rest of the narrative.)
Duh. How could I possibly have forgotten LoTR? No idea, but I managed it.
In retrospect I’d probably caveat my comment with ‘pre-modern battle’. It seems like a lot of the ‘language’ film has developed for portraying battles works pretty well for its intended purpose: dramatising battles in the world wars.
“at what point does a fight become a battle?”
I think you’ve inadvertently hit the nail on the head there. For a decent majority of media…it doesn’t. A battle scene is just depicted as ‘one big fight scene’, and that’s likely why they feel a bit flat or disjointed. They’re just a scattered collection of individual fights that are just barely stitched together into a greater whole (I’m thinking specifically of the Battle of Winterfell here, but there are many others, like the Battle of Wakanda for instance).
Meanwhile, LoTR (which I’m glad you reminded me of), instead treats the ebb and flow of the battle itself as the key source of narrative intrigue and tension, with individual ‘fights’ serving to support that narrative.
I suppose it’s a multi-faceted spectrum sort of thing. Battle of Wakanda is just a bunch of individual interlinked fights. Gladiator sort of gets that the action of the armies is the key source of narrative tension, but bungles the details. LoTR seems to get as close to as many things right as anyone ever has.
“all of the visual signifiers of a highly comeptent”
-> competent
“Auxilia cohorts would likely be deployed to the flanks ad light auxiliary”
-> and
“If Maximus’ army was up to ROman army standards”
-> Roman
“whrd o show up variably in our sources”
-> who
“While Hollywood loves passive Roman formations receiving ‘barbarian’ charges, in practice both formations would likely advance steadily before ending with a charge over the last few dozen meters before contact.”
I find this extremely unlikely. That distance is just too far.
The point of the charge is to disrupt and, ideally, punch through the enemy formation (most formations have a front and back, and if your formation is in good order, hitting the enemy formation from the side ends VERY BADLY for the flanked unit). For that, you need a solid mass. And running a couple of dozen yards is going to disrupt that. People will trip, they’ll run at different rates, they’ll get injured by enemy missiles, etc. That will result in a staggered line hitting the enemy shield wall, which means a bunch of individuals hitting the shield wall, which means they all die.
Further, elsewhere you discuss the yelling–or lack thereof. This speaks to intimidation. And while WE are intimidated by a group of screaming, angry people running at us, that simply wouldn’t be intimidating to a shield wall. If you’re screaming and running at me, I’m finding a place to insert my spear so that you run onto it. It’s MUCH more intimidating when the enemy approaches you in good order, at a walk, and just does not stop. Now I don’t have a place to insert my spear, or really do much of anything except receive the charge. And if my side does manage to take out a few of your people, you have sufficient time to reposition so that you don’t have any gaps.
The charge itself would be done at the last moment. The full impact of a shield charge can be achieved in as few as three steps, if you position your body correctly (the trick is to go a bit low and push up when you hit). At that point I’ve already tried to hit you with my spear once and am probably recovering, putting me off-balance–a good target for a thrust with your sword. This is where most of the killing would happen: That period of a few seconds where the shields are in contact, before the armies pulled off one another.
Odds are that you wouldn’t punch through right away, because the whole point of the enemy unit is to keep you from doing that. What would happen is that we’d push you back, and you’d retreat to just out of spear range. Then we’d lob missiles at each other for a bit, trying to create an opening. The Roman side would rotate people out, as well. Then we’d do it all over again. Timing and frequency would depend on the conditions–the point would be to try to hit when the enemy isn’t prepared, or to just keep hitting until the enemy could no longer be prepared. My guess is the route would happen during one of these charges, as people’s nerve broke at the prospect of being hit yet again.
That ability to rotate troops to the front is probably an under-appreciated advantage for Rome. I know it’s highly appreciated, but until you’ve spent a few hours holding a shield while other people try to inflict damage on you, you don’t really understand how big an advantage. You can rather quickly become too tired to raise your shield arm–at which point you die. All armies certainly rotated people out (again, the alternative was death), but Rome was especially good at it. And that meant you had fresh troops who’ve been itching for action hitting exhausted and dispirited troops. The results are fairly predictable, and entirely in Rome’s favor.
The part you are forgetting is where the Romans throw their pilums at you. That’s done from a dozen or so meters away, and it’s intended to create those gaps in the line you mention. Then they have to exploit those gaps before the oppos have time to fill them in. I would imagine that requires running.
Even if you run, unless the enemy is egregiously stupid AND badly trained it won’t matter much. It’s not that hard to close a shield wall quickly–you just sort of step to your left or right and cover the gap. There’s no way Romans would run fast enough to be able to exploit a gap from a dozen meters away, even at a run, unless the pilum toss disrupted the line to the degree that musket fire would.
The tests I’ve seen show the pilum as vey good at messing with one’s ability to use a shield, and THAT would be profoundly useful. A shield wall only works if it’s united, if everyone’s holding the line. If the Roman shield wall (in good order) hits a shield wall where half the people are struggling against the leverage of the pilum (or injuries), it’s going to end badly for the enemies of Rome. Even if the Romans don’t break through the formation, they’ll punch deep into it, doing tremendous slaughter to most of the ranks before pulling out again. And each time they do that, it’ll be easier to do it the next time. And all of that is stuff you can do pretty well from a dozen yards (35 feet or so) or so away. While I have ample time to close ranks to account for anyone taken out of action in that space, I don’t have time to remove the heavy spear from my shield, which results in a ragged shield wall, which is about as effective in a push as not having a shield wall.
> I can almost imagine how scathingly an author like Tacitus or Ammianus would report such a defeat, laying the blame with Maximus for arrogantly sabotaging his own negotiations by foolishly moving his cavalry in an obvious aggressive ambush position and then failing to prepare properly for the actual battle.
I would get enjoyment out of reading a faux-Tacitus discussion of How This Battle Should’ve Ended, if you ever need content ideas!
Also, having started a job this year which involves regular trekking through several-hundred-year-old forests, I have a much better appreciation of just how difficult it is for someone on foot (let alone cavalry) to get through such terrain. While the specifics are doubtless different between the submontane tropical Hawaiian rainforest I’m in and forest elsewhere, a lot of the inconveniences are, I imagine, universal (such as giant dead trees lying directly across the way you want to go, thick undergrowth impeding passage, unsteady and slippery footing, etc.).
As far as I understand, there is a huge difference between a wild forest with dead trees lying around, dense undergrowth and so on, and managed forest (where are no dead trees, since they all have been used for firewood, no dense undergrowth, which had been eaten by herds of cattle and pigs or had been cut down and so on. The forests around settlements probably were well-managed even by Ancient Germans.
Old forests don’t generally have a lot of undergrowth. Competition for light is intense, and trees are going to block the light fairly high in the canopy. This will leave little light for stuff under the canopy to live off of. Where you see a lot of undergrowth is at the edges and in clearings that generate due to trees dying.
As for the trees, if it’s a healthy forest you’re not going to see massive amounts of dead logs. This is because fungus and other organisms very quickly break down the wood into its component nutrients. This is actually a really, really significant thing in the history of life–it evolved after the Carboniferous, and in fact is why the Carboniferous ended. During the Carboniferous you had trees and other large-scale woody plants, but nothing was capable of eating the cellulose that made up the cell walls. So it all piled up and compressed. This is where you get coal. When something evolved to eat cellulose, you suddenly saw vastly less coal produced. (I’m obviously simplifying a great deal, but that’s the broad strokes.)
Old growth forests are going to have very little undergrowth deep in the forest, and what undergrowth there is, is going to be very patchy. There will be fallen limbs and things, but a lot of them are going to be varying degrees of softness, as they are decaying.
That said, it’s not like there aren’t a thousand things to prevent horses from galloping through a forest. Animals make dens, which collapse (in geology it’s called bioturbation). Trees put out roots that, among other things, provide structural stability to the tree–buttress roots, they’re called. There are going to be roots and vines and things–parts of plants that are intended to do things other than provide surfaces for photosynthesis (these aren’t undergrowth, because they extend fairly far up). There’s going to be animals. There are going to be holes from where trees used to be, but which have rotted away. It’s going to be relatively dark–remember, the whole reason there’s no undergrowth is that the trees are competing to gobble up the light. There are going to be fallen limbs, and low limbs that can smack you in the face. Pigs will root through the area, leaving rather odiferous ruts and unevenness in the area (I had to spend some time investigating an area dug up by hogs in some detail, they do a LOT of damage). Oh, and there’s a hostile army that obviously knows the Roman army is there and likely set some basic traps (caltrops were a thing, and even ones made of sharpened wood would make a horse have a really bad day). So even if we assume we’re fairly deep in the woods, there are PLENTY of reasons why galloping horses through the area is a bad idea.
Should note this also depends a lot on the *type* of forest. (as in, what actual trees are growing there)
You can even see it here in differences between eg. pine and spruce forests, who have very different undergrowth structures.
Hmm, no that is based on outdated claims. It is now known that even in the Carboniferous lignin consuming fungi existed. The large coal deposits formed in that time had more to do with in that time period an enormous area was covered by long-lasting swamps.
I had been told that those swamps weren’t much different, outside of containing different species, from contemporary swamps which also produce peat which also has the potential to transform into coal under the correct future circumstances.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/planetary_sciences/coal/
Note, this should not be taken as an attack on you or something. I myself have also fallen for such internet myths a few times.
“It is now known”
Is it known, or is there one 2016 paper arguing that? I did a quick search and I can’t tell if this is really the New Consensus, or just uncertainty and people latching onto whatever paper sounds good to them.
“Note, this should not be taken as an attack on you or something.”
No worries. Most of my work has been Quaternary Desert Southwest, so I’m a bit out of my area of expertise here. And it’s paleontology, a field where fist-fights are common enough today and organized violence on a much larger scale isn’t unheard of. I’ve got a thick skin.
That said, I simply don’t buy the “there were just more swamps” idea. Swamps wouldn’t produce just coal; there would be significant sedimentological and geochemical things associated with them. Peat swamps are VASTLY smaller than coal deposits as well, as it requires some fairly specific conditions to generate significant peat–high water content, lots of vegetation growth, low bioturbation (which brings oxygen to the subsurface), and few others. (To get a sense of bioturbation’s impacts on this, look at what invasive earthworms are doing to Michigan.)
Further, that lignin consuming fungus existed doesn’t mean it was widespread, or effective at consuming dead wood. Look at the Gray Fossil Site–we know that scavengers exist, yet we still see tremendous piles of dead animals. If the lignin-consuming organisms existed it doesn’t mean they can operate in the chemical spaces available. For example, if they required oxygen they’d quickly find themselves in serious trouble in a pile of wood (which would still be rotting to some extent, which messes with the local chemistry). And genetic evidence (for what it’s worth) suggests that the ancestors to today’s lignin-eating fungi didn’t evolve until the Permian. (I’m wording that sentence very carefully).
Finally, I’m dubious about the claims in that 2016 paper. To make a claim that controversial requires a lot of fossil support, and the authors apparently did not see fit to present much. One photo is included in the paper, and I’m not convinced by it. They do not have enough evidence to say that those fibers are what they claim they are, and we can assume that’s their BEST data. The rest of the paper is “Maybe-kinda-sorta this could have possibly happened.” At best, the argument is too under-supported for me to be willing to accept it. It’s interesting, and warrants further study, but it’s not convincing yet.
My guess, thinking about this a bit more, is that it’s going to be a combination of factors, which is the most likely answer to any taphonomic question. Limited ability of organisms to consume the plant fibers, novel plant bauplans, some rather unique tectonics situations (look at where the landmasses are), etc. But changes in plant bauplans and internal chemistry are going to be a significant component.
Oh, my excuses it seems like I had accidentally started a discussion with somebody more knowledgeable on the subject than myself. I should have been more cautious then; out of habit I had initially presumed the opposite was the case.
I had expected that, r/AskScience being one of the higher quality subreddits* and the wiki having multiple editors, somebody else would have mentioned it had there still been significant uncertainty. However, maybe I had been to quick to assume that, I am willing to admit.
* I think I have enough times accidentally ended up on a lower quality subreddits to say that.
Which seems a bit odd at a first glance to me. Paleontology seems like it would have less ideological conflicts and politically controversial subjects than say history or economics; though apparently, that has not a large effect then?
Having visited Bialowieza forest in Poland and had the environment etched onto my brain because it’s so cool, yeah. Very little undergrowth right in the heart of mature deciduous forests.
However, there were the world’s supply of fallen trees in various states of decay. Speaking to the guide there, in old growth forests you can expect as many fallen trees as there are standing ones. The process of trees falling and decomposing creates a really uneven floor as well, with big bowls being pulled out of the ground by root systems as trees fall, and mounds being created where big tree trunks decompose.
Literally everything completely covered in moss as well. The trees capture a *lot* of moisture in the atmosphere, so everything is going to be slippery.
Really not a place to be riding a horse through.
Especially enjoyable if the faux-Tacitus were actually done in Latin. In fact that would be a good exercise for a Latin prose comp take-home final exam, one which (to my understanding) Chat-GPT can’t help you with.
Actually. I take it back: ChatGPT did a decent job at this, as good as I could do. (My legal analyses and knowledge of structured finance are still better, FWIW.)
As Angon says, there’s a lot of variability, not just from management. To my limited understanding:
mature/climax forest: often not much undergrowth, because there’s not enough light to support it. Old tropical rainforest as one example. Related, is some kinds of trees chemically killing off any competition.
disturbed/in progress forest: lots of undergrowth
forest managed by lots of logging: probably lots of undergrowth, see “disturbed” above
forest managed by lots of burns: not much undergrowth, because it’s burned. See park-like easter North American forests as seen by the _early_ European colonists, before the plagues devastated native management and allowed undergrowth to recover.
“but it is actually a neat film reference in that it encourages the viewer to think of how the white North-and-Central Europeans in this scene are the ones in the position of the “other” like the Zulu were in the 1800s, at the ‘business end’ of imperial exploitation. In that, it mirrors the earlier lines about who would “know when they are conquered.””
As a side note, there are places on the Internet that get very, very upset when you point out that there was a time when people who looked like them were the barbarians who didn’t have much in the way of major cultural accomplishments and seemed to be bent on destroying civilization.
As a WASP, I sometimes self-deprecatingly remind my Jewish friends of Disraeli’s line: “My ancestors were building the Temple of Solomon while your ancestors were painting themselves blue with woad.”
Disraeli said that, of course, at a time when England was very self consciously Christian, and when most English people would have felt they had a kind of spiritual debt to Judaism. In a post-Christian era where that’s no longer true, I think the force of the statement is lessened: someone who is skeptical or hostile towards Abrahamic monotheism, and everything it entails, isn’t going to be particularly impressed by the Temple of Solomon (except in the purely technical/architectural sense) and might well feel that the druids and the people dying themselves blue with woad were closer to the truth about the supernatural than Solomon, or St. Paul, or Thomas Cranmer were.
The attitude you describe is very rare in UMC New York.
I don’t know, I hear criticisms of Abrahamic monotheism (in its Jewish, Christian and Islamic forms) fairly often?
Really? From people in New York City banks and law firms? Or who live on the UES or UWS? Many of them are vaguely agnostic, I know, and a few are militant atheists, but I have never met one who was a neopagan fellow traveler. How would you worship a tree in Manhattan?
” How would you worship a tree in Manhattan?”
o_O
a) neopaganism is not limited to tree worship
b) there are lots of trees in Manhattan. I assume Central Park has some impressive ones by now.
In fact Inwood Hill Park is something of a pilgrimage site for both Robert Mosesians and Anti-Robert Mosesians.
How would you worship a tree in Manhattan?
I mean, India and Japan are full of incredibly crowded urban environments, but that hasn’t really put a dent in the worship of ancient nature-related deities. I’ve seen a shrine to the smallpox goddess in the middle of a very crowded and industrialized North Indian city, with nary a tree in sight. (Smallpox itself is extinct, but I think that deity, whose worship is really ancient and apparently pre-Hindu, has become associated more broadly with disease, and thereby protection from disease, in general).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariamman
Hector @ June 24, 2025 at 12:44 am:
“smallpox goddess”
“Mariamman”
Huh. Now I am wondering if Roger Zelazny had heard of her when he wrote about Myra-o-arym, an alien goddess of healing and disease in his SF novel “To Die In Italbar.”
(Which it seems he thought was his “worst novel.” I don’t agree.)
One thing which makes this conversation a little confusing is that the initial posts by ey81 and Hector have been about England, but then shifted to NYC. This is not a trivial difference here, as the UK nowadays is much less religious than the US. The latter, I think, is still fairly difficult to describe as “post-Christian” when nearly 70% of the population are still affiliated with that faith. While I am aware that a number of religious conservatives believe that the country is functionally post-Christian because most of those people are no longer following doctrines X, Y, Z, I don’t think this distinction matters for the fundamental question of whether these people are impressed by Christianity’s monumental legacy.
In contrast, the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation apparently remained steady in recent years at around 20%. ALL non-Christian religious Americans account for a mere 4.1% – and just 0.2% are “Other non-Christian” (i.e. not Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu.) Once we exclude Sikhs, etc., I would wager a vanishingly small fraction of Americans would have Wiccan or otherwise meaningfully pro-Druid beliefs.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/659339/religious-preferences-largely-stable-2020.aspx
I haven’t looked at the British data that closely – although I recall that it was around 2018 that polls began to consistently show the majority of all Britons as non-religious. However, I doubt that would lead to a particularly meaningful increase in the sentiment suggested by Hector. Atheists would seem to be a lot more likely to either reject all supernatural equally, or even to follow the logic of “Monotheism was a necessary step between polytheism and atheism” or “Christianity was wrong, but its legacy still built modern civilization and made Britain/the West the success it is.” (I.e. many of the so-called “rationalists” have praised Christianity (and sometimes other organized religions) for the instrumental value only, with Peter Thiel possibly the most high-profile example.) Whether they are right or wrong, either of those outlooks would preclude much admiration for woad body paint.
While I expect you’re right, I think there’s been a resurgence of appreciation for pre-Abrahamic/non-Abrahamic faiths among non-religious folks in alliance to awareness around environmentalism. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a large proportion, but I wouldn’t say it’s insignificant.
A fair few people (myself included) see more wisdom in religious conceptualisations that place us in a more intertwined and responsible position in regards our environment. There’s certainly space for reading scripture this way (the whole idea that the world is god’s creation and is thus sacred), but quite often it seems like the general consensus is that humans are exceptional and above all the rest of god’s creations.
Personally, I quite like the conceptualisation that was likely at the core of Celtic belief (from what we understand anyway). The idea that human activity degrades the world in some way, and that this must be repaired through sacrifice.
Regardless of the specifics, I do think there’s a good chunk of people with a vague romantic conceptualisation that ‘polytheistic religions live/lived in better harmony with the world’, whether that’s true or not. That’s also not mutually incompatible with a view that ‘Christianity built our current success’.
In the spirit of pedantry I feel obliged to point out that, after 2500 years, everyone will have ancestors from both sides. They’ll share most of their ancestors too: that’s about the time frame for the identical ancestors point for Eurasia. When people talk about “their ancestors” on the scale of dozens or hundreds of generations they always mean the minute subset of all their ancestors that they feel a kinship with, rather than the full exponentially growing set. In other words, it’s a back projection of current identity more than anything else.
This is really true, and it’s especially true when one has ancestors from different groups that are, or see themselves as, historical opponents/enemies. You kind of have to pick one “side” of your ancestry to identify with. (Or create a new composite identity that’s neither one).
“They’ll share most of their ancestors too”
I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t a result of overly simplistic models. At any rate, even if everyone shares a set of ancestors, that doesn’t mean they share them in the same proportions.
“the minute subset of all their ancestors that they feel a kinship with,”
Or the subset that occurs most often in their deep family tree, providing most of the genes.
“the full exponentially growing set”
The set of _distinct_ ancestors does not grow exponentially.
It’s a little more complicated. I saw Angela Davis on “Finding Your Roots”; she is, as it turns out, a Mayflower descendant, but she simply said, “Those aren’t the ancestors I identify with.” Many factors, including surnames, location where one grew up, which immediate ancestors had higher status, which remote ancestors seem more inspiring, or which ancestors fit best with one’s politics all determine which ancestors people identify with, much more than any sort of quantitative genetic analysis.
That’s a great point, and I should have qualified my response above.
Yes, the “everyone is related to everyone, and to X common ancestor if you go back far enough” can be, and often is, wildly overstated. Like you say, we don’t all share the same ancestors *in the same proportions*. I may have (according to family tradition) an English ancestor like 5 generations back, but it would be specious for me to call myself “biracial’ on that basis.
That said, even taking into account the realities of quantitative ancestry, sometimes when we choose how to identify it really is a matter of choosing one set of ancestors, or one aspect of identity, over others.
>> I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t a result of overly simplistic models
Luckily, we’re not dependent on the intuition of an internet rando for this. This has been studied extensively by various groups of professionals in a lot of depth. You can easily find the papers yourself. Perhaps they’re wrong, but it takes more than an unbacked assertion to displace expert opinion as the most reasonable stance to hold.
I’ll add that it’s worth bearing in mind the subtle differences between first common ancestor, common ancestor point, and first common patrilinear/matrilineal ancestor. Those sound very similar, but the first two have a date range of a few thousand years, while the latter is in the hundreds of thousands of years.
>> Or the subset that occurs most often in their deep family tree, providing most of the genes.
Possibly, it’s definitely true that some ancestors will appear in more than one place in your family tree. But people don’t do this full analysis before they decide which ancestors they feel most associated too. Emotions come first. This is easily seen by the fact that new ethnicities are created all the time (ie, Balkanisation), but nobody every considers themselves the first generation in an ethnicity, they always back project it.
>> The set of _distinct_ ancestors does not grow exponentially.
All sets are distinct sets, mathematically speaking. Of course, you are right, it’s not a true exponential from now back to the dawn of time. Nothing is. What I was trying to say (and attempting to keep it brief rather than writing this essay on a tiny corner of pedantry) is that initially it grows exponentially. And, even when you take into account consanguinity, it still remains exponential (just with a growth rate of less than 2 per generation) for a while. It’s only when your ancestors start saturating the whole local population that exponential growth stops being a useful mathematical model. [And, as a model, usefulness is a more meaningful measure than absolute truth.]
“I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t a result of overly simplistic models. At any rate, even if everyone shares a set of ancestors, that doesn’t mean they share them in the same proportions.”
If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, ‘ancestry’ for the vast majority of people is something of a cultural and social exercise rather than a genetic one.
For a rather localised instance, a friend of mine was convinced that his great grandfather was a Gurka. It was part of their whole ‘family mythology’, which was rather dispelled when one of them did one of those DNA ancestry tests and it didn’t come back with any South Asian ancestry at all.
In all of the hundreds of thousands of years before genetic testing was invented, I expect a fair amount of perceived ancestry was mythologised in this sort of way. Or, alternatively, real ancestry may well be forgotten in favour of a different set of identifications (i.e. during integration into another culture).
I prefer the way Bret frames it, since his framing is about “imperial exploiters vs. victims” rather than “civilized vs. savage”. My sympathies in discussions about the Roman empire are usually with the Germanic, etc. barbarians and against the Romans, just like my sympathies when talking about the British empire are usually with the African or South Asian nations rather than with the British. Though I get that you were talking about how things appeared to the Romans rather than presenting your own point of view.
> his framing is about “imperial exploiters vs. victims”
On the one hand, you’re not wrong. On the other hand, I keep thinking that there wasn’t a big moral difference, it’s just that the Romans were better at war and exploitation, and the ‘barbarians’ would have happily returned the favor if they could… and did, when Rome was weak enough, whether back in the early Gaulish sack of Rome, or the later Gothic one…
This would seem to intuitively make sense… but I am not so sure of that. This is what Wikipedia mentions of the Gothic sack of Rome.
> The sack was nonetheless, by the standards of the age, restrained. There was no general slaughter or wholesale enslavement of the city’s inhabitants and the two main basilicas of Peter and Paul were nominated places of sanctuary. Most of the buildings and monuments in the city survived intact, though stripped of their valuables. (Referenced to Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Sam Moorhead and David Stuttard, AD410: The Year that Shook Rome, (The British Museum Press, 2010).
Compare that with our own host’s words from one of the earliest posts he ever wrote.
https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-was-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-i/
> In that context – where the Romans are at war with an entire people, then the entire people became valid military targets. And the Romans behaved as such. Polybius describes the Roman process for sacking a city – “When Scipio thought that a sufficient number of troops had entered [the city] he sent most of them, as is the Roman custom, against the inhabitants of the city with order to kill all they encountered, sparing none, and not to start pillaging until the signal was given…one may often see not only the corpses of human beings, but dogs cut in half, and the dismembered limbs of other animals…” (Polybius 10.15.4-5; emphasis mine).
> Such slaughter was not seen as outside the rules of war, but rather a normal consequence of attempting to hold out against a besieging army. A city which wanted to avoid massacre should surrender before the siege began in earnest (the last moment to so surrender, under Roman rules of warfare, was before the first ram touched the city wall).
Now, it is definitely possible to follow “What have the Romans ever done for us?” line of argumentation and claim that the positive consequences of Roman empire-building have eventually outweighed the bloodletting of such massacres. However, to be logically consistent, one then should also be willing to apply the same calculus towards every other comparable act in history, and in the West, at least, those who defend the expansion of the Roman Republic/Empire (or, to give another example, the settlement of the American frontier) in such terms seem much less willing to apply these same arguments towards, say, the consolidation of the USSR or the integration of Tibet into the People’s Republic of China. There are exceptions (i.e. one of Dr. Devereaux’s fellow historian-bloggers, Dr. Eleanor Janega, did in fact quite unabashedly proclaim (paraphrasing) “Genghis Khan was awesome, and him consolidating trade routes across such a massive territory was way more important than all the massacring he did”), but they don’t appear to be very visible.
the Goths at that point were Christian, so they wanted to appear nicer toward fellow Christian.
The Vandals seemed to be less nice when they sacked Rome though.
It’s also possible, perhaps even preferable, to have a more nuanced analysis, and consider that the establishment of Roman or British or American hegemony was considerably more beneficent than the establishment of Bolshevik or Maoist hegemony, even if at a high level of generality all those processes can be classified as imperialism.
“the establishment of Roman or British or American hegemony was considerably more beneficent than the establishment of Bolshevik or Maoist hegemony”
Not trying to support Bolsheviks or Maoists here, but how was Roman or British or American hegemony considerably more beneficent? The Romans literally enslaved conquered people.
There are exceptions (i.e. one of Dr. Devereaux’s fellow historian-bloggers, Dr. Eleanor Janega, did in fact quite unabashedly proclaim (paraphrasing) “Genghis Khan was awesome, and him consolidating trade routes across such a massive territory was way more important than all the massacring he did”), but they don’t appear to be very visible.
@YARD,
That’s interesting that you follow Eleanor Janega too! I listened to a few of her podcasts and learned a lot of interesting things about the medieval / early modern era. She’s also, from what I can tell, very…..opinionated, which can be frustrating, since sometimes I strongly agree with her opinions and sometimes strongly disagree with them.
“Genghis Khan is awesome because he consolidated trade routes” is probably not an opinion I’d share, but I guess it makes sense in the context of her overall ideological viewpoint (she seems to be a fairly orthodox Marxist). Though of course one would also have to compare the Mongols against the polities they replaced.
I completely agree with you about the lack of consistency among a lot of defenders of America (or Rome) and their histories, for what it’s worth. Whether we’re talking about actual imperial expansion across the North American continent, with everything that entailed for indigenous peoples, or US hegemony over foreign countries outside its borders (which I wouldn’t call “imperialism”, even though I still think it’s very bad). I suppose you could say, “American values, or Roman or 19th c British values, are *good* and *true* so it’s right to impose them on other peoples”. Which is coherent, as far as it goes. But of course, defenders of communist expansionism or Islamic expansionism or any number of other value systems would say exactly the same thing about *their* side.
and consider that the establishment of Roman or British or American hegemony was considerably more beneficent than the establishment of Bolshevik or Maoist hegemon
You could “consider” that, you could consider any manner of erroneous conclusions, but you’d be wrong (at least, in my opinion).
I’m not a fan of Maoism, for a start, but under (say) British rule in India, economic growth rates were much *lower* than under Mao’s rule in China (and yes, that includes through the famine years of the Great Leap Forward). British rule in India was so bad that they made Mao look like an economic genius.
With respect to Soviet vs. American hegemony, some of that is going to depend on what type of hegemony, and what time period you’re looking at. With respect to the Soviet Union, for example, are we talking about the early years (which I think YARD is referring to when he talks about ‘consolidation’), or the Stalin era, or the era after Stalin’s death? And are we talking about the treatment of minority nationalities within Russia, or about the other 14-15 Soviet republics, or about the Warsaw Pact states, or about communist countries outside the Warsaw Pact like Cuba? It would be hard to get much worse than the depopulation and complete dispossession that Native Americans suffered under American frontier expansion, for a start. And within the 20th century, I’d say that the US treatment of its neighbors in Central America and the Caribbean was at least as bad as Soviet treatment of the Warsaw Pact states.
Of course, the deeper question is going to involve judgments about whether a capitalist hegemon imposing capitalist values is better or worse than a socialist hegemon imposing socialist values, and that’s a question of, well, values, so there can’t be an objective answer. i think, other things being equal (which of course they never are, completely) that a capitalist hegemon imposing capitalist values is worse, but you might disagree.
@Hector I think I noticed something which seems at first glance a bit inconsistent to me.
First you use rates of economic growth to argue that Leninism was worse than British colonialism; but then when discussing the Cold War you instead claimed that which side was less worse instead required a value judgement.
However, when we compare countries in which the USA had ‘imposed ‘capitalist’ values’ with countries, which are comparable in both previous economic development and other characteristics like culture, in which the USSR had ‘imposed ‘socialist’ values’, like West-Germany versus East-Germany, Southern Europe versus Eastern Europe, South Korea versus North Korea*, it is the former group which consistently did better on economic development. This remains true even when we compare them in 1980**; also when we pick social indicators like life expectancy or child mortality the non-Leninist regimes in most*** cases did a better job.
Note, this is not an argument against ‘socialism’ in toto; for example, I very much suspect that a ‘market socialist’ system would in the long term have done a less bad job than Soviet-style central planning. However, I still found it odd that you used poor economic performance to attack colonialism with, but then not Leninism despite Soviet-style central planning also leading to poor economic performance in the long term.
There are still other things I could write about, like the bad things Leninism and Colonialism were responsible for outside of poor economic performance, or what I think of ‘market socialism’; however, as it is already getting late here I think I better stop.
Anyway, kind regards.
* Other potential comparisons are between Austria and Czechia or Finland and the Baltics. However, as Austria was neutral and Finland was, well, ‘Finlandized’ into the Soviet sphere of influence I left those comparisons out of the above list despite also suggesting that having Soviet-style central planning imposed leads worse economic performance.
** I picked that date because some blame the Volcker Shock for causing the collapse of the Warsaw Pact; I regard that argument as fallacious, had their economies been less inefficient they would have survived that, but better to steelman the opposing view than strawman it I think. A few of the ‘some’ I mentioned above also blame the collapse of the Warsaw Pact on ‘capitalist embargos and sabotage’; I also regard that as fallacious, Yugoslavia did not suffer from that, as in the years after the Tito-Stalin split was a de facto NATO ally and then became neutral, yet still followed the Warsaw Pact pattern of first economic growth then after a few decades stagnation.
*** Curiously, according to ourworldindata, in the year 1980 North Korea had a higher life expectancy than South Korea. (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-hmd-unwpp?tab=chart&country=PRK~KOR)
This makes me wonder whether she was aware of the Mongol Yuan dynasty destroying the Chinese economy with, among other things, hyperinflation. I had been told the damage was so great that China relapsed into a barter economy near the end of the Yuan dynasty. (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/rise-and-fall-paper-money-yuan-china-1260-1368)
And then to think that according to some estimates* China under the previous Song dynasty was the most prosperous and advanced country in the world.
Though, it is possible that as that happened long after Genghis Khan, she considered that separate of his conquests.
* I know that sometimes such estimates suffer from great uncertainty thanks to such factors as differences in relative prices of goods and doubts in whether recorded wages were representative. So, I wonder with how much salt those estimates need to be taken.
The Vandals seemed to be less nice when they sacked Rome though.
Still sounds less bad than what YARD quotes concerning the Roman practice of sacking a city.
That was common practice back then. Greeks, Persians, Mesopotamians,… all did it.
Even later, people did the same to the cities of “infidels”.
the “barbarians” did not have a lot of successes at capturing cities, so they had less opportunities of doing it.
But Boudicca’s treatment of Roman settlements proved that they did have the same rule of war as the Romans.
> But Boudicca’s treatment of Roman settlements proved that they did have the same rule of war as the Romans.
I’m not sure one can treat that episode as being representative of what all “barbarians” would have done when given the opportunity, since that would seem to downplay the intensely personal reasons Boudicca had for her enmity against all Romans.
Now, I suppose one can argue that many Romans who fought against Carthage would have themselves carried personal enmity from at least the time of Hannibal’s incursion, if not earlier. However, other episodes, like a lot of Caesar’s conquests, would in fact seem to be “just business”. 146 BC, the same year that the Romans obliterated Carthage, had also seen the equally total destruction of Corinth – at the conclusion of a war declared in that same year, so there is hardly a cycle of revenge and retaliation you could point to for an explanation of their brutality. Even a paper which generally follows Rome’s perspective on both conflicts acknowledges that there was no “extended or bloodied history of hatred” between Corinth and Rome by the time the latter acted.
https://escholarship.org/content/qt0fw661w0/qt0fw661w0.pdf
On the other hand, I keep thinking that there wasn’t a big moral difference, it’s just that the Romans were better at war and exploitation, and the ‘barbarians’ would have happily returned the favor if they could
Maybe, maybe not, i guess we’ll never know.
On the other hand, i would say that:
1) this doesn’t really get the Romans off the hook, for the same reason that most people treat someone who drives drunk once, doesn’t kill anyone, and never does it again, from someone who drives drunk once, does kill someone, and never does it again. You could say there’s not a moral difference, just a difference in luck, and you would have a point, but that’s not really the way we live our lives.
2) this kind of thinking triggers a race to the bottom (and of course has always been used by all manner of bad actors throughout history and today): “we have to do the bad thing because if we don’t, someone else will do it first”.
“Maybe, maybe not, i guess we’ll never know. ”
We generally can’t know exactly what victims would have done to imperialists, in a hypothetical complete reversal. We can often know what victims had been doing to/with their neighbors.
As for the Visigoth sack of Rome: beyond the issue of mutual Christianization, or of Rome’s prestige that might induced some restraint, I would wonder if Alaric had the _capability_ to enslave the entire population. Short of simply moving in and taking over, what do you do with 800,000 slaves? Who can buy them, how do you move them, how do you feed them while moving them?
“Took all the valuable and slaves they could feasibly transport, but didn’t kill everyone else” is I guess more restrained than “gratuitously murder everyone”, but I don’t think I’d want to put a lot of weight on the difference.
This makes me wonder whether she was aware of the Mongol Yuan dynasty destroying the Chinese economy with, among other things, hyperinflation…Though, it is possible that as that happened long after Genghis Khan, she considered that separate of his conquests.
Well, this is what I had been referring to. Unfortunately, the attached video is now private, so it’s hard to find more of her views besides the brief and typically…exuberant summary (it’s probably not an exaggeration to say her writing style is generally the polar opposite of Dr. Devereaux’s.), but based on that, I would think that yes, her assessment of him as a ruler is separate from the actions of his successors.
https://going-medieval.com/2017/08/18/emergency-pubcast-fuck-yeah-genghis-khan/
A “major” cultural accomplishment possibly gets a bit more subjective for a society that can’t leave its culture behind in monumental architecture or writing. Yet the matters of artistry that express themselves when that society does get more physical signifiers for it probably implies a continuity in which they did not lack for aesthetic and imaginative culture going backwards.
I’m not familiar with any society that could be regarded as seeming like it was bent on destroying whatever any given person wants to call civilization.
Does Boko Haram count as a “society”? If the group itself does not, then would the population of an area in Nigeria/West Africa that’s been under their control for a prolonged period of time count?
After all, their name is usually directly translated as ‘Western’ education is a sin – placing ‘Western’ in quotes because it’s not like education systems in just about any ‘Eastern’ country would be any more compatible with what their founder claimed to believe in.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8172270.stm
> In an interview with the BBC before he was killed, [in 2009] Mr Yusuf, 39, said such education “spoils the belief in one God”.
> “There are prominent Islamic preachers who have seen and understood that the present Western-style education is mixed with issues that run contrary to our beliefs in Islam,” he said. “Like rain. We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.
“Like saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of Allah, we reject it. We also reject the theory of Darwinism.”
Now, one can doubt about how genuine he was, since according to the same article
> Analysts say he was extremely wealthy and highly educated.”He is graduate educated and very proficient in English,” says Nigerian academic Hussain Zakaria.”He lives lavishly – people say he drives a Mercedes Benz. And he is very well-educated in a Western context.” …Boko Haram’s members are largely drawn from disaffected youth – university students and jobless graduates among them.
However, the direction the group had taken after his death, with schoolgirl kidnappings, child suicide bombings*, burning and shooting nearly 60 schoolboys at their college dormitories, mosque massacres, etc. does make the claim of it “acting to destroy civilization” at the very least a lot more defensible than in most other examples.
And of course, their inspiration, Taliban (as the article above points out, BH had been colloquially referred to by the same name by their local opponents due to the apparent similarities) were widely perceived to be acting against civilization when, amongst other things, they demolished the legendary Buddhas of Bamiyan. Same for ISIL and their own penchant for monument destruction – which has its own page on Wikipedia.
*Which might have encouraged another horrific feature from that conflict – soldiers from Cameroon in particular have been repeatedly reported to murder even the youngest children of the group’s members, with or without their mothers. The articles and even videos are not hard to find.
I wouldn’t really be inclined to call Boko Haram a society myself; I’d characterise it more as a paramilitary, which by definition means it is something acting at least parallel to any given national interest (and indeed, given that paramilitaries often need to terrorise their home territory, generally actually contrary to it).
Its actions in that terror are reprehensible and indefensible, but I think characterising such as destroying “civilization”, as a concept, would fall under a bias and a motive to other. Destroying the markers of another civilization is not sufficient to constitute a motive to destroy civilization in and of itself.
I wouldn’t care for such a thing in principle, and I think it would constitute a distraction from the actual basis to condemn the group. I think extreme reactionary conservative beliefs that promote violence are absolutely terrible, but I wouldn’t attribute them to mindless monsters.
(In this particular case, I would also note the specific ideological framework that is motivated to attribute contrary beliefs intrinsically to the global West, in a manner that ahistorically removes rational inquiry and variety of belief from Islam. So another reason I would be against calling it “destroying civilization” is because I think such a thing comes too close to validating narratives that try to use the beliefs of such organizations to paint Islam as a whole as intrinsically violent reactionary and ignorant.)
I’m not actually sure they’d be that upset. As Devereaux pointed out in the Fremen Mirage series, a lot of the pre-Roman “barbarian” leaders ended up being adopted as national heroes by later European nationalists. And today, white supremacists love to draw on Norse iconography (the Norse occupy a similar space in a lot of peoples’ minds as Germanic “barbarians”).
I think if you told those types that their ancestors were barbarians, they’d probably think they were badass, and start LARPing as them.
Hungary would be another relevant example. The average person in nearly every country thinks of Attila and the Huns he led as the archetypal barbarians – yet, “Attila” remains a popular Hungarian name even today. (And the name of his wife, Kreka/Hereka also apparently lives on in their culture as Réka.) Likewise, the name of Attila’s mythological son, Csaba, was used for Horthy’s Hungary only indigenous armoured car during World War II.
To be fair, the Fremen Mirage had also pointed out that this also would not have happened without those leaders’ successes, real or perceived. The greatest power of the Ancient Germanic myth lay in the idea of them “having never been conquered” (never mind that as I have commented on Part I of this, it arguably had more to do with Tiberius cutting short Julius Caesar Germanicus’ campaign (and three years later, his life in what was probably poisoning) to eliminate a popular rival for the throne than their unique martial prowess or even the advantages of their terrain) – to the point that the following apparently happened.
https://acoup.blog/2020/02/14/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-iiib-myths-of-the-atreides/
> The German form of this ideology ends up exactly where you think it does, as a core component of Nazi racial ideology, sufficiently dear to the Nazis, as Krebs notes, that in 1943, Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s SS chief, was sending crack SS units into Italy (by this point, a war-zone where Allied troops were advancing) in a last ditch effort to try to retrieve what was essentially a ‘holy’ (or unholy) text: a manuscript of Tacitus’ Germania.
Likewise, people today generally seem to think the Norse/Vikings were unbeatable. Some might recall their massive defeat at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, but I doubt that would be anything close to a majority or even a plurality nowadays. (And that triumph was quite pyrrhic for the winners anyway, having been followed by the better-known Hastings.) Even Alfred the Great’s defeat of the Great Heathen Army is probably already highly obscure outside of the UK, and growing more so by the year. (I wonder if Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla ever found the time in its “history mode”/late-game “this pro-Viking propaganda isn’t actually what it seems” pivot to mention that – and how many players got to it even if it did.) For their other losses like Battle of Norditi, there’s basically no chance outside of those battles’ immediate locales.
I would wager that some artist taking the plunge to go against the grain on what the popular thing currently is and depict some of those Vikings’ losses would do eventually do quite a lot to diminish this luster. After all, there is a reason Hungarians have invented Prince Csaba instead of identifying with Attila’s real sons – Ellac (fought and lost the Battle of Nedao vs. the rebellious Germanics, losing both much of the Huns’ domain and his own life), Dengizich or Dinzirichus (“was killed by Anagastes, general in Thrace. His head was brought to Constantinople, carried in procession through the Middle Street, and fixed on a pole at the Wooden Circus. The whole city turned out to look at it”) and Ernak, the youngest survivor who seemed to preside over the final dissolution of Huns as a distinct population, their absorption into other groupings complete after his death. “Your ancestors were barbarians who took on the Empire and won” has a rather different ring from “Your ancestors were barbarians and the Empire steamrolled them the first time it met them.”
Why do you think that the Germans would form a single line? As far as I know, Tacitus mentioned the wedge / cuneus formation used by Ancient Germans. This “wedge” was likely a trapezoid column, with a smaller number of well-equipped retainers ed by the war-chief in the front and a mass of poorly equipped militia in the back. A large Germanic army would likely include several of this wedges, acting separately (somewhat similarly to Roman cohorts).
Would be fun to see you review Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood – another hoot as far as historical accuracy is concerned. Me and my group of friends (all of us history students) cracked up right there in the movie theater when horses were used to kick down CASTLE GATES.
I wonder if that was inspired by the classic Western trope where a horse pulls out bars from a jail window and thus allows an inmate to flee. Mythbusters tried testing that back in 2007: you can read the detailed summary below but TL;DR – it didn’t work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2007_season)#Episode_79_%E2%80%93_%22Western_Myths%22
At the start of that same episode, they had shown a montage from various films to justify that it is in fact a known trope – and one example actually had someone ride into what seemed like a modern-ish police station and have the horse kick down the floor-to-ceiling jail cell bars with its hind legs.
Something I’d love to see a discussion of is what a Roman army “mirror match”, either against another actual Roman army during civil war or against an enemy who is doing their best to narrow the gap by fighting the same way, looks like. You’ve mentioned a few times how Roman armies tended to be fearsomely effective dealing with most competition of their time period and what their battles and victories tended to look like (using cavalry to counter cavalry and using infantry to sandpaper away the enemy infantry until they either run out or break formation), but what does it look like when two armies try to win the same way? What becomes the deciding factor? How do Roman-style armies adjust to try and counter their own tactics?
I don’t know about tactics, but the casualties in the civil wars both of the 1st century BC and around 400 AD were absolutely fearsome. After the battle of the Frigidus in 394 AD, the winners are said to have wept because so many Romans died who would have otherwise defeated the Barbarians.
WRT the point on melees not devolving into confused scrums: engagements between Renaissance pike blocks appear to have done this at times – the “Pell Mell” or “Bad War” stage. Some treatises and sources describe the fight closing to the point where combatants are unable to effectively use their swords – let alone pikes and other polearms – and thus need to draw daggers to continue the fight.
Of course, these front-rank soldiers are a) rather better armoured than our Romans, likely having at least a partial plate cuirass, if not even more armour and maille earlier in the 16th century, and b) facing the dilemma that if they don’t close in they might start taking arquebus/musket volleys at close range, which will kill them whatever armour they have. It therefore makes sense they’d engage in a much riskier fashion, and we do hear of situations where the front ranks of entire pike blocks became casualties at the first onset.
I think there is a difference between a “press”, when front ranks of two formations come very close to each other, pressed together by the rear ranks, and a “confused melee”, when both formations are broken and each warrior is fighting for themself without any support. Both can result in heavy losses, but the “confused melee” is much more devastating, since not only the first rank(s) are involved, and since defending from attacks from the sides and the rear is completely impossible.
I suppose both situations could happen on an actual battlefield, but the “press” was much more common (thus short swords were popular as a backup weapon among warriors with polearms throughout history).
Why is it the Republic can constantly summon new armies to replace the ones they lost to Hannibal/Pyrrhus/(insert foreign general here), but that the Empire’s army of professionals would be difficult to replace? The Middle Republic’s hastatae/principes are using roughly the same kit (gladius/scutum/pila/mail) as the imperial legionary and (as far as I know) the imperial legionary is not some master swordsman who takes 3 years to train, while the Republic is sitting on much less manpower, so I’d think the Republic would find it harder to recruit.
It’s the difference between conscripting citizens who fight out of duty to the state they (feel like) they belong to, and recruiting professional soldiers who fight as a career. This is a topic that our host has discussed a lot in various contexts. The collections on the Dilectus and on legion vs phalanx go into this.
And we see that even in the late Republic, getting the voting populace invested in wars to maintain control over distant frontiers was becoming increasingly difficult compared to their investment in fighting opponents on their proverbial doorstep, some of whom were legitimately considered existential threats to their society.
Like, maintaining imperial control over the Germanian frontier requires being posted for years on end to somewhere both far away from the homeland and overall divested of a lot of creature comforts (by the standards of the time). It’s not really an endeavour for a voluntary citizen militia.
“but that the Empire’s army of professionals would be difficult to replace?”
Most of what I know comes from reading what Bret has said, but AIUI:
In the Middle Republic, “everyone” is a potential recruit. Not literally everyone, but “from a family rich enough to give you body armor” is actually a surprisingly large segment of the male population. They’ve probably had some martial training just from growing up around veterans. And the military system expects a mix of raw recruits with quick training and older veterans from past wars (which there are a lot of, because of all the wars, and cycling most of the armor-ready men through the army at some point.) And people generally serve a year, then go back to their lives.
By the empire, the proportion of people who can afford armor is perhaps a lot lower, likewise the proportion of men who can show up with basic skill-exposure (which includes fighting, caring for your gear, marching, making camp…) And really replacing your professionals means finding people willing to give up their lives for a 25 year military career. It’s… very different.
“Everyone” in this case means “Everyone who is a roman citizen” (or a socii) which might vary a lot in terms of who that is.
The republic probably could (effectively) draw from a much bigger proportion of their manpower pool, but their pool was also much smaller.
We can draw some inferences from societies with approximately similar economic development. Sweden had, in the late 18th century, about 5 per cent of its male population in arms, constantly, with majority of the troops being “allotted” soldier-crofters. (A bit like Byzantic thematic troops) This was one of the highest peace-time mobilisation rates in Europe, and the economic basis of 18th century Sweden was not much different from ancient Rome. This is very close to the maximum army that you can support without ruining your agricultural economy, and even then, only with soldiers also doing farm work.
Because the bulk of the food for soldiers on the frontiers could not be imported from far away, the provinces would need to support the troops stationed there. For example, around 100 AD, Gaul and Germany had about four legions stationed, with perhaps 40,000 men supported by a population of 12 million. In practice, because the frontier bases of the Western legions were on Rhine, most likely the actual supporting population was clearly lower, perhaps only a million or two on Germania Superior and Inferior where you would be able to move food to the legions by river transport. After all, Atlantic bulk freight was not a realistic option for the Romans. This would mean a permanent mobilisation rate of a few percent, and you probably can’t get much higher than that. (The weapons and armor could be sourced from much further away, allowing the Roman imperial strength to improve the equipment of a single soldier, even if fod logistics would set a limit on the number of soldiers on the border.)
So, the mobilisation rate of the empire as a whole would be very low, because the wars were on the borders, and the logistics would limit the number of soldiers on the borders. In fact, it would make little sense for the emperor to allow peaceful provinces to have troops beyond the minimum police presence. In such a situation, most of the population becomes isolated from military life, but, as you have a huge recruiting pool, you can easily find people who consider a 25-year stint in the army a good deal.
Just as a small addendum, it looks as if Britannia in the 4th century contributed quite a bit of grain to the legions stationed on the Rhine.
For the later Empire, there is also the whole issue where the men being recruited into the legions knew their most likely fate is to be sooner or later fighting another legion, with all the casualties that implies – all so that, if they are lucky, their commander might become an Emperor – and probably still lose the throne in a few years (sometimes months, even.) The Republican troops on a campaign can sooner or later expect to receive a rich bounty from sacking a city of some people they don’t care about: Imperial legionaries will either be fighting border wars on hinterlands with comparatively few material goods, or sacking the cities they know to be their own. All of that is going to weigh on morale.
Now, the film is set some 50 years before that really became a problem, but the trend of diminishing returns from campaigning (and consequently diminishing attractiveness of service) ought to have already been present – I don’t know much about the lands of the Marcomanni, but I doubt an invading Roman could expect to find anywhere near as much bounty there as in the Greek city-states or Seleucid Egypt. Additionally, Rome as a whole becoming wealthier* would have also diminished the attractiveness of volunteering for service for an average young man. The more one can expect to earn in the civilian life without risking life and limb, the less reason there is to enlist. Likewise, the degree to which you might be bothered by the sparse surroundings of a playing card camp will depend a lot on where your civilian baseline level for “acceptable creature comforts” was set.
* To the point that, as one of the earlier posts here notes, former parts of the Western Roman Empire generally did not recover to pre-collapse levels of prosperity until after 1000 AD – and it had taken even longer to exceed the peak Roman Empire conditions, which were apparently somewhere between 50 and 150 AD depending on where in the Empire you lived.
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
> …Jongman presents graphs, for instance, of animal bone deposits, a good indication of the degree to which people were eating meat in a society. Meat is, of course, very high in protein (and also delicious) but it is also expensive – you can feed a lot more people on grain than meat, so the level of meat consumption in a pre-modern society is a good indicator of living standards (especially meat consumption among non-elites). In Italy, Jongman notes, animal bone assemblages become progressively more common from 450 BC until reaching a peak around 50 AD. They then decline a bit (but still well elevated from the pre-Roman norm) to a low in the mid-third century (which you will recall was not a great time for the Roman Empire) before rising again to another peak in the fourth and early fifth century, high but lower than the early imperial peak, before collapsing to almost nothing by 650 AD; the decline from 450 AD to 550 AD is the sharpest change in the data at any point. The data for the provinces also fits expectations – in that graph, assemblages sharply rise beginning in 150 BC, peak in 150 AD, fall down to a lower-but-still-high plateau in the fourth century, and then collapse down to nearly pre-Roman levels by 450.
> If anything, this may understate the problem because the animals here are not all the same either. As Bryan Ward-Perkins notes (op cit), based on archaeological remains, the average height of an iron-age (pre-Roman) cow was 115.5cm. In the Roman period, this rises to 120cm, but in the early Middle Ages, collapses down to 112cm. Now that is of course both bad for the people eating the cows, but it is also bad for what it says about the farmers raising the cows – chances are you are shortchanging the nutrition of your (very valuable) cows because you yourself are experiencing significant food shortfalls. The cows are getting smaller because this society is getting poorer – and not merely the elites are getting poorer; everyone is getting poorer. At this point the evidence is fairly clear on this point: living standards declines across the entire spectrum of Late Roman and early medieval society. Not only were the elites of 600 AD poorer than the elites of 400 AD (and much poorer than the elites of 200AD), so too were the peasants.
So this series has made me think of a problem that I hadn’t really considered before – and apologies if this has been answered in another post, but I’ve only been reading this blog for a month or two – what is the legionary doing with his pila when they’re not in use? When you form up for a battle, or when you are advancing on the enemy, where do you keep them? The things are pretty big, you’re not going to stash them in your pocket. And there’s two of them, so can you just hold them in your hands while also using a shield?
This is an entirely reasonable question… and yes, it did get covered back on here back in 2023. (To be fair, there have been a lot of posts since May 2019, and those which are on less “buzzy” topics are harder to find. It doesn’t help that our host doesn’t link back to them as often as some other bloggers might.)
https://acoup.blog/2023/11/24/collections-roman-infantry-tactics-why-the-pilum-and-not-a-spear/
> On the battlefield, the Roman soldier has one c. perhaps 7kg shield (the scutum), two pila (c. 1.25kg each, perhaps one somewhat heavier than the other), and a gladius sheathed at his side. He also, as a rule, has two arms, each with one hand. Evidently, his shield is going to occupy one hand and because Roman shields are horizontal-center-grip (that is, you hold the shield by a single metal bar at its center-of-mass which runs parallel to the ground), that hand is pretty busy. That said, it is possible to hold the scutum and a pilum in one hand, pinching the latter with your thumb. It’s not comfortable and you wouldn’t want to do it for very long (if for no other reason than that’s a lot of weight on that hand), but you can do it.
> And then you have the other hand. On the march, that hand is going to be occupied by your two pila, an entrenching stake (if it wasn’t carried on the mule), any large tools (like the dolabra, the ubiquitous Roman military pick-axe), and probably the furca, the forked stick used to hold the Roman marching pack (though the introduction date of this device is unclear; there is no reason to associate it with Marius though). And that’s not too hard to carry either all together in your hand.10 Presumably in a battle, you can get rid of all of the non-combat gear and at least advance initially with both pila held the same way (hold at the base, balance on the shoulder, like a musket).
If ‘casualties in ancient battles tend to be around 10% of the total force engaged’, what stopped the defeating force from gathering a bit further and having “the same” battle the next day?
Morale loss can be pretty bad, your guys know they got their asses kicked and that they lost a lot of their friends killed.
Pursuit meant that the losers took far more casualties than the winners, and their casualties are much more likely to be fatalities. If they got 1% KIA and 5% seriously wounded but likely to recover, and you lost 10% nearly all KIA, that’s not good for your side.
To make it worse, the heavily armored guys who are your officers/leaders/best fighters were all in the front, and are among the least likely to evade pursuit as they are visibly better targets to the enemy and also slower moving.
The losers have scattered, thrown away their shields to avoid pursuit, and left all their javelins and their arrows on the field, so they are now badly underequipped. Remember that all metal is highly valuable, and you just lost the warheads of all those arrows and javelins and the metal bosses and possibly rims of all those shields.
You need quite a bit of time to put it back together again after that sort of defeat, even if most of your soldiers are still alive.
Casualties *in battle* tended to be around 10%. But casualties *after* the battle (in the pursuit phase) were often much higher. (that doesen’t always mean people died, but often they were scattered/confused/etc. and just decided to stop with the entire thing and try to go somewhere else) trying to stop and regather an army while there’s enemies pursuing you is trickier than it sounds.
Even in the event that the scattered force is effectively reconstituted in short order, at least one reason to not go back and have the same battle is because circumstances have demonstrated that battling under those conditions is likely to have you lose.
The reconstituted army wants its future battles to happen on more advantageous terms.
Victor Davis Hansen (whom Bret doesn’t like, but mostly for his views on contemporary politics, I think) discusses this issue in the context of hoplite warfare, with considerable emphasis on the moral issue. The losing side in a hoplite battle knows that they were beaten–not out-maneuvered, not defeated by superior tactics or weapons, but simply beaten man to man. So there wouldn’t be much point in resuming the fight.
Hansen makes the further point that hoplite warfare furnished a mechanism for resolving disputes at manageable social cost. The losing side in a battle cedes some territory, or makes trade concessions, or whatever, and everyone goes back to farming. As I recall, Bret made the same point in reverse with respect to the plains Indians. Having acquired both firearms and horses from the European settlers around them, they quickly developed an immensely destructive form of warfare, so destructive that their societies could not have survived its continuance. In the event, the whites did not permit them sufficient time to evolve a stable system, which they likely would have otherwise.
To be honest I don’t like VDH either, and not for his views on politics, of which I know nothing, but because most of what he wrote it’s bollocks: starting with his concept of “Western Way of War”, which is nuts, and ending with his totally off the mark assessment of the hoplitic panoply’s weight and his absurd views of what a hoplite could do (or not do) in battle. Views which are shared by other Orthodoxes such as Adam Schwartz or Sergio Valzania, I might add, and whose books I found terribly painful to read.
VDH didn’t make sense to me: not after reading Pritchett’s “The Greek State at War,” which meticulously details what we do (and sometimes don’t) know on the subject. Unfortunately, it runs to five fairly expensive volumes of varying lengths.
I have Pritchett too ! I just must find the will and the time to read through all of it, which is hard when you have all sorts of interesting books on the ancient world to read…
I find VDH’s “Warfare and Agriculture” to be quite interesting, but later books such as “The Western Way of War” and “Carnage and Culture” are terribly ideological and, especially the latter, utterly baseless.
I read it in library copies as it was appearing, so the investment in time (and money) wasn’t so daunting. I must admit bogging down in the Greek calendars, essential though they are to making sense of campaign seasons.
It’s around 10% on average, when considering both sides in the fight. The losing force takes higher casualties (mostly from being chased down) while the winners take less causalities. So even if your army can escape and form up somewhere, you now have that much less in the way of military force than your opponent, making it more likely you’ll be beaten a second time.
As noted by Nate T, “around 10%” is the average for both forces. The below should have probably been linked in the body of the post already, but either way, it’s as good of an explanation as any.
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiic-morale-and-cohesion/
> Peter Krentz did a general survey of Greek hoplite battle casualties and concluded that attested loss rates (only men killed; we have no WIA figures for Greek hoplite battles) at 5% for winners and 14% for losers; this leads to the generally quoted average of roughly 10% losses in a hoplite battle. Strikingly, the variation is pretty tight; there are few examples where any side suffered more than 20% losses. Now of course we need to be alert to the potential problems with the source material here though at the same time sources tend to exaggerate casualties, not minimize them. If we assume that loss rates might be close to even until the moment when an army breaks we might say that hoplite armies tended to collapse somewhere between perhaps 5-10% losses (and sometimes much earlier than that).
Nathan Rosenstein attempted a similar analysis (albeit his interest was more demographic) for the Romans stretching from 200 to 168 (the period where we have the best evidence) and notes that the averages of his figures for those years were 4.2% losses for winners and 16% for losers. Again one must stress the potential unreliabilities of the sources (which Rosenstein discusses) and also note that the period from 200 to 168 was a period where Rome did a lot of winning and not a lot of losing; the reported casualties for Rome’s enemies when they lost were often a fair bit higher but of course we must be careful there of exaggeration. Still this broadly tracks with the Greek figures and suggests perhaps a general rule, though it must be noted that there are outlier battles, particularly where the impossibility of retreat produced extreme casualties for the losers (something more common in Roman warfare where everyone was a lot better at pursuit than hoplite armies were).
Interestingly, I was originally going to comment that regathering an army after it was already scattered was going be extremely hard in a pre-radio era, but according to the same post, it did happen if the army’s morale remained high after a defeat – or at least, it happened after some of the American Civil War battles cited. As the others on here have noted, a retreating force retaining high morale not be the case for a lot of premodern battles, where all the valuable equipment was already left behind on the battlefield anyway.
> Consider, for instance, an army with high morale but with weak cohesion. This is actually so common an occurrence that it actually becomes tricky to point out specific examples; its most common expression are units at the beginning of a war that despite being highly motivated ‘for the cause’ nevertheless fall apart quickly when the fighting starts. A classic example is the First Battle of Bull Run (1861); both army’s morale was evidently high (they both thought they were about to win a brief and glorious war!) and that morale carried them into the battle just fine. But when it became evident that the US Army wasn’t winning the day, that morale was insufficient and the new and not yet sufficiently trained army lacked the cohesion to hold together, leading to a panic and collapse where the units themselves dissolved in a frenzied retreat.
> What is striking in this example is that the army didn’t dissolve, because while cohesion had failed, morale had not. After the frenzy of the retreat war off, the army mostly reformed; only 1,216 US soldiers were reported missing after the battle (of 18,000 or so engaged), so most of the men found their way back to their units (one way or the other). Meanwhile the public and political leaders remained committed to the war, redoubling recruitment and enlistment; that commitment both reflected and influenced army morale: victory was still desirable and still possible. And so the army reformed to try again. The American Civil War is replete with examples like this where unit cohesion failed, but those same units after embarrassing retreats reformed and rejoined the army, often to put in solid service in later battles. Of course penalties for desertion and inducements for service also might play a part in this, but as I think McPherson (op. cit.) demonstrates, for both the United States and the Confederacy, ‘the cause’ was the driving factor. Morale brought the armies back together and sustained them through the campaigning – but it was not enough to hold together in battle until cohesion had been built within units.
In the discussion there is an interesting comment from Arilou:
> I wonder if greek battles were so relatively bloodless simply because they lacked good cavalry and thus pursuing an enemy was difficult.
> IIRC; there’s some european observers during the ACW who theorized that this was a reason the war became so bloody: Unlike say, the Austro-prussian war, or the Franco-prussian one neither side really had a reserve of cavalry capable of properly destroying a routing army. (though that ignores quite a few other factors)
(Arilou also brings up Battle of Lund in that discussion – much like in this one – as a battle where a lot of units had started fleeing, but then rallied a short distance from the main battle and rejoined the fight, ultimately leading to a remarkably bloody engagement.)
Whatever the leader said was not flawless German. I don’t have access to the director’s cut so maybe there is a scene that is not found in this YouTube clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qDLVQn6jG04&pp=ygUeZ2xhZGlhdG9yIG9wZW5pbmcgYmF0dGxlIHNjZW5l
I am a German native speaker and the first times I listened to it I found it totally unintelligible but after a while I think I got at. At 3:24 he seems to yell “Du bist der Hund” (“You [singular] are the dog”) which is technically a correct sentence but sounds very odd. When he’s in full shot (3:48) he yells “Er sieht verflügte Hünde” which is very incorrect for modern German but maybe he is intending to yell “Ihr seid verfluchte Hunde” (“You are damned/cursed/bloody dogs). So maybe they gave people who don’t speak German some lines that they tried to pronounce to the best of their abiliies or they decided that at least the second yell should sound Germanic but not modern German. I can’t say if they based that on a real language or not but considering how odd the yells sound even when they are not grammatically wrong (1st) or are corrected (2nd) I think it’s the former.
As a non native speaker, I always thought they used some weird form of reconstructed proto-Germanic.
We’ve reconstructed a fair bit of proto-Germanic by now and it…does not sound like that. The time-period for it being spoken is ~500BC to the 5thC BC, so the Marcomannic wars are sort of slap-bang in the middle of that. So, for instance, we might reasonably expect ‘hundaz’ rather than ‘hund’. They could well be speaking proto-West Germanic as that timescale fits as well, in which case we might expect ‘hundr’.
Dr. Devereaux- I recently read your series on logistics and am still struggling to understand how feeding a pre-industrial army worked in friendly territory. Let’s say we’re in middle Republican Rome, and I’m a farmer in a village in Tuscany, on the road towards Gaul. The Romans hold their annual draft/levy, muster their army in Rome, send them marching off to Gaul, and they make camp in my village along the way. How is a barely-above-subsistence level farming village able to feed an army of thousands? Especially if I’m along a common route that sees armies passing through it nearly every year? Even if the army is otherwise well-behaved, it seems like it would be extremely difficult to do this without all the local farmers starving. Maybe the Romans simply didn’t care that much about how devastating it would be to their fellow citizen farmers, but given your other writings about how the top-to-bottom societal buy-in was a crucial part of Rome’s success, it seems difficult to imagine the citizenry supporting constant wars when they are on the verge of starving from quartering soldiers all the time. Am I just underestimating the agricultural surplus in Italy at the time?
From what I understand of the pre-modern Chinese warfare, they had to maintain supply lines and build supply depots along the way to store their supplies. Losing the supplies often meant total failure of the campaign. Not sure how Romans did it though.
It seems you’re looking at this the wrong way with several assumptions.
Firstly, you don’t actually need an agricultural surplus to sustain a friendly army in its own territory – the people who are in the army, if they weren’t in the army, would still be in the country, eating food. It just shifts around the place *where* the food is consumed, localising it to along the army travel route.
But because the food production can be assumed to be there, the answer we have to look for is about logistics: How do we get the surplus food from the farm where the soldier now isn’t to the camp where he is? And there are both policies the Romans enacted as well as just bottom-up adaptations by the people in those places that facilitated that.
So the army in friendly territory does not choose a route that has it camp next to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, but rather it will choose a route along wide roads and with stops at places with the infrastructure to supply food i.e. cities. A city already has a network of smaller roads and a merchant + taxgatherer population to extract food from the countryside and bring it to a centralised location. For a city that’s a regular stopover, that just means the hinterland area has to be somewhat larger than for other cities of similar size to draw surplus from a larger area – something that will happen organically as the higher food demand drives up prices and taxes. And cities will also already have government-run granaries (to prevent food price surges) that can be use to dole out food to the army as well, they again have to be only slightly over-sized to account for the increased demand.
And in some ways, the regularity of Roman warfare makes this *less* impactful on the countryside than more irregular warring. Whenever a Roman army leaves for the east, it will use the Via Appia, and every city along that route will be used to armies passing by, because they do so almost constantly and you can basically just budget their food consumption in advance.
This battle is the tactical equivalent of “ROMANES EUNT DOMUS”
Huh, this whole treatment has given me a different view on the film’s arc as a whole.
1. Maximus is genuinely a terrible general, and bungles a major battle with the Quadi and Marcomanni. He wins, just, but his army is badly battered. He’s effectively a slightly luckier Varrus.
2. Everything bad that happens to him after that is (justified) fallout from his terrible performance as a general. Perhaps murdering his family was a bit extreme, but maybe he got the favoured protege of someone very influential killed in the battle.
3. The film is a post-hoc propagandistic retelling of his story from Maximus’ perspective, who is *deep* in the Dunning-Kruger curve and cannot comprehend why everyone else in the Roman elite has turned on him. Either that or it’s some later attempt at bending his story for propagandistic purposes (a la Herodotus using the Spartans for nation-building).