Swords and Cinema with Dr Jeremiah McCall

Welcome to The Partial Historians.

We explore all the details of ancient Rome.

Everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles wage, and when citizens

turn against each other, I'm Dr. Rad.

And I'm Dr. G, we consider Rome as the Romans or it, by reading different authors from

the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Hello and welcome to a special episode of The Partial Historians.

I am one of your hosts, Dr. Rad.

And I am Dr. G.

Dr. G, we are joined by somebody who shares a passionate interest of mine, actually a couple

I think, probably, as well as yours.

We are very lucky to be joined by Dr. Jeremiah McCall, or DMACC, as his students call him,

which I think makes him very much at home on this particular show.

He is a teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School in Ohio, and he has a PhD in ancient history.

Along with an interest in Roman military and political systems in the Republic, he has

done a lot of work on pedagogy of using video games to learn about history, publishing

gaming the past, using video games to teach secondary history in 2022.

He divides his research time between historical game studies and Roman history.

Dr. McCall's other publications include The Cavalry of the Roman Republic in 2002, The

Sword of Rome in 2012, Clan Fabius defenders of Rome in 2018, and rivalries that destroyed

the Roman Republic in 2022.

But today, we are here to talk all things, movies, and the military.

Welcome, DMACC.

Thanks.

It's great to be here.

I'm really excited to talk about this.

Oh, we are very excited.

I always cannot turn down an opportunity to talk about Rome on film.

It's interesting.

The book, I gather the book did well enough, right, like I didn't make a fortune by me

a coffee, and that's better than buying a book, but I gather it did well enough that

they put it into a paperback, but it's one that really I haven't gotten to talk to about

a lot, and I certainly thought it was kind of a fun idea, so I'm glad to be here.

So can you please maybe start by giving us a bit of an overview of the development of

the Roman army, because your interest in this book is all about the military and the

Roman army and how they appear on screen, as well as the Greeks, but which is kind of

no other part of it today.

So maybe knowing a little bit about the Roman military would help our listeners sort of

get situated.

Sure.

Absolutely.

I guess one of the things I should say about the book is there are lots of different

ways one can approach film in history, and I was absolutely not approaching it as a

trained scholar of film in history.

I was approaching it as a bunch of years sitting around on a couch, having a beer or something

like that, and you're watching the movie, and somebody's like, oh, that's so fake,

or yeah, that's how it really was.

And writing a book for that just sort of like, okay, they're films, and some are really

great films, but are they depicting battle?

Are they depicting armies and soldiers and fighting in ways that kind of fit the evidence?

So the Roman army of the Republic, if you go back, I was saying to Dr. G a little earlier

that I had just listened to part of your We're Toos episode.

So if listeners are kind of in the 4th century with you about to attack they, at that point

sort of in the late 300s, we think that Rome had a military that was essentially like

most of the Greek city states.

So it was called a phalanx.

I'm not sure if your readers are familiar with it, but basically the idea is you got your

citizen soldiers together, and they had big round shields, and stabby spears, and maybe

a helmet or something else like that, but they lined up in these sort of large formations

with the idea of being that it's kind of like a shield wall, everybody covered themselves

and the people next to them, and phalanxes don't turn well, and they don't go on rough

ground well, and the only thing they're really, really good at is kind of moving forward

and going stabby stabby at anything that they see in front of them.

So that seems to be the earliest Roman military system, and like the Greeks, they divided

it up so that your wealth determined whether you would fight in the phalanx or whether

you might be a slinger or something like that.

But eventually, and we don't know why, right, I mean, the thing about the Roman Republic

is our evidence is so bad for most things that we're looking at.

Amen.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Well, you two are so courageously going through, you know, military tribunes with consular powers

and all that stuff, and I'm like, oh my goodness, yeah, wouldn't it be nice if we really

knew about that?

I think that's our conclusion very step at this.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's important, right?

I was saying before we started recording, you know, I took notes for this, and you both know,

as you're, you know, with your own PhDs in the field, it's not about instant recall or memorizing

facts, right?

It's about being able to look at the evidence and ask the questions and sort of go from

there.

You know, point of fact, I had to review to make sure that I had my Roman army talk in

good shape.

Anyways, going back to the phalanx, somewhere in the late 300s, 311s often given as a date,

the Romans seemed to have shifted their military away from the phalanx, and they adopted this

system that persisted through most of the Republic, which was called the Manipular Army.

Plutarch and Livia are our sources for this.

They don't agree on most of the major points.

They've got different names, they've got different types of units, they've got different

numbers involved.

Bless all the philologists out there that can figure out, you know, who's got the better

source or something like that.

That is beyond me, but this seems to be the basic deal.

You had four legions under the command, each under the command of a consul by 311, they

had passed a law to do that apparently, and each of those legions was divided up into

maniples.

Maniples, I think the word means handful, I believe, or something like that is where it

comes from, but basically we're a group of soldiers, 120 normally, and then 60 on the

smaller side.

So if you had 120 soldiers, I believe you had 10 maniples of what they called the hastati.

These were the guys with the big spears that were kind of charged for it and stabbed.

Sometimes they had a pilum, which we're going to talk a lot about pila today, because they're

not in any of the movies, and I don't understand why.

The hastati were the heavy infantry who would start the battle.

The princa pays were behind them, and they were sort of the men in their prime, and they

would kind of continue on the battle.

And then after them were the triari, who were probably armed like hoplites, and their

job was just if everything hit the fan, they could sort of form a defensive group.

So the idea seems to be that these maniples were arranged in sort of, think about like

the five spots on a die.

So you have a gap in between each line that's being filled by a maniple behind it.

And we kind of think they fought that way with gaps in their lines, but we don't really

understand how they did.

But the thing that the sources seem to agree upon is somehow the back lines were able

to relieve the front lines, maybe even in the middle of battle.

We're not entirely sure about that, and that's something that shows up in the sources, too.

Anyway, the manipular army was flexible.

It had small units that could go around and do important things on the battlefield, and

the Romans ended up winning lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of battles.

What they did?

Oh my god.

I know, right?

I know.

Everybody.

It's so true.

Well, it was so funny, because on a certain level, right, the movies all depict the opponents

of the Romans as not being as effective, and I guess that must be true, right?

I mean, on some level.

On a practical level, it seems like that might be the case.

So you mentioned a couple of written sources, like Livy and Plutarch, when we're talking

about the ways that we start to understand the Roman army, is the written source material,

the kind of material we're able to use when we're evaluating depictions of battles and

Roman soldiers on screen, or other other sources we should be interested in, and what

things do we know very little about?

Sure.

Fantastic.

So we've got the literary sources, right?

Livy, Polybius, a little bit of Plutarch.

When we get to the end of the republic, Caesar becomes invaluable with his Civil War and his

Gallic Wars.

When we get into the empire, we have Tastis talks about military things and Amianus Marcelinas

on the late end of those things.

In all of that, there are no soldiers accounts.

We do not have anything that's coming from people that actually fought in battle, other

than as a general, or certainly at least didn't fight in the battles they were describing.

If you think about the Greeks as a difference, right?

We have poetry fragments.

We have historical accounts written by people who actually did fight in some of their battles.

So that's kind of one of our big things, is we have all these sources.

Some of them, right?

When you get to Livy, he never participated in a battle in his life as far as we know.

So we have a lot of unexpert people talking about something that they didn't directly

experience.

And then there was all of us, thankfully, so, right?

Not fighting with each other with, well, I'm not fighting with anybody with anything,

but certainly not with stabby spears and swords and things like that.

And so one of the things that happens is trying to figure out, well, what was this actually

like when the stakes were real and people were trying to kill each other?

Archaeological sources, almost nonexistent for the republic.

We would love to have a depiction of what the soldiers, different soldiers and the maniples

look like.

There is an altered, judicious ahina barbis, bronze beard in first century, I think early

first century, that seems to show a Roman infantry soldier and a Roman cavalry person.

But that's kind of it.

When we get to the empire, we have all of those victory columns, right?

And the triumphal arches, or like Titus' triumphal arch, it's Trajan and Marcus Aurelius,

right?

I think that have the columns, I think.

Trajan has a column.

Does it, does a Marcus Aurelius?

Marcus Aurelius has a column as well, yeah, yeah, with the spiraling sort of reliefs, yeah.

And so the show's soldiers in battle and that helps us a little bit too.

So those are kind of our big things as far as what we have for sources.

Now, what don't we know as a result of that?

Well, everything.

We know nothing, this is in this podcast right now.

Much like Socrates, we are wise and that we know we know nothing.

No, that's actually wild when you think about it because the Roman army is obviously such

a big part of what people think about when they think of Rome.

And generally, when we do obviously see Rome appear in the cinema, it is focusing around

moments of conflict where there are going to be the spectacular battle scene.

So it is wild to think about how little we actually know.

Yeah, so you got to fill in a lot of imagination and I guess we'll talk about that more, but

I guess that's where I kind of come down on these movies is you've got to have some imagination.

You can't, you know, you've got to picture this somehow in your head if you're really

going to kind of bring it to life.

So what do you do when you know nothing other than these, you know, carved in stone figures?

Absolutely.

Well, maybe we should start talking about a real example and listeners of the show will

not be surprised to hear that we're going to start with my personal favorite, Spartacus

1960.

Now this is a bit of an unusual one in the sense that it is set in the late Republic.

We don't have a ton of movies that are set in the Republic.

And this obviously details the uprising of the gladiators Spartacus and his war against

Rome.

However, one of the weird things about this film is that there is a bit of a lack of battle

scenes.

You know, you might expect given that this is about a war between a gladiator and Rome

that there's a lot of battle scenes, but there aren't a ton.

But can you talk us through the way that that final battle scene between the slave army

and crisis's Roman forces was represented, because that's perhaps one of the more spectacular

sequences?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I really had fun kind of going back.

I don't think I had all the video clips when I wrote the book originally.

So it was great going back.

And so when you look at Spartacus, yeah.

And I think I remember reading about this somewhere.

I'm pretty sure they had more battle scenes that they had to cut along the way that.

Yeah.

It's part of the very troubled production history of this film.

There was a lot of talk about what they were going to film when they were going to film

it.

The battle scenes were certainly something that they were going to add some in at the end

because they realized that they hadn't really shown Spartacus winning.

And so the Romans being afraid of him didn't entirely make sense in the way that the film

came together.

They're like, wait, why are they afraid of him?

You don't really see him winning terribly much, but it became part of the incredibly chaotic

later production of this film that they didn't end up getting a ton of them back into

the movie.

The one that you do see, of course, is Spartacus' defeat, which is this battle that we're

talking about, which not everybody in the film was thrilled about, that that was the

big spectacular sequence because they were trying to build up a Spartacus who was a very

impressive military figure in the equal of the Romans.

And they felt that by giving all this screen time to his defeat, it, again, didn't quite

match up with the portrayal that they were going for.

Do I understand correctly?

I swear I came across this recently that there's also that, you know, sort of Cold War mentality

that there was a fear that Spartacus could represent sort of the proletariat forces kind

of triumphant over the good imperialist America.

I'm sorry, Romans.

We can't have that happening that under no circumstances.

Oh, I'm going to be so good and not talk about politics today.

Oh no, look, I think there definitely could have been a bit of that going on.

But of course, one of the things that's interesting about Spartacus is the fact that so many

people who were working on this film were communists or ex-communists.

So Dalton Trumbo, obviously, was one of the people fighting to show Spartacus as an

impressive military figure and how it fast, whose novel the movie was based on had very

deliberately set up Spartacus and the slaves as a kind of proto-communist society where

it was very ideal and utopian in his novel.

That was a very clear message if you read the book that this is based on.

So they're probably actually not wrong to think that that's what Spartacus represented.

Right.

Isn't it?

It's fascinating how it's all a playground.

I came into reception studies really long way around.

That wasn't my training.

And then I got into video games and history.

But as you both know as teachers, as high school educators, you're both high school educators,

right?

I thought I got that right.

Reception studies is everything we do, right?

What's a student?

But learning with you and studying with you and then you have this interesting example

of, well, how do they take this evidence?

How do they take their readings and their discussion and their video games and stuff

like that?

Absolutely.

So yeah, it's all reception studies sort of on a certain level.

Okay.

So last battle scene, right?

Spartacus and his army are up at the top of the hill, Crassus and his army, his army

has sort of paraded by as he's sort of sitting on the side, watching, and that's probably

reasonably accurate since the generals wouldn't necessarily be in the front as they were

doing that.

But basically you've got this mashup.

There's a scholar in Manchester, I think Manchester, in Britain, Richard Cole, who's been doing

some work on video games as historical video games as mashups.

And Spartacus, the battle is definitely a mashup.

You've got, first of all, the classic, you've got the sculpted body armor made out of leather

with all the muscles, not ever.

Do we have any evidence that any average soldier was wearing these?

They're probably expensive.

They may not even have been that comfortable.

So they're wearing those.

They've got the Tarou Gays, right?

The leather flaps going down to guard their abdomen.

And that's all mashup.

The shields are mostly straight instead of curved.

And so their helmets are kind of okay, but otherwise it's a little creek.

It's a little trusskin.

It's a little Roman as they're going on.

And leather armor seems to be a fascination for lots of filmmakers, and they just didn't

wear it.

For good reason, it doesn't stop a spear or a sword or anything like that.

Don't you think it must be about what props they had, you know, like what they had on set,

what they were able to kind of get?

Oh, they like reusing things, aren't they?

They definitely like reusing things.

Yeah.

So they've got their gladiast-looking swords.

So that's okay.

But the spears that they have are clearly thrusting spears.

Now, here is Nerd 101 on spears, okay?

If the diameter of the spear shaft is like an inch and a half or two inches, and it is

straight the long way, and you have kind of like a broad tip on it, then it is a spear

and you're using it to stab somebody and keep in your hands.

But the Romans used the peelum, which was this kind of specialized javelin where you throw

it.

It was made of a wooden shaft and socket, and then it had kind of like a really thin

spit of metal and then a really kind of fine tip.

And the idea was they would throw it before they went into battle as far as our sources

can tell us.

And it did a devastating job demoralizing enemies, and sometimes if it went through shields,

it bent very easily.

And we don't know whether they planned for it to bend or it was just luck on their part,

it goes through the shields and bends, and then you've got this six to ten pound weight

holding down your shield as well.

So it makes it harder to defend yourself.

And listeners will have to report into you and you'll have to get back to me.

I don't think there's a single movie that's tried to represent this.

I can't think of one, no.

Hmm, I'm keen for details.

Get in touch, listeners.

I think it must be really, well, see today though, they have all the special effects,

but it must be really hard to represent a bunch of javelins going through the air and

people.

So usually what they end up doing is sort of just a shield smash instead.

So they have stabby spears, they don't have peel as they're going in.

The part that kind of fascinated me as I was looking at it, there's some promotional

materials that talk about how the Roman army was organized in the first century.

And they had shifted.

The short version is they shifted from manoples to cohorts.

The cohorts were uniformed soldiers.

They were all heavy infantry equipped and armed the same.

But they still seem to have that gap system where the rear lines could kind of support

the front lines.

Cooper goes for this.

He has ten units.

As you should have, a Roman legion should have ten cohorts and he's got ten units and

there's a gap between them.

They look like the five-sided dice, except for there's actually four rows of them, which

no source ever attests to, but he's got four rows of them.

And they march up.

And then when they get to the bottom of the hill, the front line extends.

So the two cohorts are in front, extends so that they become a solid line of soldiers.

And then they march up the hill and the rest sit back.

And I don't know if they're taking tea or having a holiday or something like that.

But they're not doing the thing that you would expect them to do, which is support the

front lines.

So I love the fact that they tried to do something with these gaps in the manifolds and they

tried to do something with formation.

And I think when it comes to the grandeur of the Roman army, they did a really cool job.

But this is not how it happened.

This is clearly not how it happened.

But that's actually one of the areas we don't know a lot about.

We don't know how it happened, but it doesn't seem to be this.

Suppose you were a soldier going up a hill and you saw some people at the top of the hill

and they had these logs.

And they were standing there and they lit the logs on fire.

OK, so you've got the flaming logs and you're at the bottom of the hill and they're at

the top of the hill and they're still holding the flaming logs and they seem to have two

people on each side to drag them.

What do you do?

Well, I wouldn't be walking up that hill and tell you what.

And I was trying to think about it because on the one hand, it's like, right?

Why are you?

It's like, no, I think I'll just wait down here.

Yeah, like I can wait it out.

Those logs will eventually burn through.

It will take days, but I can wait until the logs are gone and then I'll go up the hill.

Exactly.

So then it's like, well, maybe the commander made them go up.

No, I don't know.

We actually, I think we have like maybe one reference to incendiary items being used

in any of these battles.

And believe it or not, I thought this was, I thought this was absolutely false.

I couldn't believe it, but I was researching a Roman video game, Roman Total War once.

And apparently there is a testimony.

I think Appian says it at once, a flaming pig.

Yes.

Yes.

I'm a vegetarian.

I'm not a big fan of lighting pigs on fire.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah.

So anyway, so yeah, so they're going up that hill and the rolling log logs come down and

much as you would expect, they burn people and some of the soldiers jump over the logs

and some of them get rolled over by the logs.

Logs done, damage done, front row not supported.

Then you basically have the troops all run down the hill, get into each other.

And you have a brawl.

Every history Roman military, well, any ancient military history, for at least the past 140

years, it's been seriously questioned whether armies, when they got into battle, kind of broke

up into these groups that you see pretty much, you see it all over Spartacus, right?

They're all doing duels, this little clump, that little clump, and so on.

And the argument was made a long time ago in the 1870s by a French artillery officer,

I think, that if all you did was have the two sides kind of mix it up and brawl, then

the larger force would always win, because there'd always be more people in the bar fight

as it were, not that I have any experience with bar fights.

But I think that's one of these things where our inability as modern people living in

very lush lifestyles, where we're not conscripted into armed forces, but we study history, is

how do we understand these things?

And I think this is where people who have been in military settings and do military history

become highly valuable, because they do see how it works and how it doesn't work.

And what would immediately make sense and not make sense in these contexts?

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

It's really stretching your mind into something into an area that most of us just have no

experience with, gratefully, certainly.

So they're all brawling.

We'll get into it a little more in some of the other films about how they deal with that

idea of combat, but Spartacus, they're all duking it out.

And then you have the aristaya, right?

You have the courageous individual Spartacus going through, and he's lopping off.

He's stabbing people.

I forgot the part where he chops off somebody's arm, and they show her, and I was like,

oh, that's 1960 special effects, that's good stuff right there.

So he cuts off somebody's arm, and he stabs somebody, and he takes them all out, and there's

a lot of focus on that.

There's a lot of room.

There's so much room to just sort of wander around with your horse and stuff like that.

It's like, how did you get these tens of thousands of soldiers to come together and fight,

but there's all this room?

It all stays very open.

It's all very much a brawl.

It's not really going to help us visualize for a century battles very well at all.

I love that they tried it.

I think that kudos goes to anybody who tries it.

I think one of the limitations that we often don't think about with movies is everything's

on screen.

So you've got to have an answer to everything.

How did they fight?

How did they march?

What did they wear?

What were they wearing?

We get away with writing, right?

We can write a sentence and leave thousands of details out, and nobody necessarily notices

because the sentence is sort of self-contained.

You can't just have a big blank screen with a Roman standing there and nothing else.

You've got to fill it in.

Oh, waiting, historians, details, come back soon.

Right, exactly.

Exactly.

I think that raises such a good point because we've been talking a lot about Gladiator

movies, obviously, with Gladiator 2 coming out recently.

One of the things that we often talk about is the fact that obviously in modern retellings

of Gladiator movies, particularly, if you think about the Russell Crowe ones, I should

have called them the Ridley Scott one, sorry, sorry, Ridley Scott.

Australia and loyalty.

Yeah, exactly.

We do tend to see Gladiators fighting without a helmet, particularly if they're the star

of the movie.

And that's because they're being paid millions of dollars as an actor for us to actually

see them.

And we want to see the emotion.

We want to see the terror.

We want to see them scaling at each other and all of that kind of stuff.

But that obviously genuinely really happened if you were glad, Eddie.

You generally had some sort of head covering on because protecting the head, that seems

to be a priority.

Right.

I feel like it's the same thing sometimes with these battle sequences, with the brawling

in that the person who's shooting the film wants to be able to get in there close and

see some of the main characters juking it out with each other because they don't necessarily

really care about what else is happening around them.

They're focusing in on the main characters, you know, crashes versus Spartacus.

And that's what we as the audience also kind of want to see.

So I feel like cinematically, that's probably more reflection of what they want to deliver

to us emotionally.

And that's perhaps why they don't really think about the accuracy of what's going on around

these people.

I think that's a really good take.

I hadn't quite thought about that way.

But you must be right.

Certainly about the helmets, but I think you must be right too about the having the

space to be able to maneuver the cameras and things like that.

You know what it is?

The ultimate effect in Spartacus gets you very much at something that, okay, quick disclaimer.

Everything I say is based on 25 years old research and occasionally writing new books.

So anything I say can be, I'm sure contradicted and countered and told that I'm silly by whoever

the current crop of historians is on this.

That being said, at least 20 years ago, conventional wisdom was that Homeric fighting might have been

like this where you had the heroes.

I mean, obviously the elite, you know, depicts it as the heroes fighting and the soldiers

mopping around.

But apparently there's some scholarship that suggests that there is something like that

going on.

But you have these sort of battle plan leaders who are better equipped and more focused

on and a bunch of supporting soldiers.

Spartacus really kind of does that sort of that Homeric fighting.

And he's not as cool as Diomedes because he doesn't stab a god.

But, you know, I also like to think that with Spartacus, I feel like the reason why some

stories tend to make it into TV and film multiple times is partly because the source material

that it's drawing from is naturally more cinematic in the way that it's described than

others.

So for example, I feel like Herodotus, the way that he writes, you can literally lift

dialogue out of that and put it on the screen.

And that's been done in 300.

And I feel like it's the same thing with Spartacus because of the way that Plutarch writes.

There are these inherently cinematic moments.

And one of them is Spartacus's supposed death scene.

We do have this description of him in that final battle, heroically trying to cut his way

through to Crassus, you know, him being protected by some of his most loyal adherents.

And gradually, they're cut down one by one until finally, Spartacus is delta death below.

I mean, that is screaming out for Hollywood.

And that's, I think, what we're kind of seeing on the screen here now.

Did Plutarch know what he was talking about?

Probably not.

But that's what we got.

I know you both have found this to be the case because I've listened enough.

And, you know, as far as like looking at the reconstructions that these ancient sources

give and how little they're based upon.

And I think at the end of the day, it's one of the things that makes somebody like me think

that video game and movie adaptations and scholars like you too as well are are reasonable

because we're doing everything from secondary sources from people who had not a clue and

were at least 500 years after the fact.

And not always.

Sometimes there were only 100 years after the fact.

It doesn't seem so strange to take, you know, I mean, I think the battle scene in Spartacus

is at least as, at least as likely to be authentic as Plutarch's version of what's going

on there.

Neither of them is really giving you much of a version of what the mechanics are.

Wow.

Wow.

Okay.

So turning away from Spartacus because I know Dr. Rab could stay here for a whole hour.

It's not longer.

I want to sort of switch focus to a much more recent adaptation, HBO's Rome, which I still

love after all of this time.

So I think the first season aired in like 2005, which is probably showing its age at this

point.

But it's a very different time period for bringing a Roman army onto the screen.

It's post dating gladiator, which it obviously sort of kicked off in everybody's minds.

Well, we need to think about Rome and Rome on screen.

But how does HBO's Rome fare when depicting Roman soldiers?

Yeah, it's a really great question.

Yeah, it was such a fantastic series and they stopped.

I was so sad.

Yeah.

Capitalism ruins the party again.

Yeah.

Okay.

So when you get to, when you get to HBO's Rome, I think there are some problems I think

with what they do, but, and I know nothing about who was behind the filming or the directing

or anything like that.

But you really start to see a vision of a Roman battle that I think becomes useful.

We talk sometimes about, can you learn from this movie or what can you learn from that

movie or stuff like that?

And I guess I'm always reminded, right, that, and I think this is a Plutarch quote,

but it's the, you're not a vessel to be filled with education, right?

You're a set of logs that are supposed to be sparked and, you know, enlightening a fire.

And so I wouldn't want my students to be passively learning something ever.

If I can avoid it, I would want to be actively engaged in it.

And so I think the interesting question is, do these films allow us, if we're interested

in either because we're professional historians or we're nerding out or whatever it is that

gives us joy?

Do they help us visualize what it might have been like so that we can then compare it to

our sources and talk with people on podcasts and things like that?

So I think HBO Rome does it.

I think the, the Battle of Alicia, I don't think it says Alicia.

I think it just says golf.

So this was in, I believe 52 BC.

And Caesar was up in golf, right, on his 10 year campaign again, if you guys ever make

it to the third and second and first century.

I am so ready to come on back and talk about those books.

We intend to.

I will be old.

I will be significantly older than what's still excited to talk about Roman things.

So the Battle of Alicia, Caesar's there, he's conquering Gauls, that's a siege.

It's an interesting siege of the town of Alicia because of Gallic army comes up.

And so Caesar's soldiers are in fortifications where they're both fencing in the city that

they're besieging and fencing out the other army that's coming to support them.

HBO's Rome does nothing with that.

It's Gauls, there's no reason for them all to be standing in this woody area, but they

don't care.

They're just going for it.

So what exactly this is supposed to be, I'm not quite sure, but that's, but that's not

to attract, I think, from, from the achievement.

So you look at it and you really see that they're trying to make this idea of the organized

Romans versus the semi organized or disorganized Gauls.

Interestingly, as far as we can tell, the Gauls weren't that disorganized by the first century

BC.

The Romans had taken a lot of techniques and a lot of equipment from the Gauls.

And so as Roman historians, we always love a good, you know, barbarian joke here or there.

But the reality is that it wasn't quite that distinct and yet.

Clearly the Romans put a lot of energy into maintaining a training system and a formation

system and an officer system that could hold up to stresses.

So they're standing there, the, the soldiers under Verenius's century, it must be because

he's a centurion.

And you can see an optimally equipped legionaire almost.

They've got scale armor, they got ring, uh, uh, a chain mail, which is absolutely what

was being worn at the time by the wealthiest.

But by the first century, most were being supplied with that.

They have their scrotum, they have their, they have their shields, probably a little too

early.

Um, they have these shields that are rectangular and curved and that seems to be early empire.

But it's okay.

They look good.

They've got their helmets.

They've got their garlic helmet actually and they're looking good and they've got their

gladiast and they don't have Pila.

They do not have a single throwing speed missing an opportunity again.

I know.

And, and you're thinking to yourself as an armchair general, right?

You're like a throw of some Pila could be really useful here.

I would think.

I'm, I reckon, I wonder if it's a health and safety thing that, you know, just hurling

these gigantic javelins is just too risky.

But then again, there are so many scenes where they love having the rain of arrows.

I was thinking that too.

I was going to say, why don't they sub out the rain of arrows, which we know is historically

inaccurate and put in some throwing javelins.

Come on.

Yeah.

I know.

I know.

So, okay.

So they don't have that great vision here.

Now, you know, we'll forgive them those things.

Again, I do wonder about equipment costs and how much they were trying to borrow and

whatever.

So they're waiting there and there's tension and, and soldiers are all gritty and dirty

looking as you would expect them to and this is some pretty serious business.

And so they clash and it looks really good.

Their smashing shields into shields are trying to knock each other down.

The Romans are using their stabbing motion.

The, the gladiast was supposed to be good for both a cut and a stab.

They seem to be doing a good job with that and the Gauls are a bit more disorganized and

they're not having an easy time of it.

So the first part is where Verainus is mad at pullo because he's broken ranks.

So that happens first.

So, so pullo, right, the headstrong one breaks ranks and he's off fighting his own personal

battle.

And, and again, this fits what we know.

Personal battles were not being fought by Romans in the middle of battles before the battle.

Right possibly, maybe with the cavalry off on the side of the battle, but they weren't

doing it in the middle of the battle because that's when you have to keep your formations

and everything.

So there's this wonderful scene where Verainus, and I just love it, he's like, formation

pullo.

And he's just, you're like, you can, you can feel it and you go, okay, yeah, I would assume

a centurion had to grunt like that.

I mean, because it's battle, it's serious business.

Pullo goes ahead, doesn't listen to anybody, kill some Gauls, and Verainus is on me and

he gets a group of loyal soldiers to come with him and they co out into this little group.

And suddenly, as you were saying, Dr. Rad, you have all this space for the camera, suddenly

there's space for Verainus to punch pullo, have people grab him, force him back into line

as he's turning and talking and calling him a drunken fool, and then have him walk back

to the front lines without any of the Gauls hitting them at that.

Okay.

So that's strong.

The idea of emphasizing military discipline, definitely over a grandised, and I almost,

I almost feel like we have to make a moral note here, by the way, a side note, which you

are welcome to cut if you'd like.

But let's remember that there are horrific white supremacists in the world that overstate

Roman order and fascism and all these things and they do it for evil purposes.

So I don't want to, I don't want to overstate the Roman order thing.

But clearly our sources say that that was part of it, that they were trained in discipline.

So the Verainus and pullo episode, that makes sense.

So I'm stoked.

I'm watching it.

This is great.

It's only been two minutes, and then I see it.

And I said, what the hell was that?

Do you know what I'm talking about?

He died there.

Okay.

So what the hell was that?

Okay.

So he blows his whistle.

Cool.

A whistle for command.

Sure.

Why not?

I don't know the way of evidence for that, but they had to do this somehow.

He blows his whistle, Verainus.

And then the front line, the front line dudes in the Roman army all turn sideways and

sidle their way down between the tight rows of infantry on their side.

And when you look from the top, they're sidling down and going to the back.

The next person in line goes to the front.

What they don't show you, well, they show you in the, in the clip on the overhead shot

is each of those soldiers has their left hand with their shield and their left hand is

also holding their gladius because their right hand is on the straps of the soldier in

front of them.

What is that?

So basically we're asked to imagine, and I'm going to be nice to this after.

So we have to assume is the front guys would all be able to sidle their way back.

The person behind them would be able to let go of the guy, shuffle forward, take his

gladius from his, from his, from his shield hand, hold up his shield and, and, and refresh

while people were trying to kill them.

I do think this might be a logistic way of trying to solve, like, how do we do it?

Like they're standing there with all of the equipment and they've got whoever is their

master of battles behind the scenes, being like, how are we going to do this change of

formation?

How do we make that work physically?

It's like you've got this giant shield, you've got this sword.

If you're holding both at the same time, maybe you'll accidentally injure the person who

you're relieving.

So we've got to get them out of the way.

But this obviously sets up that next line to be completely vulnerable.

So presumably it's not how it was done.

I think you're right, though.

I mean, I, I think, you know, props are due.

This is the most serious scholarly version of this you would, you've seen in film, right?

I mean, Spartacus isn't doing anything close.

They tried with their cohorts.

So there are a couple of historians.

I can't remember.

It's been a while.

I don't think anybody supported the Rome version recently.

But there have been a couple of scholars that suggested this is what happened that in the

midst of the fight, individual roles of soldiers would, would relieve each other.

But yeah, it kind of staggers the imagination that that could work.

But that's one of those gaps in our evidence.

We don't know how they relieved each other.

We have no idea how that worked.

It seems impossible.

The best argument that I've heard, well, I mean, we don't even know, we don't even know

if the, if the cohorts fought in those regular lines as much or whether they were just all

sort of clumped.

The best answer I've heard is that there are actually probably a lot of gaps in fighting

and a lot of pauses, particularly if you stayed in your kind of orderly groups.

You, you, you'd clash together and people would die and energy would be exerted.

And then they'd back off.

There'd be a natural pause every so often and maybe that's it.

But I think you're right.

I think this is a serious, I shouldn't have said scholarly because scholarly is not the standard

by which history is history.

It is instead interpretation of the past, selectively, in a way that you find meaningful.

So maybe, maybe scholarly is not the word, but it is a serious attempt.

I think you're right to figure out what the heck might have.

This is the tricky thing about being an academic who studies history on film because so often

you're like, that is completely inaccurate and then people say, okay, well, how should

it have been?

I have no idea.

But I know that that's not how it was.

Exactly.

And, and, and that's that.

And that goes back to like, I'm not going to try and pronounce the French on that because

my French pronunciation has been made fun of in like six US states and the setting of

a film, right?

No, all right.

I'm going to try.

It's me's on saying.

Oh, yeah, the me's on saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There you go.

See, I knew I could go do into pronouncing it for a performer as I can.

And any event, right?

The setting of the setting of the scene, everything that's in the shot.

And they've got everybody in the shot, so they've got to figure out some way to relieve.

And so, yeah, that's what they do.

So yeah, you know, I mean, fair enough.

At the end, this is probably the best that you're going to see.

And then they get to fill a pie and they kind of go for it even more.

Still don't have Pila.

It's a civil war.

Romans are afraid of spears too.

Why aren't they doing a nice Pila throw?

I mean, civil war.

I mean, surely, if you can have Pila, it would be in a civil war when they're wrong.

Why don't you think?

Right?

Because everybody's got them.

That's when you have to surprise them by showing up without them.

I mean, yeah, it's like it's like a Pila fight in a phone booth or a knife, but you brought

it.

Don't fill up high.

The sources are pretty clear.

There are two battles, not one, but, but this telescope says cinema does the setting

they're making dry and dusty, although I don't actually, I mean, it was, I think it was

spring or summertime.

And Greece can be dry and dusty in that time.

I think the seriousness of the soldiers, their shields are kind of at rest leaning against

their knee, which makes a lot of sense.

And, you know, kind of the seriousness on their face.

And that's something that HBO really kind of goes with is trying to get sort of the

gravity of this.

And I love the fact that when they do this, I assume they must be using CGI stuff to

add onto it, but they have many, many units on the field and they're taking these aerial

shots.

You absolutely have these sense that they're in different units coming together and they

come together and they clash again, they didn't throw a Pila at each other, but they clash

with each other and they're stabbing and they're thrusting.

And it devolves into chaos in the front, but it doesn't devolve into quite as much chaos.

So you got a sense maybe that there are still formations back there, but it's, it's a brutal

slugfest, it's a brutal stabfest in the front rows.

And I think they do a really good job with all of that.

And then no whistles are blown, but they relieve the front lines and do that thing again.

You're like, okay, they're committed to this.

This is just how it's going.

It's the way.

Yeah.

And I should say it looks really cool.

It looks really cool when they do it.

The shot of the relief couldn't ask for anything more.

Interesting too.

Except for when Brutus commits suicide, there's no aristaya.

There's no, there's no individual leaders going through and making a show.

I don't think that our protagonists are even in there.

I don't think Verenis and Pullo were even at that battle.

I can't remember.

But Antony's not going in doing that.

Of course, Octavian's not doing that.

What?

He was poor and both sick.

He was not feeling well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Excuse me.

I'm not sure what anybody's trying to say here about Brutus.

He had to rest in his tent, apparently.

Yeah.

We've all had this.

Now, of course, I'm a middle, I'm a middle aged history teacher in high school.

So I would not be doing any better.

I mean, so I should not be throwing stones.

But in any event, the no aristaya makes sense.

You've got the general's behind commanding and sending in reserves and things like that.

So I think they do a really good job on that.

I don't think they do starting speeches.

I think, you know, I mean, if we're going to nitpick, right, Antonyist was certainly charismatic

to his soldiers and we don't ever have him being like giving a speech or something like

that.

And I believe Brutus and Cassius, I think all this show, because I just went back to the

video clips.

I think all they're doing is arguing or is talking about what he wants on his birthday

and isn't his birthday.

And she'll have a cake, which do Romans have cake?

I don't.

Well, the big a question.

I feel like no, like I take cake very seriously and I feel like they don't have cake

like I understand it.

Yeah.

Okay.

I mean, right.

They've got fish guts, but they don't have cake.

Yeah.

Maybe like a sweet bread of some kind or something.

Yeah.

Sure.

There you go.

Yeah.

But anyways, they don't seem to do a very good job speaking to the soldiers either and

we'd actually kind of think that happened.

We think that it's impossible for the commanders to have actually reached all the people in

their armies when they're giving speeches, but the speech for your local group was probably

something you tried to do because at the end of the day, battles were not lost primarily

through wounds.

They weren't lost when more people got killed.

They were lost when one side lost its morale to the point that had decided self-defense,

self-preservation was a better shot for them than staying in this orderly formation.

And that's when the real devastating killing goes on.

So speeches and stuff are kind of an important reminder of that.

So let's switch, perhaps, from the late republic to the empire because we don't want to

miss that.

Of course, gladiator 2000.

We can't not mention that, especially because the opening scene of that movie has a particularly

memorable battle scene between the Romans and Germanic tribes.

How accurate do you think this scene was?

It's funny.

Are you familiar at all with Brett Devaro's blogs and things?

He rips this one to shreds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think he does gladiator, too.

And I went back to read because I was like, oh my gosh, I mean, I know him digitally,

like we all know each other, right?

And I said, oh my gosh, I better go and read that because if he says gladiator, one was

horrific after I was being kind of positive on it.

I want to at least be ready for that.

But apparently it's just gladiator, too.

And you all had a good time a few weeks ago, ripping a hole into that one, too.

We did.

So they finally have the right armor, the segmented Lorca, the Lorca segmentada, which makes

some kind of look like lobsters, right, with the overlapping plates.

They have put those in movies in the republic all over the place and they never existed

in the republic.

And that is the armor.

If you want to show Romans, you show them in the segmented armor by gladiators day by

the second century, they actually were using this armor.

So finally, we've got the right armor and it looks really great on them.

And they've got head scars, which I would imagine you'd want if you were throwing a helmet

on that's kind of banging around and stuff like that.

I mean, we have a lining, but and they've got peel up that they don't use.

And they've got gladiators and their shields are curved and I didn't look, but I bet their

military sandals are, I bet they look great, too.

You totally, I think, get the authentic visualization of what this is like, nitpicky

details.

Sure.

But I'm not an imperial historian, so I don't know what they are.

I think this is a great visual.

Then they move into battle, right?

Okay.

And so first thing, of course, is we have to have the fireworks.

The Roman catapults launch flaming balls of something at the Germans who are yelling

in the trees.

It's a trope, right?

You've got the disorganized but courageous Germanic people and the disciplined Roman

people and their standing firm because after the fires come, they still go, ah, and everybody

knows that they're really tough.

And you just kind of wonder, did they do that?

I really didn't think they did.

I thought the, I thought the chances of using catapults to hit people on foot was almost

nil.

But apparently there's a little of that.

We've got a few places in the sources where artillery was used, but I'm still kind of skeptical.

I think they wanted fire.

They wanted the, they wanted the wolf dog.

They wanted Maximus's wolf dog to leap through the flames.

Oh, yeah.

Which sadly doesn't look as good as I remember it looking.

I'm glad that because I feel like that means that that animal was not hurt.

They were more concerned about hurting the animal, I'm sad than tubing the stuff, which 50

years ago would not have mattered.

Oh, I know.

Oh, God.

They formed their testudo.

We have no evidence of anybody ever forming a testudo, right?

That's the ones with the shields on top and the shields in front, like the tortoise.

We have no accounts of that ever being done, except for in a siege when they were trying

to lift people up over towers and things like that.

I think we might have one example, but they used it against the German arrows.

Now, this is clever.

Basically, the Germans fire their arrows.

The legionaries clam up like a testudo to block the arrows.

And the Germans take that moment when they're kind of hunkering to run and charge to into

them.

Now, this is clever because it means there's no space to throw their Pila.

Aha, for you.

Of course.

And looking at us like, oh my gosh, that's how they did that.

That's totally right.

That is the most legit falsehood ever.

It's like they ran too fast.

You couldn't use it.

They keep formations, but then they evolve into a brawl because they always got to evolve

into a brawl.

And my original nerd specialty is the Roman cavalry.

That is not what I went to school for.

It just sort of worked that way.

As you know, dissertation's kind of worked that way.

And the classic misunderstanding of ancient and medieval cavalry is that they rode their

horses into people and that the impact of riding their horses into people was what took

out the infantry.

And about 24, about 50 years ago, John Keegan wrote a book called Face of Battle that's

been kind of inspirational to many, at least my generation of military historians,

where he pointed out, and I guess he knew horses.

I don't know horses, that you really can't make horses run into obstacles that they can't

jump over or get around.

They're going to stop.

And furthermore, if you did ride the horses in, then you're talking about these very expensive

animals that cost training and food and everything like that.

And you're running them into a bunch of infantry, wrecking the horse, wrecking you on top of

the horse.

And let's not forget these were usually nobles riding the cavalry, riding the horses.

So it's not going to happen.

And that's what I like about the Gladiator cavalry charge, because it suggests that they

just got in there and mixed it up.

And as far as we can tell, that's what cavalry did.

They took an already occupied infantry enemy, and they added fear and disruption by coming

in from some other side and roughing things up.

And I really like that.

And I like his little speech at the beginning, right?

You're dead in an elisium.

I like that the lines are sort of deforming of the horses that say, stay in line.

And of course, some horses are faster than other horses, so they don't completely stay

in line.

I think it's a good cavalry charge.

And then it gets back to a melee, it gets back to a brawl, like they always do.

But I think with those caveats, just as I think Rome, the Rome series is the one to watch

if you want to come as close as you can to visualizing what these might look like, I think

you can do the same with that Gladiator intro if you're looking for the Imperial Army.

By the way, you can move this earlier if you want, but Spartacus in the midst of the army

after having down to soldier grabs a six foot handled mace club and start swinging it

around.

I don't know if you remember that.

A pivotal moment.

All of the enslaved people had Roman equipment and the Roman people have Roman equipment.

Where did he get this six foot tall mace that he was able to like swing around?

Well, we do know that the slaves did manufacture their own armor and weapons.

So perhaps he had a creative person on his team.

And that's the duty.

I think we can go conspiracy theory logic, prove to me that they didn't make a club like

that.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Audience, please don't do that.

We don't say prove that it's not true.

We say here is the evidence that it might be true.

Sorry.

Okay.

Teacher and me couldn't help it.

As we're heading towards the battles of this imperial period, we've also got things

like Centurion from 2010 and the eagle from 2011.

So a good decade post gladiator and also films that the people who worked on would have

been able to see HBO's room and be like, ah, maybe both these films center around the

supposed disappearance of the ninth legion in Britannia.

They're probably not as well known as gladiator, but we're interested in how their depictions

about all might compare to the blockbusters.

You really kind of have to squeeze it to get it from a stone because they're not both

of those movies, I mean, maybe they're maybe because they were going for something different.

I'm not sure, but both of those movies really focus on a protagonist that is doing their

own kind of special ops, right?

Centurion, Michael Fastbenders, Behind Enemy Lines, and he has to kind of work his way

back.

And the eagle Channing Tatum is also, you know what, I have to confess.

I never finished the eagle.

I got about halfway through when I was like, this is just not gripping me.

Oh, and so I got scared when I was getting ready for this podcast.

I was because I saw a video that said, final battle in the eagle.

I was like, there was a final battle.

I didn't write that in my book, but no, it's just like 20 guys in a river stabbing each

other.

It's not a final battle.

We're okay.

You can still buy the book, but again, if you buy me a coffee, that will be at least

as much money in my, my, my, my, the conversation.

So chronological order, no, I'm going to do the eagle first.

What I like about the eagle.

So things, this is a great example again of you've got to put something in.

You can't leave blank spots in a scene.

You've got to have everything filled in.

And so there's this kind of great scene Tatum has come to relieve whoever was the off

by the commander of this fort.

I think his dad was dishonored by losing the Legion's eagle standards.

I can't remember.

But he gets on this discipline kick with his soldiers in the fort and has them prepare

defenses and get ready to be a serious obstacle to the Britons in the area.

We did look like that.

I didn't check to see if whether their hammer and stuff were authentic.

I bet they were.

I bet they were.

I bet they probably went into that detail, but they're putting like pine pitch on to

seal things up and they're cutting steaks and doing all this stuff.

And so this is really good.

And I like that.

And then you notice, of course, that when they put their armor back on, when they're

done doing these things, they have leather.

Oh, it's a return of the leather with comfortable circle.

I know, right?

And it's leather segmented armor.

It's the correct lorica.

Look, the lorica segmentada, but it's leather.

Just like that leather.

It's a budget thing, I'm sure.

It's a budget thing.

I'm sure you're right.

I mean, I guess it's good that at least they weren't like the muscled body armor.

That just tatum has that.

The Superman look.

The Batman look.

This is what I like about it.

What they end up doing is there's some scouts he sent out and the scouts had been caught

by the Britons, including this chief warrior dude who's got a really crazy look in his

eye and it's got a bare chest and some flowing robe and lots of, lots of really cool beard

hairs swirling around and is speaking in Gaelic.

I don't know what he's speaking in.

He's speaking in something that would be appropriate for Britain in the North.

A Pictish?

I don't know.

Not Latin.

That's the most important thing.

Right.

Not Latin.

So those scouts that he sends out are brought back in by the British war, by the British

army or the Britain army and their captives and they're kind of made to kneel down

and there are a few hundred yards away from the fort and there's this big show of the

Britain leader speaking and we have subtitles to hear that he's talking about all the awful

things the Romans have done, which let's face it is true.

The Roman did horrific things to the people that they thought it's right.

It's the they make a desert and call it peace quote.

So he's doing this and he kills one of the soldiers and the soldiers are all terrified

and we're really feeling the plight of the soldiers because that's kind of the position

we've been given, right?

We're pro Roman in this or we're supposed to be.

And Tatum says, I put him out there, I've got to save him 50 men on me and the 50 soldiers

all line up in their leather armor that's not going to help them at all.

What I really like about that is the energy they put into how freaking scary it must have

been to be a small group that was going to run out and try and do some kind of rescue

operation like that.

And we can't say things like that never happened.

We don't know and do the rules necessarily apply when you're talking about these things.

That actually also brings me back to there's a night fight before this where the Britons

attacked the fortress and Tatum grabs two swords and starts killing people with his dual

wielding scales, which I mean, I learned my Dungeons and Dragons 45 years ago, I'm impressed.

But I doubt he learned those things.

I don't think anybody was learning how to use two swords.

The reason I bring it up though is who knows what was happening in night fighting when

people were doing the horrific work of killing each other.

I mean, who knows what was going on?

Back to the scene though, the soldiers are scared.

One of them vomits, one of them's murmuring a prayer, they all look very serious, they

look very intimidated and I thought that was a really nice touch.

They don't always show the fear that must have been involved with us and I thought that

was really good.

And then they come out and they form their test studio, even though that's not probably

how they used it.

And then the Britons start jumping on top of the test studio.

So it's like an armored tortoise and I think that's possible because we have this example

where the Romans using a siege sort of lift people up six feet, five feet.

So they probably could do that, but the Britons are all jumping on and again you're emphasizing

right, discipline to orderly Romans, disorganized Britons, which is probably a fairer take.

The Britons were fighting in more loose warband formations than the Gauls for example.

And you see that idea of the line holding of the Romans with their shields in their position

holding the line and that's that morale idea.

As long as you stay in your position, you are better defended than if you run on your

own paradoxically, if you get so afraid for your life that you run, you immediately become

more likely to be killed.

And so they get around, they get around the captives and they form a circle.

And I thought that was a pretty interesting way to look at that too.

And I mean, of course, there's no testimony for circles around captives.

This is not the sort of stuff that made it into the accounts.

I liked again that they were trying to keep this idea of cohesion, this idea of maintaining

your perimeter so that you support each other together.

That's kind of the eagle.

I think it's some nice visualizations of some ideas and not really a visualization.

Oh my gosh, I forgot the chariot.

My understanding, again, middle-aged high school teacher, thankfully never been in an ancient

battle, never been in any battle.

My understanding is that the worst possible thing you can do when you are a line of soldiers

with swords and you see a chariot or anything else on horses is go run.

And he commands them to run, forget what his name is, but Channing Tatum says, run and

they all start running.

And as soon as they're running, they're not protecting each other and the chariot with

its side view.

Oh, no.

Just going to beat it down.

All those sides wheels, they like that touch in Hollywood.

Hi, yeah, sometimes I wonder about the physics of it.

Like if you put your shield down and put a foot against it, but a horse-drawn chariot,

that's got to be a lot of power, right?

I don't know.

I just don't know how that all sorts out, side wheels and blocking and stuff like that.

I think they got it from Greece, quite frankly.

Probably so.

And then Centurion is just an ambush scene.

They've got that marching in order.

Yep, absolutely.

They would have narrower lines when they're marching in order.

I really liked that so they march into this area that looks like a perfect trap and there's

a hills up on each side.

And the general who's at the front, which I don't know.

They might be.

Sometimes they might be.

The general at the front is like, wow, this looks really bad.

Tell the Centurion and the rear that we need to start backing up, which made me go

huh.

You would have thought you could send some scouts ahead to do that and the Romans use scouts,

but we know, right, Varys and the Tutinburg Forest lost legions to ambush.

And so this does happen.

The Britons come out from the tops of the hills and they have fiery rolling, flaming fire.

Ah, you've caused the fiery rolls.

This time, I think, Peter, you were the one saying that you'd run away if the flaming

logs were coming down.

You were, you wait, you'd wait and then let them burn out.

This time they don't really have a chance.

They're stuck there.

They got to put up with the flaming fireballs.

It's, it's, it's, and they're horrible.

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Here's what I liked.

The equipment was fine.

I think they actually did have their metal armor that time.

They didn't have a chance to throw Pila because they were disorganized.

This should have been a text box in the book if I had realized, right?

10 different cinematic ways to avoid throwing spears.

Yeah, exactly.

It's, it's amazing.

What I did like, what I thought seemed authentic was as they were waiting for the

attack and they were, they formed their kind of perimeter line and, and the unit commander

is the local officers were prepping them.

You know, you're ready.

You're trained.

Watch for it.

And I thought that was an interesting take on that idea of morale again.

We, our best guess is that to maintain this morale.

One of the reasons that the Romans and the Greeks tended to be very effective in their

infantry battles is they ended up a philosophical and wrote about this in 1989, I think, basically

the socio economic order of those societies is replicated in the military formations.

So you have the aristocrats leading and then you have the reasonably well off plebs in

officer positions and then you have the farmer soldiers.

And so that's important and the speeches are important and absolutely the sub commander

of the centurion who had been with you and a guide you and trained you is going to be

really important at a time like that.

So I thought that was a cool take on morale, but not really given us much to sort of visualize.

I think gladiators still going to give us the best one for visualizing battle in the

empire and then add in that eagle sort of shield wall thing that was pretty cool.

I actually kind of wonder if the difference in these movies is also the budget.

You know, you can't necessarily have huge battle scenes in every single movie because

it's so expensive.

It's kind of a metaphor for room itself.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

They like to picture these gigantic battle scenes when they're talking about even things

in the early republic.

It makes it sound so grand.

But if you actually were teleported there, you'd be like, oh, it's like a hundred guys

versus a hundred guys.

This isn't quite the what I was imagining.

I think you're right.

I mean, well, so I'm always interested.

I don't know enough of it.

I mean, so I'm sorry, Peter, because you're an English teacher.

So you will, you will get me on this.

But I still like to think about authors having intention when they're expressing things.

This is a tragedy.

We had to stop.

So I accept that there are big institutions making these, these movies.

And so it's not really, was it author or theory or something like that?

It's not really the director doing sort of everything on their own.

But it's just at some point, you're still kind of, I just, I wish I knew more

about the decisions people made.

This goes back to being a teacher.

Why is this portrayal being given by this person?

How is that making sense in, how are they making sense in their mind?

And so, oh, my gosh, I wasn't using your code name either.

Sorry, Dr. G.

So Dr. Redd, I think your idea about, I think your idea about a budget limitations and stuff,

there's got to be a lot of truth to that.

They're making a movie.

They're not making a historical monograph.

So yeah, it's got to play a bit more.

Well, even if you think about academic books and we would all have experienced this,

I certainly have.

Dr. G, we'll understand where I'm going with this.

Even we have word limits because they can only print so many pages in a book.

They can only afford to have a book of a certain size.

And you can't exceed that as it turns out.

Yeah.

So I'm writing a book right now for educators to design games for their history classes,

but then also to structure and support students designing those games.

And so one of the things, because it's just meant to be for any teacher who thinks

cool, I want to do this.

It's not meant to be for somebody who has any game design experience.

And so I was talking about abstractions, right, and games are abstractions, which I often

get confused what people mean by that.

What I mean by that is a simplification that keeps the essentials.

And the part that we often forget is that text is an abstraction, right?

If you say such and such a person was born on such and such a day and you make that statement,

somebody might say that statement is historically accurate.

My understanding from watching dramatic hospital videos on TV and stuff like that is that

actually giving birth is a lot more complicated than that.

If you say such and such a person died on such and such a day, we would say that's a historically

accurate statement.

But again, something's going on, some reality that's totally not being captured.

So yeah, they're all kind of, like you said, word counts and efforts to liven up our

prose and all the other things we do we're all we're all taking a past that does not

exist anymore and trying to selectively turn it into something that we think is meaningful.

And I think this is something that Ridley Scott leaned into as well where he's like, I'm

not trying to make a historical film, I'm trying to make an exciting movie.

Yeah.

So let's put sharks in the color theme, good, damn it.

I think yeah.

And fair enough, right?

If you made that so I think Robert Rosenstone, I think was sort of the leading person on

film theater on history on film, and I was going back and glancing at one of his articles.

I just never, I never went this way into, into, into film because my video game stuff is

similar, but I just, I've learned more and studied more and found that more compelling.

But I wanted to kind of go back and look and he makes a point in an article that there's

a number of sort of snooty, stuffy historians, they're like, well, we need to have more historians

on set, we need to have more historians dictating how these things will go.

And he says, no, that's not what we need.

And I actually made the same point about video games because there was a movement in the

early 2000s that we just need more historians making video games.

No, we don't need more historians making video games or movies.

They are their own legitimate art forms.

They are made for purposes that are not the same purpose as a monograph as a popular book

as whatever.

And yeah, Ridley Scala, you know, Goddamn it, he wanted to make the call, see him, and

he wanted to have, you know, tigers, he had to have tigers.

He wanted it and boy did he get it.

See, so it worked out for him, so it's all good.

Thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us.

This has been really fun.

And going back and looking at these films through a different lens, I will, I think the

subtitle for this episode has to be, where is the peeler?

Yeah, I was going to say, justice for peeler.

Peelabila, peelabila.

But thank you so much for taking the time.

We really appreciate it.

You bet, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Thanks so much.

Thank you for listening to this special episode of The Partial Historians.

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