charlesnaismith

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2025/06/13/collections-nitpicking-gladiators-iconic-opening-battle-part-ii/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-nitpicking-gladiators-iconic-opening-battle-part-ii

https://acoup.blog/?p=29917

This week we’re continuing our three-part (I) look at one of film’s most famous Roman battle sequences, the iconic opening battle from Gladiator (2000). I had planned this to be in two parts, but even though this sequence is relatively short, it provides an awful lot to talk about.

As noted last week, this iconic opening battle, set in the Marcomannic Wars (166-180) during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180), giving us a pretty precise geographic and chronological setting, even though the battle itself is entirely fictional. As we noted last time and as we’ll see more this time, this sequence manages to strike a really unfortunate balance of doing just barely enough right to convince a lot of viewers that it must be more robustly historically grounded, when in fact it is mostly historical gibberish, employing the wrong tactics with the wrong army with the wrong weapons which it uses wrongly.

Left out of last week’s discussion, but relevant for this week’s is that this historical gibberish also goes for the scene’s antagonists. The film says we’re in Germania and credits the one speaking part in the ‘barbarian’ army here as “German Leader,” as the fellow comes out and shouts in solidly 21st century German, so presumably the film thinks these are ‘Germans.’ And that casual conflation of ancient Germanic-language speakers with modern Germans – also present, for instance in Netflix’ Barbarians (2020-2; Barbaren), where the Cherusci speak modern German but the Romans speak classical Latin – is quite common but also quite wrong. Ancient Germanic-language speakers, after all, were far more widely spread and are hardly just the ancestors of today’s Germans – this is a group that, among other things, included the Franks, who give their name to Frankia (Francia in Latin) which is to say…France. These fellows are thus ‘German’ for a definition of German that would also include the English, the French, many northern Italians, some non-trivial number of Spaniards, and so on.

But precisely because the historical moment of this film is more specific, we can be more specific: these are the Marcomanni and Quadi, the two Germanic-speaking peoples the Romans went to war with as part of the Second Marcomannic War (177-180). The Quadi lived in what today would be western Slovakia, whereas the Marcomanni’s homelands were in what today would be the Czech Republic; these are Germanic language speakers, but we’re not in Germany.¹ The Marcomanni and the Quadi were two polities (of quite a few more) of a broader Germanic-language speaking ethnic grouping in our sources, the Suebi. It’s hard to keep precise track of these groups but it in the fifth century it seems like a good chunk of the Suebi, probably including the Marcomanni and Quadi (who continue to exist after the Marcomannic Wars) end up inside the Roman Empire, settled either in Pannonia, parts of Germania Superior (the upper Rhine) or – and this is a bit longer of a walk – Galicia (then Gallaecia) in North-Western Spain.

Gladiator, of course, is happy for the folks to simply be generic ‘barbarians,’ but these were real peoples. Their economy, such as we can observe, was at least partially agrarian, although our sources stress a relatively high amount of pastoralism (one suspects more ranching than out and out nomadism). Both the Marcomanni and Quadi in the second and third centuries AD are reported to have kings – although it is unclear how much power such ‘kings’ wielded – so these are not leaderless hordes either, but polities likely undergoing early phases of state formation, as a product of contact with the Romans. Equally evident in the archaeology, peoples across the Roman frontier traded a lot with the Romans, despite political friction, so these ‘barbarians’ would hardly have been unfamiliar with Roman goods or arms by this point.

And I wanted to give that background because as badly as this sequence does Roman warfare, it is going to equally make an utter mess of Suebian warfare (to the degree we can observe it) as well and it is worth keeping in mind that not only do the Romans here purport to represent a real culture, so do the Marcomanni and Quadi.

Signals and Speeches

We start with something that, as battle depictions go, I actually like: it’s made pretty clear to us that this battle has been planned in advance. Maximus’ subordinate officer Quintus clearly knows what the plan is when he frets “soldier, I ordered you to move those catapults forward, they’re out of range” because he’s concerned about “the danger to the cavalry.”

Now the problem with this line, like a lot of the dialogue in Gladiator is that beyond the immediate emotional impression – Quintus is nervous, Maximus is calm, unconcerned about the risk to his person – it doesn’t mean anything. The catapults are very clearly not out of range given that we’re going to see they have no problem at all shooting and even overshooting the field. More to the point, moving them forward isn’t going to reduce the danger to the cavalry: the cavalry is going to be charging in from directly behind the enemy, so the risk is that the catapults overshoot the enemy line (which we do see them doing). Moving them closer would increase, not reduce that risk. Moreover one wonders both how the catapults would be moved – they’re pretty bulky – and to where since they are positioned immediately behind the infantry line.

And of course, that’s the level on which one probably has to engage with the film: the scenes and lines mostly work in describing the character’s emotions, but generally carry no deeper meaning. That’s not a problem, as films go – set your brain to idle, ride the emotional waves and you’ll have a good time – but it probably cautions against making quotes from the film a cornerstone of your personality (one may note how much of today’s ‘broicism’ feeds back as much to this film as, say, an actual reading of the Meditations), because in a lot of cases, there’s not much there.

But I am happy at least that this is a battle plan which has been worked out in advance and has a prearranged signal to commence a sequence of attacks, rather than simply relying on Command Telepathy. Now, is this a good set of plans and signals? Well, no, not really. Like most Hollywood battle plans, it relies on Bad Guys who, to borrow a phrase from Parshall and Tully, “never failed to go lowing obediently to their choreographed slaughter.”²

In this case, Maximus only begins moving to join up with his cavalry, hidden behind the enemy army after the enemy have formed up at the tree line. Had they formed up elsewhere, or bumped into his cavalry, or had cavalry of their own, or intercepted him as he rode out of his army alone (through the forest around the flanks of both armies) to meet up with his cavalry, or had they spotted his fire arrow signal, or if Quintus failed to spot the signal arrow, or simply if the precise timing didn’t go off right (a few too many minutes shooting catapults, a too-slow infantry advance, the ‘barbarians’ holding at the tree line rather than charging, any of which means the enemy’s infantry is not engaged with they become aware of Maximus’ isolated and unsupported cavalry), the entire plan would have collapsed, which is why pre-modern armies generally didn’t rely on such intricate, precisely timed plans.

In any case, Maximus gallops out to his cavalry – evidently so far off the field that they needn’t fear being seen or heard as they greet his arrival, but close enough that they can gallop the entire distance – to give a speech. We’ve discussed the standard structure of a general’s speech before: an invocation of the character of the soldiers, an acknowledgement of the danger they face, the profits of victory and consequences of defeat, the basis upon which the general is confident and then an emotional appeal. Maximus’ speech doesn’t really succeed on this basis. The only component he squarely hits is the profits of victory – he’ll be back on his farm and “imagine where you will be, and it will be so.” The problem, of course, from a motivational standpoint is that this outcome has nothing to do with winning or losing the battle; these men could flee the field on their horses to the same effect.

And, because this doesn’t fit anywhere else, is also makes no sense in the context of the army of the Roman Empire, which is a long-service professional army, commanded by aristocrats well into their political-military careers. Maximus isn’t going to go back to a farm in Spain after this battle, because he is a senator and thus required by law to live close enough to Rome to attend meetings of the Senate. One thing that comes out quite clearly in both Gladiator movies is that Ridley Scott doesn’t particularly understand, or care to understand, the political structure of the Roman Empire: he imagines something much more like the United States or United Kingdom, with distinct military and political leadership classes separate from each other.

But in the Roman Empire, these were the same people; long tradition dictated that major military commands be given exclusively to senators and Roman emperors stuck to that tradition, in part because they needed the Senate (in part to supply men who could govern provinces and command armies). While Maximus will describe his position as ‘General of the Felix Legions,’ that’s not a position the Romans had. Instead, all of the Roman Empire outside of Italy was divided up into combined administrative and military districts – these are the provinces (provinciae) – each of which was entrusted to a single senator either endowed with or delegated imperium (the right to command) for a time. Principally civilian provinces were governed by senators under their own imperium, while frontier military provinces were legally governed by the emperor, but in practice had their control delegated to legati (more fully legati Augusti pro praetore, “Legate of the Emperor with a Praetor’s Authority’) who were delegated the emperor’s imperium for a given province. Those legati also had to be drawn from the Senate and in particular from senators who had risen high enough to have held the praetorship.

So our fellow Maximus here is a legatus Augusti pro praetore, probably for the province of Pannonia Superior, which has the largest concentration of military forces on the upper Danube. His buddy Quintus looks to be well into middle age (too old to be a military tribune, though both he and Maximus will have served as ‘broadstriped’ (laticlavius) tribunes earlier in their lives before entering the Senate) and so is likely a legatus legionis, a less senior senator (but still a senator) also hand-picked by the emperor to command a specific legion. For a province like Pannonia Superior with multiple legions, each legion would have its own legatus legionis who would report to the overall legatus Augusti pro praetore. Which is to say neither Quintus nor Maximus are going back to their farm after this: they’re going back to Rome to be major figures in Roman politics, living on their large estates since senators were required by law to be extremely wealthy. Maximus’ wife and child, far from being alone on their homestead, would have been at the center of a household that includes hundreds if not thousands of enslaved laborers.

Meanwhile for Maximus’ soldiers, ‘home’ is the army. These men signed up for life-long career: a tour of service in the Roman army of the imperial period was, by the end of the reign of Augustus, about 25 years long. Common soldiers that lived to retirement also didn’t generally ‘go home’ because after 25 years, the frontier was home: many had started informal families (which became formal, legal families on discharge, but only at that point), for instance. So Roman soldiers tended to settle on retirement in the frontier communities they had garrisoned in their service, leading to Roman communities springing up all along the frontier. By the reign of Marcus Aurelius this process was very well advanced and far, far more Roman citizen legionaries were recruited from Roman communities on the frontier than were recruited in Italy.

Ridley Scott seems to have confused this version of the Roman army for that of the Early or Middle Republic, where soldiers might serve for a single campaign as a citizen militia and then go back to their farms. The army of the imperial period was quite a different creature.

That Fire Barrage

Fortunately for Maximus, his subordinate Quintus is able to see a single fire arrow hefted above the tree tops, at least a mile away but none of the ‘barbarians’ who are far closer see it and think “maybe someone should check that out.” He thus sets out to ‘unleash hell’ in a massive barrage of very literal fire.

This part of the sequence is broken in several different directions, from the more obvious to the less so.

We can start with the really obvious error here, FIRE ARROWS. Now on the one hand, the Romans had fire arrows. Indeed, they had fire javelins and fire catapult shot too. Tod Todeschini has a very well put together video on medieval fire arrows going through the construction and fuel used to ensure they stay lit in flight and burn for quite some time on the target. But as he notes, as military historians have been noting for decades, is that fire arrows were pretty special purpose weapons. Putting an incendiary charge on an arrow made it heavier and less aerodynamic, so you were trading range, accuracy and penetrating power for the fire, but the fire doesn’t give you any real lethality against an army that the arrow doesn’t. For the arrow to seriously burn someone, it is going to need to penetrate their armor and lodge in, at which point the more immediate problem that person is going to have is being shot by an arrow.

The rest of a battlefield is generally going to be pretty ignition-resistant. Soldiers, being humans, are made up of about 60% water and so do not burn readily. Most of their equipment is also going to be pretty slow to burn, being metal or wool (the later of which might seem very flammable, but wool has to hit almost 600°C to burn, which is quite a lot of heat to get out of an arrow). Shields, of course, are made of wood, but almost invariably faced with hide (as would have been the case with all of the shields in this sequence – both the Roman scutum and Gallic/Germanic oval shields are faced in hide).³ Getting a shield to ignite faster than the fellow simply pulls the arrow out is going to be pretty tough too. And then there is grass and trees, which are also mostly water and generally resist ignition unless they are very dry, conditions which do not happen all that often along the Rhine or Danube.

Meanwhile, we should also just note that the incendiaries that the Romans – or any pre-modern society that aren’t the Byzantine’s with their Greek Fire (developed about four centuries later than this battle, so having Greek fire here is the equivalent of having a line of M1 Abrams tanks show up during the Eighty Years War (1566-1648)) – had access to were not the modern petrochemical-based incendiaries we see here. Nothing the Romans could put in a pot was going to explode and shower massive curtains of fire the way we see here (which honestly looks like it is trying to evoke napalm, first deployed in 1943).⁴

But fire arrows (and javelins, and catapult shot) were standard tools of warfare from antiquity through the Middle Ages, so they must have been good for something, right? And they were! They were good for naval battles, sieges and attacks on wooden forts. Against a large target (building, wall, ship) made of wood that is going to sit still for a while, an attacker can throw lots of fire munitions at it, which will stick into the sides of it or splatter on the decks and keep burning. Note in the Tod’s Workshop video how his fire arrows are designed to keep burning, not necessary for maximum heat, but for a strong, sustained burn. In a siege of naval battle scenario, there’s a good chance that, if you fling enough fire munitions this one, one of them is going to start a fire that gets out of control. At the very least, controlling the fires diverts enemy resources away.

But in a field battle like this? Fire arrows look cool, but are worse than useless, inferior to non-incendiary versions of the same projectiles.

The next problem is the nature and range of the barrage: we’re shown an absolutely fearsome amount of lethality delivered on enemies that are very far away and have no way at all to shoot back in kind. But as as we’ve discussed fairly exhaustively at this point, even the most powerful bows are not this lethal in massed shooting and certainly not at this range. To very briefly summarize those rather long posts: the energy arrows can deliver drops off fairly rapidly over range, making extreme range shooting less effective. More to the point, opponents in armor or – as in this case – with shields can protect themselves quite completely, reducing the ‘hit chance’ of arrows to almost nothing, well beyond the point where an archer at this range might discharge the whole contents of his quiver without actually wounding anyone. Catapults, be they stone or arrow throwing, might – by virtue of flinging a heavier projectile – smash through a shield and engage at somewhat greater range, but of course also shot much more slowly.

Instead, massed archery shooting, even assisted by catapults, at this range would be tactically annoying, rather than devastating: not so much ‘unleash hell’ as ‘unleash mild irritation.’ Lethality would, of course, increase as the distance closed but the archers stop shooting when the legions advance so that isn’t a factor here. Now ‘mild irritation’ can be meaningful on a battlefield. If, as at Carrhae (53 BC), you have some means to both keep up shooting long-term and provide meaningful pressure, it can attrit down an enemy force over time quite badly. Alternately, it can goad an enemy into attacking, perhaps over poor ground, as at Agincourt (1415). But even with the most powerful pre-modern bows, massed archery at this range isn’t going to be very lethal and the Romans probably didn’t have the very most powerful historical bows, although Roman archers, recruited in the auxilia from cultures with archery traditions, were using recurve composite bows (and thus probably the best bows available at the time).

Which in turn explains the next problem here, which is that, as we’ve already noted the Romans never brought this many archers to a battle. Readers used to the extremely high lethality of archery in video games may have been a bit surprised by my suggestion last time that the dedicated missile troops (archers and slingers) of a Roman field army in this period probably made up less than 5% of the total force, but that starts to make sense when you realize that in most contexts, archery was a niche combat specialty with a few very powerful use cases but which could be basically nullified by heavy infantry with shields.⁵ You brought a few archers for the moments that required them, but unless your fighting style was built around archery, that was generally all you brought.

And here it is worth noting (not for the last time) that it isn’t just the Roman army getting misrepresented here, but also the Quadi and Marcomanni. These guys are shown in the film with an array of shields, some circular, some rectangular, mostly a lot smaller than the scutum and mostly curved. But in practice, we ought to see mostly a single kind of shield, a flat, center-bossed oval shield of significant size, basically identical to the shield most of the Roman auxilia infantry would have been using (and the shield that, after the third century, the Romans themselves will be using). Such shields show up, inter alia on the Column of Marcus Aurelius which, again, depicts this campaign. A shield like that would offer a lot of protection against arrows and rather than a hodge-podge of men with and without shields, the entire Quadi/Marcomanni line would be carrying them, presenting a solid well of shoulder-to-ankle shields. And as we’ll get into in a moment, they’d be deployed in fairly close-order, in a formation not all that different from a phalanx.

So even if the Romans did bring this many archers, and they wouldn’t have, the massed long-range arrow barrage wouldn’t have accomplished much of what we see – where in the film it creates chaos and heavy casualties. The icing on top of the ‘Hollywood nonsense’ cake here is that of course the barrage has to be delivered as a volley, with ‘knock!’ ‘draw!’ and ‘loose!’ given as commands. As we’ve discussed, this seems never to have been done historically, because it really couldn’t have been. Instead, if you were going to use archers, you’d simply tell them to commence shooting (to my knowledge, we do not know what that command would have been for a Roman army of this period or earlier)⁶ once the desired range was reached, which would be substantially closer than this. The catapults, by contrast, might have started their work earlier and their heavier bolts and stones – able to pierce or smash shields – might well have had a significant morale impact, though given the limited number of engines⁷ and slow rate of fire, the casualty impact wouldn’t be significant.

For an actual Roman army, this wouldn’t be a problem, because whatever missile infantry they had were, as noted, relatively small numbers of specialists with specific roles whereas the main effort of the battle would be handled by the heavy infantry. Which brings us to:

The Infantry Advance

As the barrage continues, the infantry is ordered to advance. This is, in theory, the one part of the sequence that really is a core part of the Roman way of fighting: a direct infantry advance against the enemy over open ground. But once again far more of it is wrong than is right, to the point that the moments of “that’s a thing I remember from a history textbook” like the testudo are mostly deceptive rather than informative.

The initial infantry advance looks like this:

The Roman legionaries marching in a series of long, thin lines (and one small half-dozen man clump for some reason), closely packed, shoulder to shoulder. I wonder exactly how this got set as the blocking, because Ridley Scott had not (at this point) directed an 18th or early 19th century war film, but this is very clearly an 18th or early 19th century musket line formation. I wonder if perhaps they were using reenactors here as extras and so ended up with nice neat musket lines almost by force of habit. In any case, I should note that these are very much parade ground musket formations; as several of the books we’ve reviewed have noted, in actual – 18th century musket – combat these formations were often looser and more flexible.

But of course the problem here isn’t that these are parade ground formations, but that they are musket parade ground formations and the Romans, somewhat famously, did not fight with muskets. I realize this joke is getting tiresome, but having the Romans form up like this, a formation 1500 years too early would be like having a line of M1 Abrams tanks show up at the Battle of Catalaunian Plains (451) and somewhat worse than doing modern infantry tactics treating bows like rifles and machine guns during the crusades.

So how ought it look? First, the maneuvering units here would be cohorts of 480 men, ten to each legion.⁸ For comparison, these blocks seem to be 2-3 ranks deep and about 15-20 files across, so maybe 30-60 men in each. But even a Roman century in this period was 80 men and it is pretty clear that by Julius Caesar’s day, the tactical unit was no longer the two-century maniple (two 60-man centuries for a 120 man unit) but rather the six-century cohort (six 80-man centuries for a 480 man unit).⁹ The centuries themselves were organizational units, rather than tactical ones (at least in a large-scale battle), so we ought to see an advance in cohorts, with each cohort clearly visible as a distinct block of soldiers.

The formation those cohorts would adopt would also look very little like this. The Romans didn’t fight shoulder-to-shoulder like this for the obvious reason that this tightly packed, no one has any space to use their weapons; such tight formations are fairly exclusively a feature of gunpowder armies. Even pike formations were not so tight. Instead, the Roman standard fighting formation¹⁰ each man probably occupied about 135cm of horizontal space (‘frontage’). Visually, on the march, that’s going to read like a gap between soldiers shoulder-to-shoulder larger than the space (about 45cm) that a human takes up: the line is going to be 1/3rd body (45cm) and 2/3rds empty air (90cm). That is, by ancient standards, one of the looser ‘close order’ formations (c. 90cm of frontage per man was probably more typical, a 50% body, 50% air formation), but then the Roman fighting system, focused on sword use probably demanded a bit more space, while the deeply curved nature of the Roman scutum (that big shield) provided the necessary protection in case an enemy tried foolishly to move into the space of the intervals.¹¹

The Romans had formations to tighten up those gaps (particularly to resist arrows) but they’d space out again to actually do any fighting. We’re less well informed about rank spacing (the ‘vertical’ intervals – chest-to-back) – Polybius (18.30.6-9) doesn’t say while Vegetius (3.14-15) says six Roman feet (c. 177cm) but does so in the process of describing formations that seem much later, if they existed at all – but we can be sure it probably wasn’t very tight, as the Roman fighting system doesn’t rely on bringing multiple ranks into range at once (the way the Macedonian sarisa-phalanx does).

Finally, these units would be simply a lot larger in terms of number of men. 480 men, organized into 8-deep files, with the 135cm facing discussed above are going to occupy around 80m end to end and probably around 10m front to back; a cohort would thus basically fill the width of a soccer/football pitch from one side to the other (sideline to sideline, not goal to goal). Rather than these tight, thin, fragile-looking shoulder-to-shoulder lines, a cohort in battle formation would be spaced and sized something more like this (each of those blue dots is one of our fellows from the spacing chart above):

In short, each cohort would be a pretty massive block of armored men with large shields moving forward. Even though there’s a lot of empty space in that formation, I suspect even looking at my lame chart your eyes quickly understood it as a single coherent thing, a ‘block’ of figures – it feels tighter and more intimidating than it might strictly be in inches or centimeters.

Of course that block isn’t the whole of a Roman army. Rather, each legion was ten of those blocks, probably still arrayed in three lines (probably 4-3-3 for cohorts in each line, front to back) and you’d probably be seeing at least two legions advance together (side to side), flanked by auxilia heavy infantry on either side (perhaps in a somewhat tighter formation, given their weapons). The whole army – two legions and flanking auxilia (but not cavalry) – would probably have been around a mile wide (accounting for intervals between cohorts and such).

That’s not very much at all like what we see and frankly the real formation would have been rather more impressive and intimidating thing than what is on screen here.

As the legionaries advance in the sequence, we see a few things I want to note. First, the men are shown couching their pila under their arms, hedging them forward over their shields, which would be a pretty strange way to hold a spear but is an even stranger way to hold a javelin. On the one hand, I’m happy that we actually see these fellows holding pila (so often left out of film depictions of Roman soldiers) but on the other hand pila are not spears, they are heavy javelins and at no point in this battle do we ever see a Roman throw their pilum. I see all the time the popular conception of these weapons makes a great deal about how they might double as a spear in a pinch and I suppose they might but they are not well designed for it at all. Instead, the pila are thrown and then you engage in close combat with your sword.

Then we get the one part of the sequence of infantry everyone remembers, where the ‘barbarians’ loose one volley of arrows and the Romans adopt a sort-of-kind-of testudo in response. This one tactical maneuver is generally the only thing most people know about the Roman army and so this one bit does a lot to enhance the apparent credibility of the scene. Which is unfortunate, because this testudo is formed wrong and being used in the wrong place.

On the first point, when we see Roman testudo formations, they’re not crouching, stationary formations, but instead designed to be capable of movement. They’re also not formed like this – where because the men are already marching in an modern musket formation, the testudo they form is very wide and extremely (about three men) shallow. Instead, when we see the testudo depicted in artwork, it is invariably deeper than it is wide suggesting that it is formed out of a marching column.

But the other problem here is that there’s little reason for the Romans to form a testudo here. The pervasiveness of the testudo in the popular imagination (including adorable ‘children form testudo‘ videos) is such that folks assume that it was the standard fighting formation, but it was in fact a quite specialized formation mostly for sieges. After all, as we’ve noted before, the Roman shield provides ample protection for arrows on just about any front-facing trajectory; the scutum covers most of the body, after all. For an archer who is on the ground in front of you, there is little reason to need to place a shield over your head because the arrows aren’t going to be plunging down at such high angles (and if they are, they’ve lost a lot of energy and you have a helmet). The situation in which a formation might be worried about arrows or other projectiles plunging down is in a siege, where the enemy archers are up on a wall or tower and thus able to shoot downwards, over the shields of the advancing Romans.

Instead what we see is that the standard Roman response to enemy arrow attack in open battle was to close up the formation so that the shields more nearly touched and advance in close-order, only to spread back out into fighting order as they came into contact with the enemy.¹² So as cool as it is, we shouldn’t see a testudo here and even if we did, it ought to be a forward moving formation and even then, we shouldn’t see pila poking out of it like a hedgehog, because that’s now how the pilum is used.

Intermission

I must pardon the readers who have ended the last section with the understandable expectation of finding legions clashing with Marcomanni warriors,¹³ but this post is already six and a half thousand words long and we’ll have quite a lot to talk about with the actual fighting next week.

Instead, I want to stop to note again the impact of the approach here towards historical verisimilitude. As we’ve now demonstrated, very little of what Ridley Scott shows on screen is how a Roman army operated, but almost all of it is presented in a way to fool a viewer into thinking this is more or less how a Roman army operated. This is not a case of an obvious fantasy setting or a scene that is taking clear liberties viewers might recognize. Instead, there’s clear care here to get a bunch of surface-level signifiers of accuracy – the testudo (done badly), the distinctive Roman equipment (also not done particularly well), the presence of catapults (including some clear anachronisms) and of course the decision to situate this battle in a specific war under the reign of a specific emperor – all of which seems calibrated to convince a viewer that someone has ‘done the research.’

But that’s not the case. Or more correctly, some folks had done the research and been brought on the project and Ridley Scott ignored them, with historical advisor Kathleen Coleman famously requesting the studio remove her from the credits because of how comprehensively her “hundreds of hours” of work advising was ignored. Naturally for the sequel, Scott found a more pliable, less qualified historical ‘advisor,’ (the sort whose CV lists advising credits but not, you know, any actual education or publications) for a film that is somehow even less historically grounded. I don’t have a problem making fantasy films set in the past, but I do think Ridley Scott in particular has a habit of making movies that very deliberately trade on the perception of some degree of historical groundedness (even for fictional narratives) and then, of course, gets very upset when historians then assess that groundedness and find it lacking.

What I find most disappointing though, is the lost opportunity. The last time a director seriously tried to accurately recreate a Roman army in the field, it was 1960: we knew far less about the Roman army and the technology to put it on screen was far more limited. I am often asked by students or members of the general public what movie depiction does the Roman army best and I am generally left at something of a loss because none of them do it particularly well. By contrast, while results have been mixed, there have been really meticulous efforts to recreate the tactics of the First and Second World Wars (at this point we have a ‘try to get everything right’ treatment of nearly every sort of warfare in WWII), the American Civil War, Pike and Shot and even a remarkable rendition of the Battle of Gaugamela (331) from the otherwise decidedly mixed Alexander (2004).

But no one seems to even really try to put a Roman army on screen, using the weapons they’re described as having, in the formations we’re told they used, at scale. HBO’s Rome comes the closest and still can’t resist inventing things (holding on to baldrics, etc.). The irony is, I think showing a Roman army functioning correctly would be such a surprising, somewhat alien experience to a modern viewer that it could be really very striking.

Alas, instead, next week: the confused melee!

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