This week (and next), I want to talk a bit about the recent release of Gladiator II. Now I’ve written a review of the film for Foreign Policy, which you can find here (behind the paywall). I also discussed it with Jason Herbert and Sarah Bond over at Historians at the Movies, which is a blast of a podcast in which Sarah absolutely kills it and I am also present. But I had a lot of miscellaneous thoughts, which wouldn’t fit into an 1800-word review, so I thought I would pull those together here. There were enough of them that I’m also going to split this into two posts: this week we’ll look at chronology, battles and weapons and the next week we’ll discuss Rome, the Colosseum and the Severan Emperors.
Now I should be clear this isn’t my review of the film (that is linked above). I’m not going to talk here about if I think you should go see the film (mostly no) or what worked (mostly the action scenes, Denzel Washington) or what didn’t work (the story, everything else). To be blunt, this film is mostly a reenactment of the first Gladiator (2000) and at the same time, remarkably weaker than the original.
Instead, I want to expand a bit on what I think the historical themes of the film are and why they are both so troublesome and also so ill-fitting to its historical period. But mostly I want to do a lot of the sort of largely empty nitpicking and rivet-counting that has perhaps less intellectual merit but is just fun. So on to the nitpickery! Also warning, spoilers: none of the ‘twists’ in this film struck me as particularly shocking (the major ‘reveal’ was heavily hinted at in the first film) but I am going to ruthlessly spoil the movie in discussing it, so if you are still planning to go see the film and value the story – well, first, um…unusual choice there – but more broadly, maybe hold off on reading this until you’ve seen the film.
Also, I should note that because the film is still in theaters, I don’t have lots of images from it because I can’t take screen captures. So I’m going to be forced to describe a lot of things I can’t yet show you pictures of. There’s enough military equipment – good and bad – that when the film does come to streaming and I can take screencaps, I might do another post on “wait, what is that helmet?” but that will have to wait.
Now I want to be clear before we get going to avoid some of the common, empty waste-of-time criticisms here. I did not go to Gladiator II expecting a historically accurate film. I was hoping to see a compelling film (which did not happen) and was thinking, in the best case, I might get a film that, while basically historical nonsense, at least traded in broadly historically interesting themes (like Kingdom of Heaven or, indeed, to an extent, the first Gladiator); this also did not happen. Mostly, I expected to at least be entertained; that…also mostly did not happen, unfortunately.
That said, when you spend hundreds of millions of dollars making a historical epic which uses the names of real historical figures (Lucilla, Geta, Caracalla and Macrinus) and says it is set at a specific time in a specific past culture, I think you do, in fact, open yourself up to historical critique. The fact that Ridley Scott regularly acts so angry and hurt by such critique seems to have created something of a permission structure for his super-fans to get really angry and harassing over critiques, but in practice is just childish and embarrassing for both Ridley Scott and his fans.
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Wait, When Are We?
The film opens, as the first one did, with a big Roman battle, because this is a film largely about reenacting Ridley Scott’s other, better films. One of these days, we’ll get to discussing the famous, iconic big opening battle in Gladiator. In short, having a big ‘ol battle with Germanic peoples on the Danube late in the reign of Marcus Aurelius makes a fair bit of sense – he was with the army there on campaign. The battle itself there is mostly tactical nonsense and doesn’t offer much of a grasp on how the Romans fought open field engagements, but the context at least made some minimal sense.
Not so for Gladiator II‘s opening! We’re informed by a title card that we are both 16 years after the events of the first film (which ends with the death of Commodus) which should make this the year 208 (during the reign of Septimius Severus), but also that this is during the joint reign of Geta and Caracalla, which itself lasted less than a year before Caracalla murdered his brother in 211. But then the opening scene tells us it is 200 A.D. and we’re in Numidia. Nor, I should note, can you hope that this is all explained by time passing; unlike the first Gladiator which is reasonably and productively vague about how much time Maximus spends training as a gladiator, Gladiator II sets a clock. The film opens with the fictional Marcus Acacius attacking ‘Numidia’ (suddenly a city and not a kingdom) on the orders of Geta and Caracalla in a big battle that he wins and then the rest of the film’s action takes place over the course of ten days of celebratory games marking his triumph. So this is a film that, at maximum, covers something like a month or two of real time, not the years required to make the timeline work
But that’s not the biggest timeline problem! Instead, the biggest timeline problem is that it is the third century AD and we are attacking Numidia. Numidia was an ancient region of North Africa mostly in what today would be northern Algeria. The Numidians, famed for the quality of their horsemen, were split initially into two states, Massylii to the East and Masaesyli to the West. Early on, we see Carthage maintaining some control over this region by playing the two states off of each other, often recruiting Numidian kings (and their high quality cavalry) into Carthaginian armies. In 203BC, the king of Massylii (Masinissa) allied with the Romans in the Second Punic War and defeated the king of Masaesyli (Syphax), which was swiftly followed by the Roman defeat of Carthage at the Battle of Zama (202 also BC), which enabled Masinissa to absorb the Masaesyli and thus create a united Kingdom of Numidia, which was essentially born as a Roman client state.
That client state churns on, with occasional Roman intervention (and a major war from 112 to 106, still BC) to the 40s (still BC), when the client kingdom was absorbed to create the province of Africa Nova (‘New Africa’ – briefly name-checked in the film as the name of the region) although neighboring Mauretania remains a client kingdom until 40 AD.
Which is to say, by 200 A.D., the earliest of the multitude of possible dates for this film (which mashes together events from 211 to 218), Numidia has been a Roman province for two-hundred and fifty years. By this point, North Africa, far from being some foreign ‘barbarian’ land is distinctly Roman. Indeed, North Africa, by 200 has already supplied its first native North-African emperor, Septimius Severus (r. 193-211), a Roman man of mixed North African (Berber) and Punic (Phoenician) heritage who really ought to have come up in the prep-work for writing this film given that he is Geta and Caracalla’s father. More on that in a minute. But the upshot here is that Numidia has been an important, core part of the Roman world for a long time when this film opens.
It makes about as much sense for Rome to be invading ‘Numidia’ (which, again, the film treats as a town and not a large region) in 200 A.D. as for a film to open with dramatic footage of the initial European settlement of Tennessee in 2024. The last time it would have made sense for a Roman Fleet to have been approaching the coast of Numidia with violent intent, realistically, would have been during the Jugurthine War (112-106) and the last time it would have made sense for this large of a fleet to have done so would have been the Second Punic War (218-202, again, we’re still BC here).
One gets the sneaking, terrible suspicion that in writing this script, someone mistook BC for AD on some dates, because the film is supposedly set between 200 and 211 AD, but the opening battle would make some sense if we were between 211 and 200 BC.
Regardless of how it happened, I think it’s not quite a harmless error. Students and the general public often have an idea of ‘Africa’ including ‘North Africa’ which ‘others’ it very strongly from the European tradition. I regular see students confused, for instance, that one of the most important early Christian centers in the Roman world is in Carthage or that Roman emperors like Septimius Severus came from North Africa. The fact is, North Africa was a relatively early Roman acquisition which was quite well integrated into the Roman world.
This film reinforces that incorrect perception of a ‘barbarian’ Africa in ways we’re going to be unteaching for the next decade.
The Ships
But then, of course we get a big battle, in which the Roman fleet, under the command of Marcus Acacius attacks the ‘town’ of Numidia, which were told, somewhat fantastically, is the ‘last free city in Africa Nova.’
Again, I must stress, this film takes place between 200 and 218. It wants a major theme to be how ravenous over-expansion is weakening the Roman Empire, but the problem here is that Rome’s rapid expansion largely ended with the reign of Augustus (31 still BC – 14 AD). The last significant expansion at all for Rome was under Trajan (r. 98-117) a century prior (with the conquest of Dacia, 101-106). We’ll come back to this, but one of the key problems here is that Ridley Scott wants to make a movie about the decline of the Roman Empire, but appears to have functionally no understanding of why or even when the Roman Empire was to have ‘declined.’
In any case, the film opens with a massive naval assault on a fortified town. And it is kind of astounding just how much is wrong here.
We can start with the premise. The scene shows a large Roman fleet of massive warships with big siege towers and catapults making a direct assault on the seaward wall of the town.
And in that basic premise we already have a bunch of problems, beginning with opposed landings were exceptionally, fantastically, incredibly rare before the modern period. I can only think of one opposed landing of note in the whole of Roman history (Caesar’s first landing in Britain in 55) off the top of my head, despite the Romans doing quite a lot of naval operations. Ships, after all, tend to be faster than armies on foot and so can simply choose an empty beach. You are even less likely to opt to disembark in to prepared fortifications, because, again, you can simply land somewhere else. What has happened, so far as I can tell, is that every director watched Saving Private Ryan (1998) and wants to do the Omaha Beach scene (and hasn’t necessarily the self-reflection to ask, “can I out-direct Steven Spielberg‘s most famous scene?”). But that sort of opposed landing is a creature of modern warfare and modern armies and simply doesn’t happen much at all in the pre-modern world.
The Roman fleet that performs the assault is several different stages of wrong. These are the wrong ships for quite a few different overlapping reasons. The first problem is that the ships we see are large, multiple-banked oared warships, ‘polyremes’ we might say. The Romans did use such large warships during the Republic. But by the second and third centuries, Rome has been the unquestioned, unchallenged master of the entire Mediterranean litoral for a long time and its fleet has changed to match. In 200 AD Rome no longer builds large warships of this type, but instead has a navy composed of smaller coastal patrol ships called liburnians, named the Dalmatian peoples who originally came up with the design. Most notably, liburnians were ‘aphract’ (‘uncovered’ or ‘undecked’) in their design, meaning the rower’s space was uncovered (as opposed to a ‘cataphract’ (‘covered’ or ‘decked’) warship, which had a flat upper deck for marines). Indeed, it is something of an irony that Roman victory in the Middle and Late Republic, using ships in the Greek design tradition (triremes, quinqueremes and so on) brings an end to that shipbuilding tradition – later medieval galley warships derive from these smaller patrols hips, scaled up into the late-antique/early medieval dromon. So this fleet should be composed of lighter, uncovered liburnians, rather than the larger and heavier ‘decked’ warships of the Middle Republic.
But even if this battle scene were in the Middle Republic, there are also problems. Now, as W. Murray, Age of the Titans (2012) argues, there were, in the Hellenistic period, large warships designed effectively as siege platforms. Murray argues that with the emergence of larger warships, we see a split of their roles: the triremes (‘threes’) of the Classical period become essentially lighter escorts and cruisers, while heavies polyremes – quadriremes (‘fours’), quinqueremes (‘fives’) and hexaremes (‘sixes’) instead come to make up the core of the battle line of fleets engaging other fleets, with their heavier builds designed for frontal ramming which a lighter trireme cannot do safely. And then the very biggest of these ships – septiremes (‘sevens’), octeremes (‘eights’), enneremes (‘nines’) and deceremes (‘tens’) and larger – were intended as flagships to anchor the center of the line on and massive siege-support ships to engage enemy harbor defenses. So the idea of an ultra-jumo oared warship designed for siege support isn’t insane, though it is about two centuries too early for this film.
Except there’s a problem here, because one interesting thing about the Hellenistic period is that while the Romans adopt the Greek/Carthaginian ship tradition (which was shared), Rome and Carthage almost never deploy those massive ultra-polyremes. Roman and Carthaginian flagships will occasionally be ‘sixes’ or ‘sevens,’ but Roman and Carthaginian fleets seem to be all ‘threes,’ ‘fours’ and ‘fives’ otherwise. The reason seems pretty simple: neither power has much of any use for them. The Romans expect to take fortified cities by storm (the standard Latin word for ‘siege,’ oppugnatio, really means ‘assault’ or ‘storm’ – the Romans rarely starve out defenders) by land and so the value of a fleet is to cut off a garrison from reinforcement and resupply while the Romans build up their works to get over the walls. Carthage prefers more often to fight defensively, but on the attack seems to have a similar approach; Hannibal has no problem storming fortified towns (like Saguntum). With that approach, engaging harbor defenses is unnecessary – a fleet that can anchor off the port (and resupply from the army on land) is enough.
If you can reliably – and goodness the Romans are reliable at this – take fortified towns from the landward side, gigantic, expensive floating siege platforms aren’t all that useful. You simply roll up with your fleet, drop the army off a day or two’s march away from the city, then shadow them up the coast as they move in and invest the place, before sealing the port, while you resupply from the siege camp.
So these are a type of ship (siege support polyremes) the Romans broadly don’t use and in the wrong period for anyone to use them. So it will surprise no one that they’re also wrongly designed in any case. When we see the inside of these ships, we ought to see densely packed, vertically stacked rowers, either in two or three levels. Space inside these ships is very tight and the annoying thing is Ridley Scott almost certainly could have filmed inside one, as there is a single modern trireme, the Olympias, built in 1987 under the direction of J.F. Coates and J.S. Morrison. The ship is long in the tooth these days, but has been out a few times (I know folks who have been on it) in the last few years and I have to imagine for a movie like Gladiator II it could have been possible to film on it. Instead, the interior of the ships we see is comparatively open, more like the ships of the sword-and-sandals Hollywood epics of the 1950s and 60s.
And that gets us to the battle.
Equipment Potpourii
I want to start with the equipment. Now I can’t go back through the scenes with detail, so I can only talk about what I noticed, but essentially the problem is that the equipment on both sides is a pastiche of around four or five centuries of military equipment. I honestly found myself wondering if the production crew for Gladiator II had looted the prop room from HBO’s Rome, because there was a fair bit of stuff that seems like it would have been at least somewhat costly to make and one assumes that somewhere in that process, someone would have asked, “hey, is the stuff we’re making for the film actually more expensive and complex than this era’s equipment?”
First, to be clear, our period dates are: Classical (480BC-323); Hellenistic (323-31BC); Principate (31BC-284AD) and our movie takes place in 211(ish)AD. So anything that isn’t from the principate is way off.
The most glaring example I noted were the defenders of ‘Numidia’ wearing pretty clear examples of phrygian helmets, a Hellenistic helmet-type generally associated with elite units like Alexander’s hypaspists. We see less of this helmet by the Late Hellenistic period (though it was still in use) and it seems pretty well gone by the end of the Roman Republic. In short, it’s a helmet that would have already been somewhat out of place in HBO’s Rome, two and a half centuries before this movie takes place.
Likewise, a lot of the Numidian defenders (and later some Roman soldiers) wear mail. That’s fine, lots of mail in the Roman Empire, but they wear a distinctive pattern of mail with an extra layer over the shoulders, what we call ‘shoulder doubling.’ When the Romans first get access to mail armor (the lorica hamata) in the late third century BC, this is the form, with the doubled shoulders, they encounter (from the Gauls). Early in the imperial period, however, the pattern changes a bit: the shoulder-doubles drop away in favor of a tunic of mail, often with ‘false sleeves’ (a flat flap of mail extending over the shoulders and upper arms). This is, for instance, the pattern we see on the Column of Trajan (c. 113), a century before this film. Meanwhile, many of the Roman soldiers in the same scene wear, appropriately enough, ‘so-called’ (its a modern term) lorica segmentata, the famous Roman segmented armor; that’s period appropriate.
So essentially we have the equivalent of a scene where special forces operators are fast roping down to fight the Taliban with cocked hats and muskets: a chronological jumble across multiple centuries.
Finally, as an aside: the film absolutely loves black or blackened armor. So that we know the Praetorians are Bad Guys, their armor is always dark in color, but also the Roman legions have worn, dull armor and most of the Numidian armor is also dirty and unpolished. Likewise, Maximus’ breastplate and Acacius’ breastplate are both muscle cuirasses in black with just some shiny metal detailings. But one thing we know quite well in antiquity is that it was not black armor that was impressive or frightening, but bright, shining well-polished armor. You wanted the enemy to see the gleam of your armor, because that was intimidating: it meant you were wearing lots of expensive, high quality, well-maintained equipment.
Homer, for instance, has a touching moment in the Iliad where Hector on the walls of Troy reaches for his infant son Astyanax but Astyanax shrinks back, afraid, as Homer puts it, “of the bronze and the horsehair crest” of Hector’s helmet (emphasis mine, Hom. Il. 6.469). Onasander (Strat. 28) notes that “advancing companies appear more dangerous by the gleam of weapons, and the terrible sight brings fear and confusion to the hearts of the enemy.” The fear caused by shining, polished armor (and weapons and shields) is a commonplace in ancient literature and we can be quite sure it was common practice for the Romans to polish the exterior of their armor and then probably oil the surface to deter rust rather than other processes that would dim the shine, like blueing or blacking.
But to me the biggest problem is actually one that Gladiator II shares with the battle scene in Gladiator: bows.
Bowguns Are For Monster Hunter
Now don’t me wrong, the Romans did employ archers, sagittarii in their armies. Just not Roman archers; Roman Italy doesn’t seem to have ever had much of a military archery tradition – the missile weapons of choice were javelins and slings – and Roman armies in the Republic were overwhelmingly ‘shock’ based. So when the Romans employed archers these were auxiliaries, non-Romans (at least until 212) employed to support the Romans. Given that the legions were effectively entirely heavy infantry and made up half of the force and that the remaining auxilia were split between numerous kinds of units (heavy, medium and light infantry, archers, slingers, skirmishers, shock cavalry, bow cavalry), as you might well imagine, sagittarii tended to be specialist units rather than the mainstay of Roman armies.
Instead, the Roman army was a shock based force. Missile weapons – javelins, slings, bows, darts and so on – were support weapons, but the expectation was always that a Roman army won by marching into contact with the enemy and engaging with swords. As an aside, while some sloppy and bad scholars like to represent shock-based armies as a uniquely ‘western’ feature, most agrarian pre-modern armies have a significant shock-component, often a dominant one, for the clear reason that you can turn a lot of farmers into soldiers very rapidly by handing them spears and then marching them into contact with an enemy. But even by those standards, the Roman army is a very shock based force.
This poses a problem to uncreative directors or once-creative directors gnawing at the long, frayed ends of their creativity at the tail end of decades of making first great and then more often mediocre movies because what they’re used to are modern firearms and thus modern fires-based militaries.
You can see this sort of problem really clearly if there’s a whole lot of “people holding other people at [cross]bow-point” as if they were carrying a gun in the film (Game of Thrones is absolutely lousy with this trope). And indeed, in Gladiator II the Praetorians around the Colosseum are all armed with bows and at points in the film hold the crowds at bow-point, which doesn’t really work. After all, if the crowd charges you with your bow, you will get maybe one arrow off, which won’t stop the crowd. Unlike a modern firearm, you cannot put enough ‘fire’ in the air to prohibit the crowd’s advance and unlike early firearms, bows do not have bayonets. What did pre-gunpowder societies use for crowd control? Spears.
In the large battle scenes in both Gladiator films, Scott’s fires-based mentality translates into Roman armies that employ massive numbers of archers and enormous amounts of catapults. We all, I assume, remember the enormous barrage of arrows, bolts and bombs in the battle scene of the first Gladiator film. Before the legions advance in that battle, the Romans absolutely pummel their ‘barbarian’ foes with arrow and catapult fire for about a full minute of screentime in a five minute long battle sequence. And the second film continues that trend: the marines on the decks of the ships are a handful of legionaries and a ton of archers, with lots of catapults. The sky is thick with arrows as the Romans storm their way into the fortified town.
Those arrows are, of course, all fire arrows and equally the catapults are throwing exploding incendiary munitions. Lloyd (Lindybeige) already has half a dozen videos or so complaining about this sort of thing, so I’ll just note that while the Romans did have incendiary arrows, javelins and catapult shot, they don’t have napalm. Their incendiaries are much less powerful than this and so incendiary rounds are not about burning people or ships but about setting fire to things like wooden palisades and roofs, usually over the course of a longer siege, not to kill anyone but to force the defender to waste the manpower putting out fires that could be used to man walls, repair fortifications or engage attackers.
So the way Ridley Scott represents the battle is that the attackers approach in ships with big siege towers on their bows, ram up against the walls while deluging the town with massive amounts of arrow fire and then rush off of their towers to capture the city. And that’s just not how Roman sieges (or battles) worked.
Instead, what we might expect a Roman army to do is disembark its main force somewhere up the coast from the target city and march on it; the fleet would mirror its progress at sea (so it could resupply from the army on the coast) and complete the siege by closing off the port. The Roman army would arrive at the town and build a fortified marching camp, and then usually a defensive inward facing ditch or wall to contain the defenders around the whole town (this is called circumvallation, “walling around”). If enemy reinforcements are expected, a second defensive line, facing outward (contravallation) would also be built.
Then usually the Romans are going to build a ramp (called a ‘mole’) up the side of the wall of the city. This is where you get archers and slingers and catapults deployed: they’re used to suppress defenders on that specific section of wall, while the legionaries provide the labor and security to build the ramp (or in some cases, advance a ram to the base of the wall to batter the wall or a gate down). The purpose of towers was not to storm up the wall (they’re very vulnerable for that) but to provide elevating shooting positions for archers who could then shoot down on the wall to prevent the defenders from disrupting the mole construction. Finally, once the wall was either breached or surmounted, the Romans would shock their way through with their usual heavy infantry tactics. This – a siege assault – by the by, is where you would see a testudo (the famous Roman turtle-formation), not in an open battle.
This kind of shock-centered warfare, in which missile weapons are supplementary, rather than primary, can be appropriately cinematic. I think HBO’s Rome showed this really quite well, with solid battle lines advancing and meeting and getting a sense of the carnage that happens where they come together (although the Roman pilum is sadly absent from Rome‘s battles). Another director who used to be better at this is Ridley Scott in Kingdom of Heaven; the battle scenes in that film are over the top (and for some reason Scott’s armies never move in formation, but as big screen-filling clumps of men with lots of superfluous flags) but we do see efforts to repeatedly force a breach in a wall using shock (and the massive of arrows in the air are a bit more excusable in the context of that period).
The arrows-as-guns problem continues, by the by, when we get to the Colosseum. We’re going to talk a bit in Part II about gladiators as highly specialized professionals, but gladiators didn’t generally use bows (the Romans knew, as Ridley Scott does not, that bows are boring) but nevertheless our hero Lucius manages to get ahold of one in the naumachia scene to fire up at the imperial box. As an aside, having lots of archers in your naumachia is a terrible idea, because that kind of spectacle in which most of those involved are going to end up dead is going to be performed by prisoners or criminals under death sentences, who have nothing to lose if they, say, fire their arrows into the crowd. Or at you! But likewise, arrows claim the lives of three major characters (including fully 66% of all female speaking roles in the film), which is a really high number for a society that didn’t use bows very often.
And I think part of the problem here are mistaken assumptions about the lethality of archers and other missile weapons. In films, when the archers volley, tons of men all go down at once, in visual language that seems taken directly from films about the gunpowder warfare of the 17th-19th centuries (e.g. the American Civil War or Revolutionary War). But archery volleys simply aren’t that lethal: they’re much, much easier to defeat with shields and armor. As a result a heavy infantry formation that was decently cohesive could effectively always count on being able to march through a heavy arrow barrage into contact. Indeed, even at Agincourt, the paradigmatic ‘archer victory’ in the West, the dismounted French knights were able to march through the longbow volleys just fine into contact with the English men-at-arms and indeed initially seem to have pushed them back in the center (before being pushed back in melee fighting).
This flawed ‘fires centric’ vision of pre-gunpowder warfare shows up in a lot of pre-modern Hollywood battles (and video game battlefields), but I notice it has begun to seep pretty deep into the public conception of how ancient armies worked, with the ‘Total War‘ standard formations often being very missile heavy and I find students often assume that a sort of ‘default’ pre-modern military force features a ‘back line’ of archers that are at least if not more tactically significant than the contact infantry or cavalry. As a teacher, that creates a real challenge, because I effectively have to deprogram those assumptions about how battles even work before descriptions of battles or summaries of standard tactics begin to make sense.
Well, so far, not so great but alas we are not really out of the opening sequence of this film. Next week, we’re going to look at the action in the back…80% of the film…in Rome and see how Gladiator II treats Roman politics.
Badly, it turns out.
