Nitpicking Gladiator's Iconic Opening Battle, Part III

This week at long last we come to the clash of men and horses as we finish our three-part (I, II, III) look at the iconic opening battle scene from the film Gladiator (2000). Last time, we brought the sequence up through the infantry advance, observing that the tactics of the Roman arrow barrage and infantry assault weren’t very Roman at all and were poorly executed in either case.

This week, we’re closing out the battle with the final, confused melee as the infantry, barbarians and cavalry all come together in a swirling mess. As we’re going to see, not only did Roman warfare seek to avoid such a swirling mess on the battlefield, so did the warfare of Germanic-speaking peoples like the Marcomanni and the Quadi – the ostensible enemies in this scene – who fought in spear-and-shield walls that relied on keeping formation every bit as much as the Romans. Meanwhile Maximus, who is supposed to appear supremely capable, comes off as a deeply incompetent Roman commander who ought never have been trusted with command.

The result, as we’ve seen so far, is that while the Roman army in Gladiator is a lot of folks’ standard reference point for the Roman army, it doesn’t function very much like a Roman army. Instead, its historical groundness is largely deceptive, getting just enough of the obvious things close enough to right for an audience to largely accept the things which are wrong.

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Whoopsiedoodles.

The Barbarians

But before we dive into the clash of infantry, I want to turn our focus briefly and look at bit more closely at the Marcomanni and Quadi in this scene, because they are done even worse by it than the Romans, by some margin, in how they are equipped, dressed and how they fight.

What we see of our ‘barbarians’ is all over the place, but mostly conforms to the sort of ‘barbarian chic’ I have complained about in the past: lots of leather and fur, dirty clothes and earth tones. In equipment, we see few helmets, an absurd variety of shield shapes (most rectangular to some degree and curved) and a lot of axes (because barbarians love axes). Their formation is likewise poor: they form a vaguely linear mass, but when the arrow barrage starts, we see men running around in every direction, with no particular order or effort to retain formation. When they charge, there’s no effort to retain any kind of order, they simply rush forward in a rolling mass.

The one interesting quirk, of course, is that their leader speaks flawless 21st century Bundesdeutsches Hochdeutsch – an awkward and unfortunate equating of modern Germans with ancient Germanic-language speakers, as we noted last time – and they use the pre-battle murmur call from Zulu (1964). That murmur call was, so far as I know, entirely made up in 1964 and isn’t any less made up in 2000, but it is actually a neat film reference in that it encourages the viewer to think of how the white North-and-Central Europeans in this scene are the ones in the position of the “other” like the Zulu were in the 1800s, at the ‘business end’ of imperial exploitation. In that, it mirrors the earlier lines about who would “know when they are conquered.” Again, I am not entirely hostile to Ridley Scott and he’s at his best with these sorts of general themes, in the same way that Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is mediocre as a history of the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem but fantastic as a study of how internal politics and ideologies impel states into foolish, counter-productive wars.

Our ‘German Leader,’ tossing the head of the Roman emissary. They’ve given him a great big two-handed axe, but the prestige weapon in his culture in this period would have been a one-handed sword. A proper Marcomannic or Quadi chieftain or king would also have worn a helmet and mail, and carried a shield, probably oval, and brightly painted. A warrior like that, clad in gleaming metal armor with a bright, well-painted shield would cut an imposing figure on the battlefield.

But the rest of the depiction is pure nonsense. What ought we see?

Instead of leathers and furs, in terms of dress, we ought to see the Marcomanni and Quadi wearing wool tunic and trousers, probably dyed in fairly bold primary and secondary colors. Given the poor weather, they might wear cloaks (also wool), but generally people don’t wear cloaks into battle (whatever fantasy fiction has told you). Helmets, by this period, should be very common; those without metal helmets would likely have a textile or leather head protection, but I would expect metal helmets for most warriors. Body armor would be rarer, but a noticeable number of these fellows should be in mail or scale armor: while Roman artwork loves the trope of the ‘unarmored’ (often nude) barbarian, in practice these fellows have been exposed to Gallic mail armor since c. 300 BC and have been living next to – and often fighting in (as auxiliaries or allies) – the Roman army for generations, leading to the adoption of a fair bit of the Roman (particularly auxiliary) kit and tactics.

The ‘barbarians’ issuing their Zulu (1964)-style murmur call.

In terms of weapons, their shields should be broadly of a single type: a long, flat oval shield (sometimes these are hexagonal in Roman artwork, but I wonder if that was just an artists’ way of making them look foreign; oval seems more common) running from the shoulder to the shin, with a metal boss at the center. Such shields would be faced in hide (giving them a smooth appearance) and brightly painted. The primary weapon of basically everyone would have been a thrusting spear, a version of the one-handed omni-spear, as their primary weapon. Swords, of a type similar to the longer Roman spatha (still a one-handed sword) would be a more common backup weapon, particularly for the wealthy, but everyone should have the spear. At this date, I’d expect to see few axes, particularly not among the wealthier warriors (like the leader, who wields one).

In formation, we should be a little wary of our sources: the trope of the untutored barbarians who fought without units, order or formations is very strong as a form of ethnic stereotype against Celtic- and Germanic-language speakers in Greek and Roman literature. We get hints this stereotype isn’t quite accurate, like Tacitus noting that Germanic warriors were divided into units recruited from specific villages, at a specific strength (100 strong) and drawn up not in a mob but in an acies, a battle line (Tac. Ger 6.5-6). What we should expect here is is a shield wall formation, probably somewhat more tightly spaced than the Romans.

In fact, such a Marcommanic or Quadi shield wall wouldn’t have been very different in organization or capability from a hoplite phalanx of the Greek world during the Classical period (admittedly, that’s five centuries earlier at this point): a close order formation of effectively militia-soldiers, recruited by neighborhood. Command and control would have been similar too: a Greek phalanx was also something of a ‘dumbfire missile’ – once it advanced, there was little the general could do to maneuver it. Greek generals, like what we’re told of Germanic-speaking kings, led from the front, attempting to inspire by example, rather than command (Tac. Ger. 7). The formation might not be rigid, but it would be recognizable as a coherent battle line and there would be some effort, if simply for self-preservation reasons, to keep that formation more or less together in the advance.

That is going to play into how these formations would, at last, clash.

Infantry Battle

There’s something of an irony in this scene that, as we discussed last time, Ridley Scott has tried really hard to give the Romans all of the visual signifiers of a highly comeptent, disciplined, capable army, from their technically sophisticated artillery barrage to their neat marching formations, clever tactics like the use of a (badly formed) testudo and so on. Those details are wrong, but we’re clearly meant to be impressed by how disciplined, trained and skilled the Romans are. We’re supposed to be really impressed by just how formidable Maximus has made his army, how impressive the Roman military machine is.

And then the charging Quadi and Marcomanni just casually sweep over these badly formed formations improperly using their weapons, with the battlefield dissolving into near total chaos almost instantly. In the first instant we see those thin, fragile looking Roman musket-line formations both bend backwards at the edges and clump up, with large numbers of ‘barbarians’ rushing into the intervals unopposed, leading to the entire formation devolving almost instantly into a series of isolated ‘islands’, ‘tactical clumps,’ surrounded and being lapped on all sides by enemies. By the time Maximus has been unhorsed and is fighting on the ground, the battle has devolved into a series of confused duels, with no clear front line or formations to speak of, and it’s equally clear the Romans have taken heavy losses. We’re supposed to conclude that Maximus has a really badass army, but if this was how an actual Roman battle went, what we’re actually seeing is that Maximus is terrible at this and so is his army.

It is hard to make out precisely what is happening in the soup of this scene but you’ve got a group of Romans in the foreground who have formed what I am going to call a ‘tactical clump’ rather than, you know, a fighting formation, and then behind them you have ‘barbarians’ pouring through the gap and wrapping around them, so that each Roman formation instantly becomes a confused little island alone at sea.

As you might imagine, this is not how the Romans fight, both in terms of tactics but also in terms of results. The Roman Empire, after all, employed a long-service professional army of hard-to-replace professionals. That army was, in absolute size, enormous – 300,000 to 400,000 men, far larger than the largest mobilizations of the Roman Republic – but it also covered some 3,000 miles of frontier on three different continents. The Roman Empire could tolerate isolated defeats or long campaigns, but overall the Romans needed to be able to win their battles decisively and generally quite one-sidedly; indeed one of the factors in the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west was that the Roman qualitative edge – the better tactics, soldiers and equipment – didn’t vanish, but was merely reduced (mostly by the ‘barbarians’ getting better at doing war Roman-style), leading to increasing strain on limited resources. In short, Roman victories tended to be lopsided in part because they could be and in part because they needed to be.

So what ought we be seeing?

As noted last time, the Romans ought to be advancing in cohorts, blocks of roughly 480 men, 60 files wide and 8 ranks deep, with fairly wide spacing, with the cohorts themselves set in two or three lines, with visible intervals between cohorts both laterally and vertically. Auxilia cohorts would likely be deployed to the flanks ad light auxiliary or allied troops might skirmish out in front of the formation or in the intervals between the cohorts. In terms of the size of those intervals, we don’t know precisely, but reasoning from the manipular legion of the Roman Republic, where we have better sources, they probably tended to have 10m of interval for every c. 25-30m of unit over the front. So we might expect a cohort to be about 80m wide, with perhaps c. 25m intervals on either side.

You will often hear it said that the Romans advanced silently, but this is actually a question of considerable debate in the scholarship. In practice, our sources are mostly silent on this question and when they’re not silent, they give us confusing and varied reports: Romans sometimes advance silently, frequently raise a loud cry (the clamor) immediately before throwing pila and engaging, sometime drum pila against shields during the advance or to intimidate the enemy – and then in all of these we need to be wary of literary embellishment. The most common solution in this case is probably a relatively silent advance, with the legions raising a loud rolling shout right as they reach javelin-range (about 20-30 meters).

The Marcomanni and Quadi, meanwhile, would have formed into a shield wall-style line, probably without unit intervals (so it is a single long line), but not shoulder-to-shoulder. Instead, we probably ought to expect that each warrior occupies about 80-90cm of lateral space (making the formation a little under 50% empty air).

Naturally the film just has the ‘barbarians’ do a disordered rushing charge.
Gladiator really wants this to be a scene about how good a soldier Maximus is, but what it keeps showing us is how he very nearly loses to a deeply incompetent, poorly equipped enemy.

While Hollywood loves passive Roman formations receiving ‘barbarian’ charges, in practice both formations would likely advance steadily before ending with a charge over the last few dozen meters before contact. Roman sources describe the coming together of Roman armies with words like concursus (a ‘running together’) so we know the Romans charged rather than walking into contact. At about 25m, the Romans would volley their first pilum, sending a shower of heavy javelins into the enemy ranks, likely timed to coincide with the shout (the clamor) and then the rushing onset of the Roman battle line; the second pilum could be thrown on the run or simply dropped if need be. Battles in which lines closed too rapidly for pila to be thrown are known from antiquity.

The question of “what happens when two battle lines collide at speed” is one of those enduring scholarly debates – mostly carried out in debates about hoplites – which we won’t settle here. I’ll offer my own view, which is I suspect they did collide at speed (though not, perhaps a dead sprint) before ‘accordioning’ back out to fighting intervals. Romans and ‘barbarians’ both in this moment have some flexibility of movement, both side to side and forward or back from the enemy, but they’re going to want to try to roughly maintain their relative position in formation, because they’re relying on the men to their sides to protect their own blindsides.

What you’d thus have would not be a confused mass of fighting or the isolated little ‘islands’ of Romans we see in the film, but rather a single solid line of ‘barbarians,’ pressed by large, coherent blocks of Romans with small intervals between them. A few Marcomanni or Quadi warriors might get the bright idea to run into those intervals, but they’d learn their folly quickly, as they’d be flanking themselves between the rear ranks of each Roman cohort, who are not actively engaged – and many of those Romans will still have had a pilum to hand. I should note that the Roman military oath swore, “not to leave or retreat from one’s post for flight or terror, unless in order to pick up a weapon, pursue and strike an enemy or to save a citizen” – the exception neatly in place to let a Roman soldier dash into the interval to strike down an enemy fool enough to try to run through it. Even if a warrior ran through the gap, they’d simply find themselves facing the next line of cohorts, off-set from the first to cover these exact intervals. Instead, I’d expect the ‘barbarian’ line to flex and waver, but generally hold as a line, not advancing far into the intervals.

The fighting, rather than taking place everywhere, would be taking place along those lines where the front of the cohorts met the Marcomannic and Quadi shield wall. Here, we’d likely see the same tactical interaction taking place in many individual combats at once: the Roman’s gladius (of a high imperial type) at c. 65-70cm is obviously far shorter than the enemy’s c. 2.5-3m long spear, so the Roman has to advance through his opponent’s reach advantage to strike. However, the Roman has an enormous shield and heavy body armor, which he can use to block his opponent’s weapon in order to advance into his own ‘measure’ (the reach of his weapon) at which point his sword is much more capable of thrusting (or cutting) around his opponent’s (also quite large) shield and the Roman’s heavy armor gives him a pretty decisive advantage.

Further aiding the Roman would have been that shower of pila just before contact, disabling men and shields and thus creating gaps and opportunities to exploit. Remember: a Roman can advance a short distance out of position for the purpose of striking an enemy. Likewise, the rear ranks, if they still had pila or could spot any usable missiles on the ground, were perfectly capable of throwing them either over top of the line or between the men in front of them. A wounded Roman could be relieved by the man behind him – after all, it was permissible to advance to save a citizen, so if the fellow soldier in front of you was wounded or knocked down, I think the expectation is that you rush forward to take his place so he can withdraw through the fairly wide tactical spacing to the rear (and you have a big shield with which to do it).

In practice, unless the initial rush of Marcomanni and Quadi was sufficient to sweep the Romans back – something that usually only happened in ambushes or other forms of tactical surprise – the attrition on that front line of fighting is likely to favor the Romans by a lot. As a rule in pre-modern contact (‘shock’) warfare, armored heavy infantry can inflict absolutely staggeringly lopsided slaughter in close combat against less well armored infantry: the heavy armor doesn’t just keep the Romans from being killed, it allows them to be more aggressive, advancing through their enemy’s striking distance more safely to ply their own weapons, which in that closer context (sword’s reach rather than spear’s reach) are a lot more lethal. Combined with Roman drill, the result was that these sort of pitched head-on-head engagements tended to go very badly for Rome’s enemies and to do so quite quickly.

If Maximus’ army was up to ROman army standards, his cavalry ought to arrive to find an enemy line already collapsing from casualties and thus rapidly collapsing morale. The fact that Maximus needs to bail out his own infantry line – in an army where the heavy infantry makes up three-quarters of the total force – suggests that far from being a great general, Maximus is quite bad at this and has under-prepared his army. Which bring us to:

That Cavalry Charge

With Maximus’ infantry being overrun and falling apart in an open field engagement, it falls to Maximus to save the day with his cavalry. As we’ve already covered in the previous sections, this is itself an oddity: the Romans rarely expected cavalry to play a decisive role in winning their battles and Roman generals in this period (and earlier periods) wouldn’t accompany the cavalry either – expecting to win with their infantry, they tended to position themselves behind the infantry to be able to command. Moreover, Maximus’ cavalry appears to be entirely, or at least mostly composed of legionary cavalry, but in practice the overwhelming majority of cavalry in Roman armies in this period were auxilia cavalry; each legion’s small detachment of 120 cavalrymen was more for scouting and messenger work than combat.

And yet we’re not even close to done with everything that is wrong about this part of the battle.

To start with, as alluded to before, the positioning of Maximus’ cavalry, effectively behind the Marcomannic army, is wild. It would, of course, be almost impossible to conceal such a flanking force of cavalry from an enemy, especially an enemy that knows the ground better than you do (because they live here). Forests often act in strategy games as default ‘concealment,’ but large bodies of cavalry are both very visible and fairly loud, so bringing this cavalry close enough to take part in the battle makes it nearly certain they would be spotted. If spotted, they’re in quite a lot of trouble, as they’re too far away to be supported. So the most likely result of Maximus’ strategy is defeat in detail: he’d arrive at the end of his long ride away from his army to find his cavalry gone – engaged, defeated and scattered hours earlier while he waited for his envoy to return – shortly before his infantry was overrun and defeated.

I can almost imagine how scathingly an author like Tacitus or Ammianus would report such a defeat, laying the blame with Maximus for arrogantly sabotaging his own negotiations by foolishly moving his cavalry in an obvious aggressive ambush position and then failing to prepare properly for the actual battle.

But assuming Maximus’ cavalry remains undiscovered, this is still a pretty terrible plan. The problem is terrain. I find a lot of folks are used to thinking about terrain much in the way that strategy games often do, which is that terrain offers relatively mild buffs or debuffs to specific unit types which generally ‘wear off’ the moment the cavalry exits the unfavorable terrain, which tends to make things like forests at most mild inconveniences to move through. But in actual practice, dense old-growth forest might as well be a wall for cavalry as battle conditions: not a mild inconvenience but a nearly absolute barrier.

This is terrible ground for your cavalry! There’s no way to keep this tight formation together through all of these trees and about a hundred ways to injure your horse trying.

Horses, after all, did not evolve in dense forests, they evolved on the rolling flat grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe. It is very easy for a horse to injure itself moving through a forest unless it is on some kind of path: forests, after all, tend to be full of uneven ground, concealed small holes, fallen tree trunks, roots, undergrowth and all sorts of obstructions which can be hard to see (for either the horse or the rider) but which can easily damage a horse’s long, relatively fragile legs. Even at a slow pace, a rider would need to be careful in this terrain; at a gallop riders would almost certainly injure their horses – a bad footfall leading to a tumble that could kill the rider and would certainly permanently lame the horse.

One assumes the film can get away with this on screen because they’re not filming in an actual forest, but in a tree-farm, a kind of terrain that did not exist in antiquity, with nice, relatively neat even-spaced rows of trees on relatively flat ground with all of the obstructions and underbrush cleared away (and then probably further cleared and made safe during set preparation). So even if undiscovered, the practical result of Maximus’ cavalry charge would be dozens of lamed horses and injured or killed riders and a charge that fell apart from terrain long before it got within sight of the enemy.

Of course Maximus’ own handling of the cavalry is little better. He immediately spurs them to a gallop – rather than letting the horses advance more careful in such difficult terrain – and repeatedly orders his cavalrymen to “hold the line.” This is one of those lines that is intended to sound cool, but not to actually mean anything; to ‘hold the line‘ is to hold position and formation against enemy attack, an injunction, generally to infantry, to stand their ground. But this order cannot be to the infantry, who surely could not hear it. Here it is, I suppose, an order for the cavalry to hold their formation in the advance (which is simply not what this command means), but that’s also quite stupid: these men are galloping through a forest and so cannot hold tightly to their posts, because they will need to swerve or slow down to avoid the trees and other obstructions. Meanwhile he keeps shouting it like this is supposed to motivate the cavalrymen, who in practice can’t move any faster than their horses in any event.

The funny thing about Maximus yelling ‘hold the line’ here is that his cavalry has already dropped out of any formation that could be called a line, but also ‘holding the line’ at a full gallop through a dense forest isn’t really an option.
Also, it sure is nice for Maximus that someone came through here in advance and made sure all of the trees were neatly space in rough rows and cleared out all of the underbrush and low-hanging branches. Who knew the ‘barbarians’ kept such neatly trimmed tree farms?

If it did somehow reach the enemy, Maximus’ cavalry would run into more fairly immediate problems because they’re carrying the wrong weapons. We see his cavalry – and Maximus himself – wielding gladii and oval shields. The shields are basically correct, but the other weapons are wrong. For one, the primary weapon of Roman or auxilia shock cavalry is going to be a cavalryman’s spear (generally a hasta in Latin), because a charging cavalryman wants a weapon which can reach beyond the head of his horse to strike an enemy. A sword would only ever be a backup weapon and in this case that sword would not be a gladius, but rather the longer spatha. Both derive from the La Tène sword tradition, but whereas the gladius of the imperial period is a shorter variant of a Roman variant of a Celtiberian variant of an early La Tène sword, the spatha is an only modestly altered Roman variant of a much longer late La Tène sword. The length, of course, is a great advantage on horseback where a rider is above any target he intends to swing at.

He just keeps shouting it.
What line, Maximus? Where do you see a line to be held? Who are you even talking to?

Once again we can ask what ought we see?

Well in the first place, in a battlefield that has dense forest on both sides, we might not expect to see much cavalry at all. There’s simply no good terrain here to use them on. In these sorts of cases in the sources, we often just don’t hear what the cavalry was doing (rear security, most likely), sometimes for the whole battle and sometimes the cavalry becomes ‘visible’ again when it pursues fleeing enemies. It would not be at all unusual, from our accounts, for the cavalry simply not to be utilized here in the pitched battle – instead, the cavalry’s work would have been in scouting and screening the army as it matched here and pitched camp.

Assuming there was an open flank where cavalry could be employed, the Romans tended to post their cavalry on either flank of the army, with the intent that it screen those flanks, keeping the heavy infantry component from being enveloped. Since this wasn’t the main effort, the general didn’t accompany the cavalry. Instead, this task would be assigned in the imperial period to some of the more senior equestrian (as in the social rank) officers in the legion, whrd o show up variably in our sources as praefecti alae or praefecti equitum, while the senatorial legati took command of the main heavy infantry component, the legion. Out on the flank, the ‘Roman’ (mostly auxilia) cavalry would mostly be sparring with enemy cavalry and light troops rather than charging directly into opposing close-order heavy infantry.

And now to be a little mean, but everything else in this sequence is delivered in English except this one sentence which is given in Latin and the Latin is wrong. The viewer might assume that because this is the only phrase in Latin, it is a real Latin phrase, but of course it isn’t.
The immediate problem is the victor is a masculine noun which can sometimes play as an adjective, but Roma is feminine, so if we wanted to say ‘Conquering/Victorious Rome’ we’d say Roma Victrix. That said, I can’t call to mind any example of Roma – a word that is going to conjure both the city and the goddess – being described as victrix. Cicero describes the res publica as victrix at one point (Ep. ad Brut. 1.10.2), although he uses a form of the verb to be, so he’s using victrix as a noun, not an adjective.
The deeper problem is that the structure here implies ‘victrix’ as an epithet of Roma, which as far as I know, it isn’t; instead victor is an epithet of Jupiter and Hercules. Nike (the Greek word for ‘victrix’) is an epithet of the goddess Athena and that gets translated into Latin as Athena Victrix, but Athena is very much not Roma either. Roma’s more common epithet, that we see on coins, is Roma aeterna, “Eternal Roma.” When Roman armies wanted to invoke victory as a battle-cry, well, that was a different goddess – Victoria, naturally, and they’d shout her name (which actually happens, e.g. Caes. BG 5.37).
So this is both grammatically incorrect Latin, but also theologically incorrect Roman religion and so something I have a hard time imagining a Roman would say, another example of the remarkable carelessness of this scene.

Melee

If Maximus thought it was important enough to keep a cavalry formation – he does spend all that time shouting ‘hold the line!’ to his horsemen, after all – he certainly doesn’t succeed. Even before he’s left the trees, his cavalry have lost any semblence of a tight, linear formation and by the time they arrive at the rear of the Marcomanni and Quadi, the battlefield is a confused, jumbled scrum.

Every so often, when I am teaching about ancient warfare, well meaning students will ask me how a given set of equipment or fighting style works once the battle has descended into the sort of confused, jumbled melees that Hollywood loves. Of course the answer is they don’t. No one’s fighting system or equipment is designed for this sort of confusion, because it simply wouldn’t be survivable and what most men want even more than winning a battle is to survive the battle. As you might imagine, such a confused battle would be insanely lethal: without a consistent direction of threat, soldiers couldn’t defend themselves effectively with their shields, instead being attacked from behind or the sides (while focused on an enemy in front of them). The whole thing would resolve very quickly, but it would resolve with both sides taking overwhelming casualties. As we’ve noted before, contrary to popular culture which tends to imagine that battles mostly involve killing the enemy, casualties in ancient battles tend to be around 10% of the total force engaged.

No lines, no formations, just chaos. No one in antiquity fought like this intentionally.

As a result, no army wanted the battlefield to devolve into such absolute confusion – Roman armies least of all. A general that allowed a battle to get this out of control was quite a failure. As fun as this sequence is, this is one of its problems: it wants us to understand Maximus as an extremely capable commander, but keeps showing him commanding very poorly.

As a result, there’s no much to say about the confused final scrum of this battle except that the Romans didn’t fight this way and neither did the Marcomanni or the Quadi. But I do want to note that even how we see the Romans (and especially Maximus) fighting is wrong. In particular, we see Maximus and other Romans doing a lot of sword parries – blocking an enemy blow with their sword – but that’s also not how the Romans fight. You can parry with a gladius or a spatha and certainly this must have happened, but the weapons are not ideal for it: the weapons have very small guards (the bit at the base of the blade that protects the hand) generally made of wood rather than metal, so there’s a good chance the opponent’s sword is going to ride down your blade into your hands. Instead, a Roman – infantry or cavalry – defends himself with his giant shield, with the added advantage that, having caught an enemy strike with your shield, there, you can be making your counter-stroke in the same time.

While we’re here, this is a block that only works with Hollywood blunts. If that sword edge is sharp, you are just going to lose a hand. There absolutely are blocks and sword-fighting techniques that involve grabbing the blade, but they do not involve placing the edge flat against your unarmored palm and letting the enemy drive it through your hand. It’d have made more sense to turn this blade to parry with the flat so Maximus’ hand could rest against the flat of the blade and thus keep all of his fingers.
It would have made even more sense for this Roman to have a shield.
Also note how many dead Romans we can see in these scenes? This battle did not go well.

The related problem in the scene is that almost none of the Romans seem to keep their shields once the confused melee starts. It is really hard to get good screen-caps of this, because of all of the really quick cuts and the frequency with which Scott has people in the foreground run in front of the camera, which obscures a lot of the action, but I’d hazard by the time Maximus is on the ground, maybe one in five of our Romans still has their shield. Abandoning your shield in battle was a serious offense (because the assumption is that the only reason you’d drop your shield is to run away)! Precisely because the Roman combat style, focused on the gladius rather than on a spear, requires the Roman to advance through a spear-wielding opponent’s reach, you need that big shield to block, because your opponent will get to swing first.

Confusions and Conclusions

The battle ends with scattered Roman survivors standing over heaps of corpses, both Roman and enemy. We’re supposed to come through this scene thinking that Maximus is a very capable commander, a grim, focused, effective military man of the sort that Rome needs. But to be frank, actually knowing the Roman army, he comes off as a remarkably poor Roman general, the sort of fellow who needs to be sacked to a back-bench position in the Senate and then encouraged to spend more time on his estate.

Look at all of those Roman casualties! This battle may have been won, but it did not go well. The entire Roman security structure was predicated on the ability to win battles like this easily as that was the only way the entire Roman frontier could be held. In practice, the Romans tended to win these battles so consistently that through much of the early imperial period, the challenge on the Rhine and the Danube was that enemies wouldn’t fight such pitched battles, leading the Romans to have to find ways to force such engagements.

After all, we see Maximus and his buddy Quintus come to this battle supremely confident. Quintus even quips that the Marcomanni should “know when they’re conquered.” And then they go on to very nearly lose the battle, despite every part of their over-complicated, baroque battle plan going according to the plan. Maximus nearly gets himself killed playing warrior-hero rather than actually commanding his army while Quintus loses complete control of the battle the moment he orders the advance, which might be acceptable for a fifth century hoplite general but would have been totally unacceptable for a third century BC Roman commander, much less a second century AD one.

Hooray, all of our friends are dead and that one guy on the left is bleeding out from a gut wound!
Also someone needs to pick up those standards. – I see at least two just standing in the ground on the left! Those are holy objects, if the standard-bearer falls, someone else needs to pick them up! Losing them would be extremely shameful!

Of course the point of ending the battle with scenes of wounded and fallen Romans and sad music playing is to loop back to Ridley Scott’s anti-war themes. The problem is that while Ridley Scott is notionally anti-war in his themes, his movies also think that battles are really cool and that only soldiers should run the state, which is a sort of thematic train-wreck that afflicts both Gladiator movies in particular.

Taking the entire sequence together, I think we can see how – despite being a very fun sequence – it is also very deceptive. Almost everything we see is shaped by one or more misconceptions: the army is composed wrong, positioned incorrectly, uses the wrong tactics, in the wrong formations, often with the wrong weapons, under the direction of a general we are supposed to understand as supremely capable who we see make one mistake after another and very nearly loses the battle as a result.

What is deceptive about it, however, are not all of the things which are wrong – which to be clear, are most of the things. This is not a very Roman battle. But if the film made no representation to historical accuracy or groundedness, if there wasn’t a tremendous effort to create historical verisilimitude and as such every viewer could easily intuit that what they were seeing had no real historical basis, this would just be a fun fantasy battle sequence.

It returns me to the concept I’ve used a lot in these sorts of pop-culture reviews, which is asking the degree to which a given work “makes the claim” to historical groundedness. I was asked, for instance, if I would do a similar review of A Knight’s Tale (2001) – another super-fun movie – and the answer is basically no. The reason is that A Knight’s Tale goes out of its way to avoid “making the claim” to historical accuracy, mostly notably by including a whole bunch of diagetic (that is, in the story rather than merely played over it) modern music. You are not supposed to take any part of A Knight’s Tale seriously as a historical work.

But as we’ve noted, quite a lot of effort in Gladiator (2000) goes into the signifiers of historical accuracy, to get the feel of an accurate portrayal, even though almost no part is accurate. Gladiator is “making the claim.” For the most part, the legionary and auxiliary soldiers look like they walked on to set off of the page of a textbook illustration, even if they’re present in the wrong ratios and fighting the wrong way; the Romans show up with lots of catapults and field fortifications, both things folks often vaguely know about the Romans (but in both cases, they’re used wrong); characters shout Latin phrases even if those phrases are grammatically incorrect; they have Roman-sounding names even if those are incorrect. There was a deliberate choice to present something that looked an awful lot more authentic than the sword-and-sandal epics of previous decades. And of course the narrative is presented in a very specific time and place, under the reign of two specific emperors. It mattered a lot to Ridley Scott and his team that this sequence looked accurate, even though it wasn’t accurate.

You can see how successful that effort is simply by reading through some of the comments on the last two posts, or the response they elicited in some corners of social media – some quite strident efforts to defend elements of this sequence (including an amusing effort to salvage Maximus’ name). The efforts to defend the battle speak to the degree to which many viewers have internalized this as their vision of historical Roman warfare and of course they did: the film goes out of it way to encourage them to do so. And because this scene is so influential, even folks whose sense of the Roman army comes from, say, video games are likely to also be effectively marinated in this scene, merely second-hand.

Which is why I thought this scene was worth talking through, because it isn’t an accurate vision of historical Roman warfare. Gladiator is, unlike its sequel, a fun movie and a good time, but if you know the Roman army from this movie, chances are you know less than nothing. Normally, this is where I’d recommend a better portrayal of the Roman army at war but to be frank, we haven’t really gotten a good one. HBO’s Rome has some good moments, but also some solid nonsense and so falls into much the same trap as Gladiator: just enough right to leave people vulnerable to accepting what is wrong. Most films can’t help but invent non-existent Roman tactics rather than showing the Roman army function as it was.

To be honest, I’d rather think this would create a space, especially as CGI is now much cheaper, for a film to ‘break out’ by delivering a radically grounded vision of the Roman army. In the meantime, if you want a real sense of how a Roman army fights, all I can do is recommend something like my own series on the Roman army of the Middle Republic.

Gladiator sure ain’t it.