Ancient World Review

Historical Inaccuracies In The 1959 Ben Hur's Naval Battle Scenes

This is a classic sequence from Ben Hur, the 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston. It's obvious that the scenes on the deck of the galley were shot in a studio using matte paintings for backgrounds, but the lack of CGI is particularly refreshing and the effects look a lot more realistic than the computer-generated stuff in modern movies. The soundtrack is great, the galley miniatures (filmed in a tank at the MGM back lot) are well done, and the whole sequence has a dark, intense atmosphere that I've always liked, but almost everything about this scene and the naval battle in general is historically inaccurate.

The presence of a Roman consul on board Ben Hur's galley is questionable because this scene presumably took place during the early part of the 1st century AD. "During the Republic, command of a fleet was given to a serving magistrate or promagistrate, usually of consular or praetorian rank," according to Wikipedia, but the setting here is the early principate, when the Mediterranean was a Roman lake and the organization of the navy seems to have changed completely. By this time, individual triremes were commanded by a trierarch, squadrons of ships by a navarch, the rough equivalent of a modern admiral.

Be that as it may, however, the biggest problem with the naval battle scenario is that the Romans are supposedly fighting Macedonian pirates in the Mediterranean:

"The biggest fault with the battle scene from the movie, Ben Hur, was the battle itself. Since this is the time of Jesus, it would imply a date of between 0 and 30 AD, and at that time, Rome no longer had enemies with fleets and there were no pirates remaining who used large warships. The last major naval battle was fought in 31BC, and since that date, most naval battles were skirmishes between naval forces employing small ships." Source: Roman Seas.

There's another minor detail about this scene that always bothered me. Would Roman marines and naval officers wear armor and crested helmets on board their ships when they were just traveling from point A to point B? It doesn't seem very likely. After all, if you slipped and fell overboard, that armor would drag you straight to the bottom. But never mind that. The most serious problem with this entire sequence is the fact that the Romans didn't use slaves to row their galleys. This image is pure Hollywood.

"Naval craft were expensive to build and maintain," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). "Most warships could not be used for trade and their crews were normally free men who required payment as well as provisioning."

According to Wikipedia, "The bulk of a galley's crew was formed by the rowers, the remiges (sing. remex) or eretai (sing. eretēs) in Greek. Despite popular perceptions, the Roman fleet, and ancient fleets in general, relied throughout their existence on rowers of free status, and not on galley slaves. Slaves were employed only in times of pressing manpower demands or extreme emergency, and even then, they were freed first."

Like the fight against Macedonian pirates, the movie's depiction of galley slaves is completely inaccurate. According to the Guardian, "When Ben-Hur is falsely accused of throwing a roof tile at Valerius Gratus, he is sentenced to slavery in the galleys. This is one of the film's (and the book's) biggest blunders. Galley slavery was hardly known in the Roman empire, and there are no records of it being used as a punishment. Not least, this was because most Roman galleys – including the triremes shown in the film – required skilled rowers. The only substantial Roman use of galley slaves was recorded in the second Punic war, more than 200 years before the period depicted in the movie."

Note: the heavily-edited French-language clip above was the only one I could find showing the battle from the 1959 version.

Putting aside the fact that it never would have happened during this time period, the naval battle itself is full of technical inaccuracies and anachronisms. For instance, "the Romans did not use catapults onboard their ships, they used ballistae," according to Roman Seas. "Ballistae fired projectiles at near flat trajectories (trying to hit a moving target from a moving platform using weapons that fired projectiles with high trajectories would be near impossible, and that does not even take into consideration the rocking motion of the ship firing the projectile)."

Ramming was also a bad idea in naval battles. According to Roman Seas, it was "a risky and unsure system of attack that required great skill, and a fair amount of luck, to be pulled off successfully. One miscalculation could mean that you would inflict more damage on your own ship than onto the ship you attempted to ram." Naval battles aren't like demolition derbies. The Romans would've focused on boarding the enemy ships:

"The Romans circumvented ramming altogether by using boarding as their main method of attack. Boarding combat was easier to control, quicker to resolve and safer than ramming, and the Romans had a ready stock of heavily armed, trained soldiers from their land armies. This was an easy solution for the Romans as well as also being a highly effective one since most other navies only used lightly armed and armored marines." (Roman Seas)

So the whole "ramming speed" bit in the galley scene is nonsense. In fact, almost everything about the battle is pure fiction.The 1959 Ben Hur is a classic, I suppose, if you can overlook glaring historical inaccuracies like this, something I'm finding more difficult to do these days. I haven't seen the 2016 remake, but from what I've read it isn't any better and apparently bombed at the box office.

They Didn't Have Flattops In Ancient Rome!

I've never seen a movie about ancient Rome that didn't suck (except for Centurion, which was passable, I guess). Some of these celluloid atrocities are marginally accurate, but most of them get everything wrong and the big budget Hollywood productions are the worst, especially the old "classics" which are incredibly cheesy. The modern movies usually do a better job with the costumes and sets -- usually -- but their scripts are laughable and they almost always mangle the actual history, something I've never been able to understand because the real history is always a thousand times more entertaining than the Hollywood version.

Take the "classic" Spartacus with Kirk Douglas, for instance. The movie's loosely based on real events, but it's a typical overblown Hollywood extravaganza with melodramatic dialog, stereotypically sadistic Romans and a truly moronic ending where Spartacus' wife shows him their baby while he's hanging from a cross. (Never mind the fact that he was actually killed in battle and his body was never found; this scene's so insipid that it makes me laugh just watching it again). The real story would make a fantastic movie if someone would take the time to research the period and actual events.

Spartacus may be world-class schlock, but it looks like a work of careful scholarship next to Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. This movie is so ridiculous, its suck-factor so extreme, that it's almost impossible to describe. Cleopatra's grand entrance into Rome is so comically overblown that it has to be seen to be believed. The Hollywood of the period seemed to think that the ancient world was a gigantic Cecil B. DeMille spectacular and things haven't improved much since.

The massive amount of sensationalist gibberish and misinformation these movies squirt into the soft, quivering brains of their audiences is truly mind-boggling. Just to list a few minor examples, how many people think that the Romans used slaves to row their galleys because they saw it in Ben Hur or that the Egyptians used slaves to build the pyramids because they saw it in 10,000 BC, a movie so bad that its entire cast and crew should be scourged and crucified?

As for Gladiator with Russell Crowe, the less said the better. I liked it when it first came out, but I find it unwatchable now, partly because of its inane Shakespearean dialog which is supposed to make everything sound "classical" and partly because of its mega-extreme level of historical inaccuracy, but mostly because it has one of the most ludicrous endings I've ever seen in a movie, and I've seen a lot of crap movies. Read my review of Gladiator for more details.

Quo Vadis is another mind-blowing suckfest, but it's been decades since I watched it and I think I was drunk at the time, so I can't remember much about it except the loud slurping sound that came out of my TV while I lounged around chain-smoking and guzzling cheap beer. I do remember the scene where Nero feeds the Christians to the lions, however. It has to be one of my favorite bits of crap cinema.

I could go on about more of these big-screen atrocities, but why bother? I'm not even going to get into all the idiotic low-budget gladiator movies the Hollywood machine has spewed out over the decades like projectile vomit. HBO's great series Rome may have played fast and loose with the history (out of necessity), but the writers made some effort to get the details right, so why can't Hollywood do the same thing? As Ralphie said in The Sopranos, "They didn't have flattops in ancient Rome!!!"

Spot The Anachronisms: Mary Queen Of Scots

"'Mary Queen of Scots' is director Josie Rourke’s historical retelling of one of the most fraught and interesting periods of the Elizabethan era. But how much of it is fact and how much is fiction?" Source: The Wrap.

Comment: I haven't seen this, but Good Golly Miss Molly it looks terrible. Other than that I have no comment.

Blood On The Deltoids: Conan The Barbarian

In the interests of improving my mind, I just watched Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer again, plus I've been reading the original Robert E. Howard stories, the later books by Robert Jordan, and the Dark Horse collections of the Savage Sword of Conan comics. This is all great stuff, even the second movie, which is generally panned as campy and too light for serious barbarian action. The Destroyer has its dopey moments, true--quite a few of them, in fact--but I've always been a sucker for stories about evil queens who try to bring ancient gods back to life so they can take over the world. Something always goes wrong, naturally, and they end up releasing monsters which turn on them and run amok. This same general plot was also used by Robert Jordan in his excellent novel "Conan the Triumphant," by the way. It never gets old.

Decisive Battles Of The Ancient World

Decisive Battles - Episode 3 - Teutoburg Forest, 9 AD.

Might makes right, but might and brains don't always go together and "fortune rules all things; she raises to eminence or buries in oblivion from caprice rather than principle." (Sallust)

If you don't believe that, you should check out Decisive Battles of the Ancient World from the History Channel. This fantastic documentary covers thirteen major battles ranging from Ramses II fighting the Hittites for control of Syria to the Spartans standing off the Persians at Thermopylae to the Gothic invasion of Rome and Boudicca's revolt in Britain. "Chance rules all," according to Virgil, but after watching Decisive Battles, I'd change that to "chance, hubris, ambition, greed and stupidity."

Decisive Battles - Episode 9 - Cynoscephalae, 197 B.C.

Most of these battles were epochal to one degree or another, shaping the future development of the entire Western world, and the West as we know it might not even exist if they'd turned out differently. So it's unnerving (and comical) to realize how contingent history really is--how much of it is determined by random combinations of personality and circumstance, the fate of nations hanging on the quirks of strutting egos and a roll of the dice.

The video covers each battle in a twenty-minute episode, featuring lots of maps, background material, onsite footage and interviews with classical scholars like Victor Davis Hanson--expert on Hoplite warfare and author of the great book "A War Like No Other," a history of the Peloponnesian War. The battles themselves are presented using a beta version of the video game Rome: Total War, using computer graphics to animate the formations and maneuvers. This is a lot more effective than using re-enactors since it provides an aerial view of the battles and a sense of their scale.

Decisive Battles - Episode 4 - Marathon, 490 BC.

Some of these fights are stories of epic courage like the last stand of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, while others are chaotic and insane--bloody massacres doomed from the start. Some of the commanders were geniuses like Caesar, Paulinus and Alexander the Great. Others were less brilliant, to say the least, marching their armies into death traps like Varus and Crassus. In any case, this is "Big Man" history--a story of High Glory and Major Screwups--and it's mind-boggling how small some of these Big Men really were.

Great stuff. Highly recommended.

2018 update: The graphics in this 2006 documentary are pretty crude by today's standards, but it's still one of the best resources available if you want to get a quick overview of the history surrounding these various battles. At the time it was pretty ingenious to use 3D game animation, but the details of the battle scenes tend to look the same after a while. I'd like to see an updated version including standard battle maps and campaign diagrams.

The Argonautica By Apollonius Of Rhodes

Note: The rest of this 5-part series can be found here. Scroll down to "Uploads" section.

The Argonautica: "The Voyage of Argo," aka The Argonautica, by Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd cent. BC) is one of my favorite books from the ancient world. The story of Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece is one of the greatest adventure stories ever told and reading its descriptions of battles and monsters and sacrificial rites is like traveling thousands of years back in time. If you're interested in this classic story, I can recommend the Penguin Classics edition (1959,1971), translated by E.V. Rieu, which is particularly clear and easy to follow. The book is full of luminous scenes like this one where the Argonauts, having just landed on the island of Thynia after passing through the Clashing Rocks, see Apollo pass to the north:

"But at that time of day when heavenly light has not yet come, nor is there utter darkness, but the faint glimmer that we call twilight spreads over the night and wakes us, they ran into the harbour of the lonely isle of  Thynias and went ashore exhausted by their labours. Here they had a vision of Apollo on his way from Lycia to visit the remote and teeming peoples of the North. The golden locks streamed down his cheeks in clusters as he moved; he had a silver bow in his left hand and a quiver slung on his back; the island quaked beneath his feet and the sea ran high on the shore. They were awe-struck at the sight and no one dared to face the god and meet his lovely eyes. They stood there with bowed heads while he, aloof, passed through the air on his way across the sea." -- The Voyage of Argo, Book II, pp. 89-90.

Another great scene describes the Argonauts conducting an animal sacrifice to Triton, the son of Poseidon and the messenger of the sea:

"They urged Jason to kill the best of their sheep and hold it out to the god with words of praise. Jason hastily selected one, lifted it up and killed it over the stern, praying in these words: 'God of the sea, you that appeared to us on the shore of these waters, whether the Ladies of the Brine [Nereids?] know you as that sea-wonder  Triton, or as Phorcys, or as Nereus, be gracious and grant us the happy return that we desire.

"As he prayed he slit the victim's throat and threw it into the water from the stern. Whereupon the god emerged from the depths, no longer in disguise but in his own true form, and grasping the stem of their hollow ship drew her on towards the open sea."

Great stuff. Highly recommended.

The True Story Of Alexander The Great

The story of Alexander the Great is one of the most exotic adventures to come down from the ancient world, mostly because of its sheer scale and the larger than life, quasi-mythical personality of Alexander himself.

Alexander's conquest of Asia took him across the Hellespont, past the ruins of Troy through western Asia into Egypt and then on to Babylon, Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush. He fought through the Punjab to the outer ocean, traveling on foot and by ship--a fantastic journey into the unknown.

Alexander's army fought Indian war elephants, massive Persian armies and laid siege to the fortified island of Tyre, building a mole across a half-mile of water in the face of fire ships and relentless attacks. His forces marched through almost every kind of climate--deserts, jungles, mountains--creating the largest empire ever seen, an empire that quickly disintegrated when Alexander died at thirty-two, the victim of wounds and disease (or he was murdered--take your pick).

Alexander thought he was a god: the son of Zeus. According to some stories, his father, Philip II of Macedon, saw Alexander's mother, the ambitious, mystically-inclined Olympias, in bed with a snake (one manifestation of the supreme deity). When Philip sent an emissary to the Oracle of Delphi to find out if he was Alexander's real father, the Oracle told him to make sacrifices to Zeus and predicted that he would lose the eye that had seen his wife with the serpent--a prediction that came true a few years later.

Alexander was a heavy drinker. He may have been involved in the assassination of his father. He may have been bisexual, but the evidence for this is questionable at best. Some writers have called him a psychopath, but these modern terms don't really apply to the ancient world. According to the stories, he never showed fear and always acted with supreme confidence, a confidence that apparently grew into megalomania towards the end of his life. Maybe he was half-crazy--or maybe he really was the son of Zeus.

The True Story of Alexander The Great, an excellent documentary from the History Channel, does a good job of covering the highlights of Alexander's story in two-and-a-half hours. The video recreates Alexander's early days and most of his major battles in reasonable detail using a combination of computer graphics, reenactments and clips (I think) from old movies. The film crew traveled to many of the battle sites and cities that Alexander either founded or passed through, filling out the background through interviews with modern historians and excerpts from the primary ancient sources: Arrian, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch.

Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Gladiator

Gladiator tells the story of a Roman general with an Australian accent who becomes a Hollywood gladiator and saves the Republic in one of the most idiotic conclusions since the third act of Starship Troopers III. The movie won a bunch of Oscars and everybody seems to think it's the greatest film ever made, but if you ask me, its big-deal stars and special effects can't save it from its brain-dead conclusion. Gladiator's a good movie--sort of--but the ending is pure crap and that tends to crapify the whole thing. It's semi-entertaining crap, however. I'll give it that much. Note: Spoilers.

Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe as the general, Maximus; Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus; Richard Harris as the Stoic philosopher/emperor, Marcus Aurelius; Oliver Reed as a gladiator trainer with big ambitions; and Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, Commodus' luscious sister, Gladiator is a big-budget summer epic blockbuster with enough scenery-chewing to feed a Roman legion and it's as historically accurate as a Marvel comic book, but it's a major extravaganza and it could have been a great movie with a different ending and some attention to historical detail.

The first two-thirds of the movie is marginally acceptable with good acting and effects--provided you can ignore the quasi-Shakespearean dialog which is supposed to make everything seem more "classical"--but the conclusion is pure Hollywood tripe and the writers should all be dragged to the top of the Capitoline Hill in Rome and thrown off the Tarpeian Rock for writing this steaming pile of melodramatic bull plop. The ending's a tear-jerker, though, so I guess most of the people who watch it are going to be too busy sobbing in their popcorn to notice how completely absurd it is.

Gladiator opens with a spectacular (though only vaguely accurate) battle scene in which Maximus defeats the last of the German tribes who have been standing in the way of the Pax Romana. The emperor, Marcus Aurelius, is on hand to witness the battle--historically plausible since the real emperor wrote his Meditations while on campaigns--and he decides (for some bizarre reason) to name Maximus his successor, charging him with restoring the long-dead Republic and "ending the corruption" in Rome, a monumental task, to say the least. This wasn't a very bright move on Aurelius' part since it meant passing over Commodus, his son and legitimate heir--just the kind of thing that tends to stir up trouble. And never mind the fact that "restoring the Republic" meant turning the Empire over to the Senate and nobility.

When he hears the news, Commodus flips out completely, strangles the old man in an outburst of tearful rage and orders his goons to kill Maximus and his entire family. Mrs. Maximus and son meet a grisly end at the hands of the Praetorian Guard (?in Spain?), but Maximus escapes, only to be taken prisoner and sold into slavery, landing in a gladiator school run by Oliver Reed, who complains at one point that a shifty-eyed Arab sold him a "queer giraffe," a jarring anachronism, to say the least. Anyway, to make a long story short, Maximus becomes a one-man killing machine, dispatching dozens of his fellow gladiators with one swing of his sword, etc., becoming a popular hero in the process. As a result, he's sent to Rome to fight in the Colosseum, where he ends up facing various tigers, chariot-riding Amazons and the Emperor himself, killing him eventually and croaking in the process, at which point Lucilla announces to the world (with a suitably stern expression) that "Rome shall be a Republic again."

Say what? A Republic? Why? Where did Lucilla, the emperor's sister, get the authority to "restore the Republic?" And why would anyone want to change their entire system of government just because the emperor was dumb enough to start a fight with Russell Crowe? I know it's just a movie and we're supposed to submit to a voluntary lobotomy every time we buy a ticket, but come on. This conclusion makes no sense at all. If a gladiator DID kill a Roman emperor in the arena--in front of thousands of spectators, not to mention the Praetorian Guard--it would set off a mass riot, not to mention a bloody power struggle, but never mind that. The conclusion was effective, I guess, if you're totally unconscious and prone to bursting into tears while your brain shorts out completely.

This reviewer's conclusion that Gladiator is "a true story" is seriously bizarre.

Now, don't get me wrong here. Gladiator is an excellent movie if you can just switch your brain off for a couple hours, something I find pretty easy to do these days, but its conclusion is so ridiculous that it's almost impossible to describe. As for its historical accuracy, forget about it. It would be a waste of time to go into all the details, but it's worth pointing out that all the stuff about Commodus murdering his father is just a lot of Hollywood BS. In the real world, Marcus Aurelius intended Commodus to be his successor all along. He made him Imperator in 176 AD and gave him the title Augustus the next year (when he was fifteen years old). Father and son ruled jointly until Aurelius died in 180. As emperor, Commodus was popular with the mob for staging and participating in gladiatorial combats, so that part of the movie is actually pretty accurate, strange as it may seem. The combats he took part in were carefully staged, though. There was never any danger of him getting injured, let alone killed.

All things considered, Gladiator's a great movie for what it is--a Hollywood blockbuster with a lot of stilted dialog and a truly idiotic conclusion. It's a lot better than most of the crap being produced these days, but it's the kind of flick you watch in a trance and tend to forget about ten minutes after you leave the theater. The dirty secret here is that movies like this are a virtual substitute for the real gladiatorial games that used to be staged for the bloodthirsty mob back when people were more honest about their love of violence. Gladiator has lots of blood and howling crowds and heads rolling across the sand--the real draw for modern "civilized" audiences (though nobody will admit it.) Two-thousand years ago, the Romans went to the games to watch animal hunts, executions and gladiator fights that rarely ended in death. Today, we watch people massacre each other on the Big Screen. I'm not trying to make a moral point, however. If Hollywood started producing REAL gladiatorial games, I'd probably go to see them. Until then, I'll have to settle for world-class schlock like Gladiator.

Note: This review was written in 2009. These days, I've been spoiled by fantastic historical dramas like HBO's Rome and find Gladiator completely unwatchable. The scene in Rome where Titus Pullo is condemned to death in the arena is a thousand times more realistic than anything in Ridley Scott's "historical epic."

Movie Review: Ironclad (Warning: Graphic)

Review: Ironclad is a fantastic movie about a small group of soldiers trying to hold a strategic castle against the notorious King John, who has enlisted the help of Danish mercenaries in an attempt to reclaim England after being forced to sign the Magna Carta. The battle scenes are small scale, but realistic and extremely violent, and the cast is outstanding. James Purefoy, the actor who portrayed Marc Antony in HBO's Rome, plays a Templar who breaks his vows of chastity for love, and Brian Cox (Agamemnon in Troy) plays an English noble leading the desperate rebellion. And Paul Giamatti as King John delivers what has to be one of the greatest rants in favor of the divine right of kings I've ever seen. I don't know how historical the movie is, but who cares? Ironclad's very intense and well done. Highly recommended for the non-squeamish.

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"Ancient Egypt Unearthed" - Discovery Channel

Capsule Review: "Ancient Egypt Unearthed" (2009), Discovery Channel. This fantastic, 525-minute, 2-disc documentary covers a wide range of Egyptian history in nine episodes featuring onsite footage, interviews with archaeologists and computer-generated reconstructions of ancient towns, tombs and structures.

The first disk (Egypt Uncovered) covers the possible origins of Egypt, the unification of the upper and lower kingdoms, the purpose of the pyramids, the development of cities, the role of the pharoahs, heiroglyphs and mummification, among other things. The second, supplemental disk has four episodes: "Egypt's Ten Greatest Discoveries", "Secrets Of Egypt's Lost Queen" (Hatshepsut), "Why Ancient Egypt Fell" and "Women Pharoahs."

All the episodes are great, but some of the highlights include the history of the development of pyramid building and footage of the pyramid complex in the little-known kingdom of Kush south of Egypt.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in one of the ancient world's most spectacular and influential civilizations.