Ancient World Review

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.

If you really want to get into the Conan saga, however, you need to read the original Howard stories, now available in three volumes from Del Rey: "The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian", "The Bloody Crown of Conan" and "The Conquering Sword of Conan" (the best of the three, in my opinion.) And, if you can find it at an affordable price, I highly recommend the 928-page Gollancz hardback collection The Complete Chronicles of Conan. This is the only one-volume "collected" Conan I'm aware of that actually includes all of the stories and other Conan-related material that Howard wrote. It's the Bible for hardcore Conan fanatics.

Note: Excellent audiobook versions of the Del Rey Conan books can be found at Audible along with many of Howard's other works. There are several Conan collections for Kindle as well, some of them better than others. The Kindle versions are kind of hit and miss. Some of them have formatting problems and others, advertised as being complete, aren't actually complete. The three volumes of the Del Rey collection are apparently available on Kindle now, but they're kind of expensive.

The original Howard stories are all fantastic and some of them, like "Red Nails," "Beyond The Black River," "The Black Stranger," "Queen of the Black Coast," and "The Hour of the Dragon" (Howard's only novel) are masterpieces of high adventure and incredibly luminous writing. Beneath the surface, Howard was writing about the clash between barbarism and civilization and his prognosis for civilization wasn't very bright:

"'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,' the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. 'Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'" -- Beyond The Black River.

Howard was an inspired, prolific writer who is often credited with creating the swords and sorcery genre, aka heroic fantasy, though stories like this can be traced all the way back to Homer and the Norse sagas. He was also lucky enough to live during a time when fiction writers could actually make a living writing for pulps like Weird Tales.  His writing's vivid and energetic, if sometimes florid, but always absorbing and entertaining. He was a friend of H.P. Lovecraft, another favorite of mine, and the great fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, and the three writers included references to each other's work in their own books in order to spread the word about Hyperborea and the Cthulhu Mythos, an interesting example of literary cross-pollination. Howard and Lovecraft corresponded regularly, producing a huge number of interesting letters collected in the two-volume set A Means To Freedom, edited by the Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi.

"For stark, living fear...what other writer is even in the running with Robert E. Howard?" --H.P. Lovecraft.

The late fantasy writer Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time series, continued the Conan saga at a high level. He wrote six or seven Conan novels,  three of which are collected in "The Further Chronicles of Conan," and he also wrote the novelization for Conan the Destroyer. I'm reading "Conan the Triumphant" right now and it's excellent:

"In the fabled kingdom of Ophir, Conan and his Free-Company of mercenaries enter the service of the voluptuous, dark-eyed Lady Synelle, unaware that she is secretly High Priestess of Al'Kiir, the sharp-horned, multi-fanged demon god whose worship is almost forgotten in the kingdom." --Fantastic Fiction UK

Now that's what I call high literature, but enjoying it involves an obsolete skill, namely reading. If you're a product of the modern school system and you've already seen the flicks, you can always get a good dose of Conan through the comic books (though some reading is still required). The ones I've seen are top rate. For instance, I just got volume one of The Savage Sword of Conan (Dark Horse), which includes a faithful version of the Howard classic, Red Nails. The art work in these old comics was top notch (though nothing beats the original Magnus Robot Fighter series, in my opinion) and the writing is a testament to the good old days when kids weren't protected from the real thing by the all-knowing Nanny State.

As for the movies, the first one, Conan the Barbarian, is generally considered the best. Arnold Schwarzenegger was still in condition at the time, the supreme Iron Rat and perfect for the role of the semi-articulate Cimmerian (Howard's Conan was anything but inarticulate, but never mind that). The second movie, Conan the Destroyer, is almost universally mocked as kid stuff by serious fans, but I've always liked it. Both movies are quests. In the first one, Conan's sent to recover a king's daughter who has fallen under the spell of the evil Thulsa Doom, the leader of an apocalyptic snake cult. In the second movie, he's dispatched by an evil queen to help a beautiful young princess (destined to be sacrificed, naturally) recover a supernatural treasure which the queen plans to use to bring the god Dagoth back so life so she can rule the world. During the process, heads roll "with more thwacks and less facts, more pecs and less sex...with Arnold the Barbarian getting blood on his deltoids in every scene..." according to the legendary drive-in movie critic, Joe Bob Briggs. Neither movie is faithful to the far superior Howard creation, but that's the way it goes. I'm not holding my breath waiting for someone in the movie industry to do justice to Conan (the 2011 Conan the Barbarian was a typical Hollywood CGI schlockfest and I'm sorry I even mentioned it). 

Robert E. Howard is sitting at the right hand of Crom these days, but he should be proud of himself. Conan has become a cultural icon and the character Howard created has spawned a huge industry of movies, books, comic books, video games, role-playing games, you name it. Regardless of the format, however, they all have one thing in common. The world presented in the Conan saga is harsh, cruel, violent and, well, barbaric, but it's also more elemental, which I think is the big attraction these stories have for the modern mind cut off from nature in the barrack cities of so-called advanced civilization.

Note: I wrote this article several years ago. I've been reposting it on a regular basis because I want to do what I can to publicize the work of this great American writer.

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 (2011), "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.

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 1963 movie with stop-motion effects by Harry Harryhausen is a classic. The scene where Talos wakes gave me the shivers when I first saw it as a kid.

Capsule Movie Review: Ironclad

Ironclad (2011) is an excellent 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.

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.

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 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.

"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.

10,000 BC - The Dumbest Movie Ever Made?

10,000 BC wasn't all that bad. All right, yes it was, but I managed to sit through the whole thing, which is more than I can say for a lot of movies these days. It was entertaining in a mindless, drooling sort of way and the effects were good enough to keep me borderline conscious from start to finish.

The geography in this idiotic movie was seriously confused, to say the least. The main characters, apparently northern European mammoth hunters, cross a mountain range which appears to be the Alps, emerging in sub-Saharan Africa, at which point they head back across the desert to find themselves in Egypt, where woolly mammoths are being used to build the pyramids. Now, I'm too lazy to actually look this up, but I was under the impression that there were no mammoths in ancient Egypt and everybody knows that shape-shifting reptilian aliens actually built the pyramids, not that it really matters.

I don't want to give away the plot, such as it is, so I'll just say that the story's vaguely (very vaguely) like a hyper-crapified version of Apocalypto. The fact that Apocalypto is a truly great movie just proves once again that no concept is immune to recycling by brain-damaged midgets. The grand finale of 10,000 BC is almost as stupid as the ending of the TV version of The Stand, one of the dumbest scenes ever filmed, but the body count was high enough to keep me semi-amused for a couple of hours so I'll give it a shaky thumbs up. Is 10,000 BC worth watching? Hell, no, but if you're determined to stare blankly at something while you eat popcorn and dribble all over yourself, it might as well be this.

Note: I originally reviewed this movie in 2008. These days, I don't think I could make it through the opening credits without gouging my eyes out.