Top Roman Historian Rates Famous Movie Scenes

I'm Spartacus, so I'm being very honest, I actually had to work really hard to get Pompeii wrong. Absolute fantastic rubbish. My name is Dr Simon Elliott,

historian

, archaeologist and broadcaster, and today I'm going to review Roman films. Fantastic, this is the opening scene of the

movie

Gladiator. There is the Marcomatic king holding the head of the Roman messenger that he did not like very much. Oh, and he's giving it back to the Romans, which is kind of nice, so Maximus was actually a real one. general, he was a contemporary of september severus and pertinex, who later became emperors and also of the imperial candidates paschenius niger and claudia salvinas, who fought against severus regular in terms of the historical setting of this battle, there is a reality to it, the kit is not bad, so I'm going to guess it's leather, but it must actually be laurica segmentata, which is dynamo band, which is accurate for this period of the main Roman empire.

In three weeks I will be harvesting my crops, imagine where you will be. I love this quote. Also, I love, love this quote. Russell Crowe is absolutely on top of his game in this

movie

. They go to the former judo to take the fire off the Germans, which is accurate. Something is wrong here in the sequence that is about to happen. the way the legion is engaged, so the legionnaires must stop about 100 meters from the Germans and each legionnaire must throw his lightest pillar in the direction of the javelin and then when he approaches almost point blank he must stop again and then throw his heaviest weight of the javelin, um pelham, and only then should he draw his main weapon, which is gladius spaniensis.

The sword that Maximus is actually using there by Russell Crowe is also accurate because it is not a gladius infantry sword, which is a stabbing weapon. more than anything, the cavalry we're into with a sword, which is a longer weapon that gives more reach, so you can crouch down and start hitting people from the chair, so the sword he's using there It's really accurate in the world of Rome, you have a theater. which is half of your surroundings and in which you have a performance and poetry of things, you have the odion, which is the theater with a roof, you have the circus where you have the charity races and, finally, you have the big problem that is the amphitheater In this case, the coliseum where you have gladiatorial combats, etc., terrible weapons.

The Hispanic ancestors of the gladius did not have any blood supply, so there is no way for air to leave a wound and there is no way for the blood to run out, we wouldn't either. Therefore, when the earth entered it was very difficult to remove, so you had to give it a huge twist that created a terrible and terrifying wound, so it was a psychological weapon. There is a phoenix that represents, I have to say, Commodus in an incredibly fantastic way. captures the madness of man. I would say Commodus, there are many Roman emperors who are crazy or bad, but Commodus is the one who is crazy and bad.

If you watch any Roman movie, I can guarantee that it will somehow shape the director or the producers will try to shoehorn in something that has to do with gladiators somewhere. Would you get a Roman general even in the most extreme circumstances like a gladiator? No, I don't think so, especially I mean, um russell crowe goes out of his way in gladiator as An example to say that he is the general of the armies of the north, so the important thing to remember here is that a gladiator is a slave. If you can enslave a Roman soldier, then yes, ultimately he could become a gladiator, I guess, and Roman soldiers were enslaved.

In the context of the civil war and that kind of thing, certainly the Roman soldiers may have found themselves in the arena as gladiators and then been very good because they are trained soldiers, a fantastic movie, um, really, kind of, uh, It hits the target where I want. at least 50 to be historically accurate and a lot more is actually historically accurate, some parts are wrong but particularly based on the opening battle scene which is fabulous I give it eight out of ten to be honest I don't think this is very Good movie, okay, but some aspects are very, very good and one of the best aspects is the recreation of the city of Pompeii.

See you at the villa. The Lady. You are a woman or a woman from the top of the novel. society your options your options about your own life were limited there were probably more options down below and there is actually a very

famous

portrait from Pompeii of a baker and his wife that is now on display in the archaeological museum in Naples, the baker himself, the man is very well dressed, he clearly did it, etc., but his wife is the one holding the pencil and writing material, so the literate bookkeeper is actually not the baker but his wife, so you get a public bath next to a really fancy house next to a street vendor like we're seeing in this scene here, etc., etc., there we have the diving board, so that's fantastic, it's really a good recreation of Pompeii and others.

What you see is actually a terrible movie in my opinion, but another thing that you see very accurately here and really feel oppressively once you know where you're looking is the proximity of Vesuvius, wow, so we have the eruption of the plenium so this is Vesuvius at full speed so with this particular eruption you have the top of Vesuvius and you can actually see that writing big today that when you look at Vesuvius from the uh even after the later eruptions, if you look at Vesuvius today from the forum in Pompeii, you can see the chunk on the right that went flying in this explosive eruption.

There you can see the enormous amount of panic caused by this eruption. What we do know now is that many people had already evacuated Pompeii. because they had been telegraphed that there was going to be trouble in the days leading up to the event because there were a series of earthquakes and they could tell that the volcano itself was probably going to have some kind of eruption, in fact we know that. A wealth of Pompeii through juxtaposition are two of the key tools archaeologists use when trying to understand the site. You have history, but we also have amazing archeology because the city was buried under several meters, tens of meters of volcanic ash, dust, waste and detritus, and much of the city is preserved in a way that is not normally found anywhere.

Roman, everything is laid out so you know exactly where it is, almost unlike any other Romani site in the world. world, so if I'm really honest, I've had to work really hard to get Pompeii wrong, that's probably been a bit mean, I don't think it's a well-made film without taking away some aspects of it. which are actually very good historically, the depiction of Pompeii itself is excellent and the depiction of Pliny's eruption is excellent, but other than that it's absurd, so I'd give it three out of ten consoles ready to ship, this is a movie that I would probably end up watching even if it's just wallpapers on TV, probably twice a year, actually, here you have this elite piece of ancient technology, military technology, the warship, probably a gallery of triarin or a peculiar sailor, um, so it's going to be three, three wars backs or five wars benches. being rowed by slaves absolute garbage there is no evidence anywhere with the task of searching for and destroying them there is no evidence that they used slaves they were all professional rowers that is why in the Roman world they were called romigas and they were paid the same amount of money as an auxiliary infantryman or auxiliary cavalryman and you know that nine-tenths of the crew of a war galley will be people rowing, so why do you think you would want to put the future success of this elite piece? technology military technology in the hands of slaves, even if they were being whipped, there are drums, bang, bang, bang, bang, that's probably accurate, but there would have been professional rowers, so that's absolute nonsense.

So the ratio of slaves to free people in Italy was probably one to ten and the highest would probably be in Egypt, where I've seen references to it being one in three, which is very, very unusual, those slaves themselves, in terms Of those slaves, there is also a huge difference between their life experiences, so slavery is bad, your experience of being a slave is bad, you have no control over your own destiny, that is bad, let's be absolutely clear about this, but one Once you look at the differential experience of being a slave, you could, on the one hand, be a sort of Greek scholar who is a teacher of his own children, a grammarian, and then at the very bottom you have people who are condemned to work in metal. , so they are working in the mines if you are condemned to work in the metal what is missing is that you are condemned to die to work in the metal if you get into the hole you don't come out the highest is not mine if you get into the hole you don't come out Fantastic, this is one of the most iconic

scenes

in any ancient history film or else it's the chariot race in Ben Hur.

Every major Roman city had a circus and their recreation here, this kind of hippodrome for horse racing, is really really accurate, I mean, they've got it absolutely right, people from the past, they're like us but different and one of the ways in which What's different is that they have a completely different sense of something like casual violence towards us, so this race here would have been sponsored by incredibly rich people and one of the things you have to remember if you remember the public is that once you're seated you can't go anywhere because the many guards and guards etc. around you don't.

I don't want to be the person who looks like they're not overly grateful for the person who pays huge amounts of wealth to put aside how smart they are and how successful they've been and again, you can see here that you've got the side cars, by the way. , there is no evidence that side chariots were actually used in Roman chariot racing, in reality, they were proper races as such, you know, like the formula one races of their time, clearly one of the things that is very wrong I think about Ben Hur is the fact that Judah Ben Hur is portrayed as a slave rowing a warship, you would say that wouldn't have happened, they would have been professional roses, but it gives a very good representation of what life is like as a slave in In the Roman world it is a very normal part of the existence of slavery of Roman life, so let's look at the Roman social structure, at the top are the senators and then below two of the classes of nobles are excited to the shit, so you have the horsemen and then the curials then next you have free men who are people who have never been slaves and then you have freed men who are people who have been slaves but have been freed, have been manumitted and finally slaves only the main senators are patricians everyone else is a pleb, but the key is that even if you are a slave, you can earn your money, get out of slavery by earning money or through good service, and it is very common to be manumitted, so a

roman

emperor pertinex was the son of a slave who became the emperor of rome ben hur it's one of the biggest movies of all time it's a spectacular blockbuster it's hollywood at its best huge amounts of money thrown at it um I give it a seven out of ten this is a good film I have So the way the native Britons in the far north of Britain, say the Brigantes on both sides of what later became the light of Hadrian's Wall, are very well portrayed here, they are exceptionally well portrayed here and they have the right hand accurately very very good right hand accurately you can also see very precisely how high the pommel of the gladius hispaniensis actually is and that is to allow it to be drawn in a very specific fencing technique for the blade to lift formations that hold this is elite military training using elite military equipment of the time very, very, very well represented on film and with the narrative of the film based on the book by Roseanne Circle, making it a really good watch even for a Roman military

historian

like me, who can be very picky.

I just think this is fabulous and now they are reforming while in combat, what elite military troops, including the legions of the principality, could do. The legions have been freed and told to pick up a weapon because you don't carry anyone when you're in an army. Situation like that with huge amounts of danger, I can't remember if cars have sides or not, if they don't I'll be happy because they shouldn't have size as a key piece of technology, oh they have size, oh. Many people actually think that these chariots were not actually shock weapons at all, but there were battlefield taxes that allowed an aristocrat to go up and down a Roman line or an opponent line, so in terms of that If the Romans faced the natives in the far north of Britain, they would not have come close to it.from the Scottish highlands and in fact this is portraying the British that Channing Tatum's characters were involved with in the scene in the Western Isles and there is no way that the Romans would have approached that Roman.

Rashford, so there is no way on earth that the aquila eagle banner of the 9th legion, as it should be here, according to roger suckler's book, the 9th eagle would have found its way to the western isles to the Romans. It was very clear that either you were part of the civilized world, that is, in the Roman empire, or you were in barbaricum, you were outside the Roman empire, so for them you are either inside or outside, that's all and the interesting thing for us, of course, It's that we see things differently, so we see them through the prism of 19th and early 20th century imperialism, on the one hand, in the way the world is portrayed and the world of the passage portrayed through that. mode.

If you looked at, for example, the depiction of the barbarians, the bad guys in the movie, the eagles, a great example, they actually painted a different one, in fact, from the way the Romans would have faced each other across Hadrian's Wall. or the antenna wall with people. to the far north of Britain, um, it would have been an absolutely normal part of their life and the people they associated with were simply from the north of Britain, how can you go wrong with the story of the night eagle eagle, the rosemary cyclists? kind of blockbuster from the early 1950s and there are generations of children who have grown up and are learning for the first time about the Roman world by reading his incredible book about the lost eagle, the eagle of the nights, which in this movie The Eagle with Channing Tatum is beautifully recreated, it is very faithful to the book.

I love the book. In fact, I wrote my own book about what happened to the 9th Legion and I referenced the movie in my book. I say in my book that it's actually a very good recreation of what the Roman army would have been like at this time, the battle scene is nailed into place, particularly the physical training of the Roman soldiers, the legionaries, which really It's nailed, um, there are aspects that are not so good, for example, the fact that the film has the natives of the far north of Britain on the Scottish islands or in the highlands, well, that was not the case, but overall this is a great movie and I'll give it nine out of ten, check out History Hit YouTube where you can get great exclusive videos and a sneak peek of what's available on the best history channel in the world.

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