GLADIATOR TYPES & how the movie got it so WRONG!

this video about the movie gladiator and gladiators and gladiator types comes to you courtesy of the great courses Plus which means that we're free of other adverts but I'll talk to you more about the great courses plus a bit later in this video [Music] strengthen on our Matt Easton here of scholar gladiator in today we're going to be looking at gladiators specifically the types of gladiators the groupings of golly ages the type of equipment they had but also specifically how the movie Gladiator starring Russell Crowe got it all wrong so inspired by a course that I've actually been looking at on the great courses plus I went back and re watched the movie Gladiator and this is a movie which I really loved when I saw it when it first came out in the cinema I fully accepted that there were historical inaccuracies in it I didn't necessarily realize how many there were at the first time when I saw it in the cinema and but later on I found out and we'll talk about those in a second but one thing that has worked me over the years and particularly when I started to work on a BBC production to do with gladiator training I started to realize just how wrong that movie had got it now leaving aside the bigger issue of how the Emperor's behaved in what they did and the actual sort of main bits of history in it and the bits of fiction to put the shield down here there is a more specific topic that we can look at and that is the matter of the gladiators themselves now many of you will know there are some really really good videos out there on YouTube about the subject of gladiators and many people who are more specialist in the subject may have covered this so I don't want to just retread old ground but in reference to the movie Gladiator specifically they got some things really really fundamentally wrong and the two main things that I want to focus on here are number one the fact that the idea that gladiators just went into the ring and fought to the death and that was it one one person lived one person died and that was the end of it and this is a complete and utter nonsense when we actually looked at the history Gladiators we know for a fact that most gladiators are fought multiple times they may be sustained injury but they were highly trained and expensive entertainers they were there to put on a show now yes it was a very bloody and very dangerous show and yes people did die and certain spectacles that were put on were intended for people to die sometimes in great big numbers but generally speaking the the typical trained gladiators of the types that were going to look at in a little bit later in this video were highly trained highly expensive and you wanted them to he wanted to get lots of fights out of them quite simply and some of these gladiators I'm sure anybody watching this video will know went on to become great celebrities and there were famous reti arias famous sequitas and so on and so forth so you wanted them to survive and they were well looked after they were well housed they were well fed and they were well medically treated when they were injured so one thing that the movie really gets completely wrong is this idea that these gladiators were throwaway slaves that you literally threw into an arena half of them died didn't matter you just get a bunch more slaves from somewhere else it didn't work like that these were people who were invested in and looked after like almost like racehorses or something like that now leaving that point aside there is a bigger point and it's the one I want to focus on in this video that really irks me about the representation of gladiators in the movie Gladiator now bearing in mind that yes this is a fictionalized story however it is a movie called gladiator and it is a movie about gladiatorial combat and gladiatorial games and the life of a gladiator and therefore I feel that they should have got a little bit closer to actually what gladiators were now one thing we have to accept from the absolute onset is that gladiators for the most part not 100% but for the most part fit into certain types of class we should say or classifications or types of gladiator and gladiators were specifically trained those types and specific types of gladiator fought against specific other types of gladiator so what were these types of gladiator and which of them fought against each other well before I go into that I just want to take a little bit of time out to talk about the great courses plus I think they're going to be single-handedly responsible for me making videos on a whole raft of new topics below this video in the description you'll see a link to a free trial with the great courses plus and I urge you go and check it out because I think your mind will be blown by how much they've got on there there are over 11,000 lectures on there everything from kind of like economics to various types of hobbies and crafts to zoology safaris and the people giving these presentations are absolute top level experts in their field and there's lots of them there's people from National Geographic from Ivy League top universities so the first course I started watching is called a historian goes to the movies and part one is a gladiator fact versus fiction by Professor all dret of the University of Wisconsin but it's what inspired this video and he does touch on the gladiatorial armor and the way that the gladiators are represented in there but he doesn't go into a lot of depth on that so that's basically why I thought I would go into depth in this video but what's amazing is he really covers he does a summary of everything that is right and wrong historically about that movie so there are a couple of other courses that I really really want to look at one of the things I want to watch next actually is about the pirate Wars of 1718 which is on there and there's another one about the Mongol Empire absolutely phenomenal for me because it means I can brush up or expand my areas of historical knowledge some of which will definitely filter through to you watching this channel so do go and check it out yourself it's free trial so nothing to lose it's absolutely awesome I don't think you'll be disappointed there's the link below if you go and visit the great courses plus comm forward slash scholar gladiatorial okay and the links there below so you can click on that as well and as I say you can watch all of those things basically stream them or you can download them watch them later like podcasts so thanks for your patience check that out and now let's get back to the video and have a little look about gladiator types and the movie Gladiator and what they got wrong no I'm not going to go through all of the types of gladiator but we're going to have a look at some of the main types of gladiator and see how they match together and I just want to emphasize that one of the main problems I have with the movie gladiator is the fact that they didn't represent this at all and yet it's so fundamentally important to gladiators and understanding what gladiators were and how they operated incidentally before I just go into describing the most common types of gladiator that would have been around at the time that the movie gladiators said I want to just mention that the fact that gladiatorial combats came out of funeral rites originally and from the earliest stages it does seem that the sword and the shield or Scouten do seem to have been a predominant pairing in the gladiatorial combats now that's not obviously to say that all gladiators uses orna Shielders we'll see in a minute they don't but however there are various types of gladiator that do indeed have a sword and a shield and generally speaking the shields are usually a variation on the Roman army shield and the sword is usually a Gladius although we have to say looking at the iconography looking at the sculpture and the figurines and the art mosaics and things like this it does appear that gladiatorial swords were probably smaller on average the military swords but they were a form of Gladius or at least a large pulley or dagger as well as that I don't want you to be overwhelmed by the differences between the different types of gladiator because there are some unifying features between them generally speaking there is usually a Manica or armed guard worn usually of padding linen padding combined perhaps stuffed with well combined with either leather or sometimes metal plates be they bronze or iron over the top and there are different types of Manica at different periods and different places and used by different gladiators but there is a tendency for the hand and arm particularly when a sword is used and indeed when the Trident is used by the Rati arias which we'll see in a bit there is a tendency to protect the lead armored weapon arm now that does tie in also with the fact that the legs usually protected people with large shields tend to have their front leg which would be their left leg assuming they're holding the shield in the left hand so if you're holding the shield in the left hand you're usually left foot forward and the left leg is usually protected by again padding a bit like on the arm linen and perhaps wool padding and then very often a grieve made a bronze usually over the top of that in some cases where someone has a smaller shield than the big scoot and when they have a shorter version of the shield well they have a round shield like the hop LaMarcus then we sometimes find or indeed if we look at the people who've got two weapons instead of having a shield then we often see that there are two leg protectors worn so there's a sort of balancing here and was there's also a very strong attempt very clearly to increase the odds of a combat going on for longer and this is of course coupled with the use of the large helmets so the use of helmets which protect the head and to some degree the neck and the throat the use obviously of the defensive shield but the use of armor particularly for the weapon arm which is the most vulnerable part of a person's body when they're using weapons and the use of leg protection where only one is needed because your person is keeping a big shield in front of them or if they have a smaller shield and they're more likely to be using passing footwork and sometimes the right leg might come forwards then they also have a right leg guard as well so despite the fact that we have different classes or types of gladiator those are sort of unifying features between most if not all most of them so what are these main types that I want to focus on where these are the types that we see very often in the iconography we see in text textual sources mention too we see them in mosaics we see them in little figurine bronze figurines we see them in statues and funeral carvings and things like this and they are very often referred to these are the common predominant types that a movie like gladiator should have made sure were represented and represented reasonably accurately I think to give a context even if you then had character gladiators who were outside of those types or did other things at least as a background as a historical background to show what their typical and the most common types of gladiator fighting at that time were so first up we have the provocateur now the prophet Carter in the earlier period seems to have been almost equipped like a light infantry from the Roman army with a small breastplate a Roman shield scooter and Gladius being their main weapon and a helmet which was modeled after the Legionaries own helmet as we go a little bit later in time the helmet became more protective and became more like almost emerging a couple of other types of gladiators helmets however the Provocateur stayed present and stayed fairly common and we have a helmet from The provocateur from the excavations at Pompeii for example and it's clear that the provocateur pretty much always perhaps 100% always as far as we can tell fought only against another provocateur and in that sense it's my opinion that the pravakara almost represents the Roman soldier training or fighting against the other Roman soldier and I think perhaps there's a possibility that in some sense the training and we know that the training of gladiators influence the training of Roman soldiers and possibly the training of Roman soldiers influence the training of gladiators and I think they're inextricably linked and I think that there's a good chance based on the equipment and what they looked like I think there's a good chance that the provocateur was basically supposed to represent the Roman infantryman training with another Roman infantryman next up we have four gladiators who fight in specific pairings who many of you will be very very familiar with many of us get taught these things at school even and you will have seen them in other movies and TV shows they are the tracks or thracian the murmillo the ratty arias and the sequitur now these four gladiators usually fought in pairs against each other the Thracian or Thrax usually fought against a murmillo the ratty arias usually fought against a second thought now it's interesting because of these two pairings if we call them that the Thrax and the murmillo are not so different the mummy law is more heavily equipped with heavier and bigger equipment with a straight sword and the Thracian or Thrax is armed with the seeker or curved sword a little bit similar to weapons we find in Dacia the Fox and a smaller shield and is a bit more lightly equipped and also there's a tendency it's very important to point out there is a tendency for certain physical types and certain characters to be recruited into certain gladiator types and we know that one person for example might be declared to be perfect to be a monomial or might be a big strong person who is perhaps more defensive but very kind of steadfast and big and strong and then they might deem that person to be perfect as in real law because they're more suited to wearing that equipment and fighting in that way and so they absolutely specialized in that equipment that armor and fighting that role and to a degree it's almost like role-playing in a way and there was a degree of role-playing in these roles for example we know that the if we go to the ratty arias for example with the eluding to the net we know that the we law in the Secretary had a sort of affinity with the sea and with fishes and things like this so there's there are certain other sort of myths and legends alluded to in the characters of these gladiators in terms of the ratty arias versus the secretory they're very very different to each other the Letty arias has really practically no defenses at all except for a moniker on the left arm and a large protective cauldron on the top of the left shoulder the reason it's on the left hand side is because people holding pull weapons such as the Trident if you hold it two-handed you're pretty much usually with a thrusting weapon you tend to hold it left hand forward so against an opponent you'd be left foot forward left arm forward and so this side is the side that is vulnerable also they have the very large pauldron perhaps to compensate for the fact that they don't have a helmet not having a helmet means you can breathe and see more easily but of course it means your head doesn't have any form of protection whatsoever so one blow to the head and you could be out of the fight so no questions the Rati arias is on balance one of the most likely equipped or likely armored of all of the gladiator types that we commonly see but with this protection on the left hand side they can to some degree hide themselves behind that and then of course they've got the net the net which as far as we can tell from the sources very often had weights attached to it this of course was to be either thrown around or over an opponent it could be entangle their limbs their arms or their legs it could be thrown over their helmet use to pull their helmet although we'll talk about the secretory helmet in a second it could of course be thrown over to tangle a shield or a weapon to tangle those things up perhaps even disarm and pull them away from the opponent so it could be used in a number of different ways but equally from the iconography we know that the Rati arias often their net was expended and used and it didn't achieve a fight ending result and they had to fight with just their Trident and they did have a pool you usually as well although it's not always shown in the iconography it does seem that at least maybe all the time but certainly some of the time they also had a pug yo for point blank range for close up combat as well now in terms of their secreto de in some ways the secretary looks a little bit like the Thrax and a little belt like them Emilio has got a very protective helmets got a large shield got a sword but one of the interesting things is that the the shield and the helmet are given rounded edges and this of course is to give them some advantages or defenses against the net and some advantages fighting against the Rati aureus so it's more difficult for the net to snag those things we can even guess that perhaps in the early stages the the rounded edges weren't present and they found that the net too often got tangled up on the secretory helmet or shield possibly but anyway with time they ended up being specialized the secretory was specialized for fighting against the Rati aureus now whilst the secreto has a very protective helmet completely encases the head and protects the neck at least from sort of downwards blows and stabs it only has two small eye holes and it is a relatively heavy helmet we have surviving helmets from pompeii and elsewhere and we have iconography of them all over the place and these are very all-encompassing and encasing helmets and looking through these small eye holes and not for the most of time having any other breathing except for a little gap in the bottom and the air can come out the front you get a buildup of carbon dioxide in there and quite simply you're losing some vision you're getting tunnel vision you're certainly losing the ability to breathe easily imagine in hot weather whilst you're fighting and you also lose some senses in terms of sound as well and remember that when you're wearing a helmet if you get hit on the helmet it makes a loud clang inside even if you've got padding inside you still get a loud bang inside so it's it really kind of limits the senses and potentially the stamina when we come to breathing as well so in one sense you might look at the reti aureus and think well the ratty aureus is very lightly equipped that seems almost suicidal but remember to some extent they can move around more freely and all gladiators have pretty much uncovered midriffs unless they're a specific class that has body armor and there were a few but we'll deal with them another time but for the most part most gladiators were still vulnerable on quite a lot of their body and so the secretory does have this fantastic karma on the head and a large shield but the Rati aureus is more mobile can see in here and breathe more easily and remember that trident is a pole weapon and as i often talked about in my videos having a reach and leverage advantage and having two hands on the weapon gives you a lot of advantages not only can you attack the secreto from a distance whereby the second door can't reach you yes they can defend with their shield we've got a very large shield I'm not saying it's easy to get around that shield with the Trident but you do at least have the ability to attack quite freely with that Trident and at a distance where they can't directly attack you back except for charging you down under the cover of their shield and of course you can switch sides with it although that would have the disadvantage for the retirees that they don't have armor on the right hand side usually so I think it's an interesting pairing now the point to emphasize here is that we've got Thrax versus mamela then we've got ratty aureus versus psycho dog now what I think's interesting is there is a difference between the Thrax and the mummy law but in the grand scheme of things they're relatively similar the Thrax is a bit like a slightly lighter slightly different equipped version of the mummy law they they're not hugely imbalanced or hugely different types so that's more of an even fight it wouldn't look drastically different to a fight between two pro provo cartels however the reti aureus versus the seco tour is a very different fight it's apples and oranges and so I think it's interesting that these principle four give you a sort of equal fight and then a very unequal fight not saying that one is unequal in terms of strength and weakness but in terms of how they would have to fight on what their strengths and weaknesses are now there is another very important type of gladiator a very popular type of gladiator we see in a lot of art lots of iconography who is called the hop lemarcus now the hop lemarcus is a very very interesting gladiator and different to the principle for we've just talked about in the sense that the hope LaMarcus was very often paired against the mamela and very often paired against the Thrax or Thracian the principal armor armament of the hop LaMarcus was a spear and a shield now there is some suggestion that the hop LaMarcus was supposed to represent a Greek or perhaps a an older more ancient Roman soldier so where the principal weapon was still the spear instead of the sword and the principal shield was the round shield instead of the later rectangular characteristic Roman scooter Scouten so but whatever the origin of the hop LaMarcus was they were used a lot against the murmillo and against the fraks they used a round shield it could sometimes probably have been smaller than this and more like a buckler like a medieval buckler it seems to have very different different times and in different artwork and the spear wouldn't have looked exactly like this this was the first one I had to hand this is a later period winged spear it would have been longer than this it would have been probably around seven or eight feet long and it would have a simple and smaller leaf shaped spear head on it so this is obviously a very different pairing and it's it's the combination of the spear and shield historically it's just about the most common weapon pairing for closed combat that we find across cultures across continents across the centuries and so spear and shield was incredibly common and popular and used by a lot of the people who the Romans fought against whether they were fighting in Britannia they're fighting in Gaul fighting in what's now Germany or in Africa in the Middle East they would have encountered people using a spear and a shield as their primary weapons whereas the Romans themselves of course were more by this point and with the exception of certain types of troops most of the Roman legionaries were more equipped with the rectangular shield and the sword so in a sense we could almost see the hop LaMarcus as representing foreign or the common types of soldier that they they would encounter on the battlefield where things like the the secretory and the mummy law were essentially equipped with armament that was more similar and of course the provocateur more similar to the Roman legionary now one thing I should say also is that the popular MacOS and pretty much anyone with a shield who can afford it in history also has a backup weapon and that would have usually been either a Gladius or some form of short sword or indeed a bogey or a dagger and that is for the principle reason that with a spear whilst the spear is very good ranged fighting and has an advantage over a sword if the swordsman manages to close in then the spearmen certainly its shield to shield range almost grappling kind of wrestling range needs a shorter weapon and so they need really a dagger or sword that they can deploy drop the spear and deploy that in that distance and that's what the hop lemarcus normally had there are some reconstructions which show the shield being held in the same hand as the dagger and I think it's the sword and I think it's a little bit fanciful to suggest that they tried to use the dagger or the sword at the same time as the shield offensively although it's not impossible and we know that this was done it's mentioned many centuries later being done by Highlanders where they're using the Highland Dirk and the target example so it's not impossible my personal opinion that is probably for the most part it just meant that they could get this backup weapon more quickly if they needed to so it doesn't impede your use of the shield at all although you have to watch out that you don't stab yourself in your own leg or thigh or body with the pointy end of your dagger or sword that you're holding but most importantly it does mean if someone charges in and bashes your spear point out of the way and comes in to shield to shield range it means you can quickly get your sword out and use it so these are what I consider the principle five types of gladiator who fight against other humans I'm not going to deal with gladiators who fight against animals or hunt animals in this video so they are the tracks or Thracian versus the mamela the rat er versus the secreto and then there's the hop LaMarcus who can fight either the more Mila or the thracian but of course as is being covered in other people's videos and in some very very good books and there are many other types of gladiator out there and it's almost complicated by the fact that sometimes gladiators weren't always referred to by the same name so sometimes we think there might be two separate types of gladiator and they're actually just two names for the same thing equally sometimes there are gladiators referred to and we don't really know because it may only be one or two sources that refer to them we don't really know what they're referring to and we have to always reiterate and emphasize in videos like this and and in books on this subject you have to emphasize that our source material for gladiators in the Roman world isn't huge we don't have a huge amount of source material to go on so we're constantly learning new things and the excavations at Pompeii have taught us a lot more but every time a new sculpture or figurine is discovered it teaches us a little bit more about gladiatorial equipment and even things like how they stand with the sword and shield their stances and sometimes we find exceptions you know you find a type of gladiator with a type of helmet that they don't usually have or a pairing that you don't normally find between two different types of gladiator that is in common so every time we discover an exception it widens our interpretations a little bit so let's bring this back to the movie by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe gladiator and how did they get the gladiator types so wrong well fundamentally what they seem to have done is they seem to have cherry-picks a few bits of period gladiator equipment particularly certain types of helmet that we see some that appear to be more like Thrax helmets some that appear to be more like murmillo helmets perhaps there's something a little bit like a secre toward helmet in there and then we see other bits of familiar historical at least quite similar to historical versions of the gladiator armor for example the Manica we see worn by various different Gators in the movie particularly in the earlier fights and then we see the leg guards as well and we see that the loin cloths and that the belts this is something which was cut quite characteristic of gladiatorial equipment so we do see those things but they're put together in combinations that as far as we know they weren't ever put together in or at least almost never put together in and so I think they've missed a they've missed a trick really because what they've done is they've got access to some of the correct looking gladiatorial equipment helmets Manica leg guards and the weapons we see Trident Gladius we see various types of correct shields and in fact the shields are actually probably one of the most historically correct parts in the whole movie but they've got access to some of the correct equipment but they put it together in the wrong combinations and perhaps more importantly they have shown group combats which these types of gladiators didn't take part in now I have to say and I have to concede we do know that at the Coliseum they did hold reenactments essentially a bloody reenactments of battles and obviously one of the set piece and most memorable fights from the whole of the gladiator movie is this so-called Battle of Carthage the fictional Battle of Carthage which is actually based on a real battle and I recommend you go and have a look on the great courses Plus on my recommended course but it they whilst they have recreated that battle they've kind of got the equipment if they're if they're sort of re-enacting what these two forces may have looked like even in a fictionalized account they've kind of got it the wrong way around because they've got Russell Crowe's so-called barbarians wearing the Carthaginians wearing something that is more like Roman equipment and then they are facing chariots something that the Romans never really used in warfare and the chariots were used by various people that the Romans did fight against but not by the Romans themselves so it's a sort of bizarre switch around but you know I'm not going to say that that never happened in history who knows it was all about the spectacle and I do accept that and I do accept that they did do recreations of battles and in those recreations of battles it's almost certain that people wore a mixture of military equipment to represent the nations that they were representing in that battle however what they absolutely don't do and what they completely fail to do is at any point even from the earliest combats in the gladiator movie right the way through the big set piece battle and all of that period in the middle and right the way through to the end of the movie where a Russell Crowe is fighting a champion and then fighting the Emperor at no point do they ever really show the famous gladiator types wearing the correct combination of equipment and fighting in the correct pairings that they should have done and for a movie called gladiator about gladiators I find that incredibly disappointing and the problem is it's not even a problem that's isolated to this movie because so many producers of TV series and movies that come after that will now go we want to make a show about gladiators and instead of looking at history they will look at the movie Gladiator and replicate it and we see this time and time again with things like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings if a particular style of armor or style of sword or style of shield is used in a successful movie or TV series it gets copied by later ones and that is how we I think it's one of the main reasons how we came to have this black leather look that pervades everything from the three musketeers to Lord of the Rings to gladiator this black shiny black leather as armor which you know is not something was ever a shiny black leather was never really used much as armor at all you know armor was used as armor is something that we see across genre from fantasy to ancient world to medieval world and it's and it's very very pervasive so I think that when you have a movie called gladiator about gladiators but you don't show the famous main types of gladiators fighting in the way that they fought in the correct pairings then you fail so to conclude I think it's really a shame that the movie Gladiator missed a trick in showing these very famous and iconic types of gladiator that we know a relatively large amount certainly compared to the other exceptions to the rules should we say and we should see we should have at least seen a Thrax fighting against the mamela we should have seen a ratty arias fighting against a secretin and hopefully a hot lemarcus fighting against either a Thrax or a limo Milla and if we got to see a cheese order or one of the other famous types of gladiator out there that would have been great as well the cheese are all incidentally seems to have been an alternative to the to the second order and more similar helmet and fought against the ratty arias but we don't see any of these in the movie Gladiator and there's there is so much cool about gladiators and the fact that we've got them using these characteristic Roman shields of sometimes a lot smaller versions than the full army size and various types of the iconic Gladius perhaps sometimes shorter versions than this that and appoggio and indeed the seeker the curved or crooked sword and the hop lemarcus with their characteristic round shield and spear and they're just so memorable but also so formulaic and the fact that we don't get even a hint of that in the movie Gladiator I think is a huge huge shame so here I am waiting for a real gladiator movie to come out about real gladiators and I'll be there in the cinema to watch it and I'm sure lots of you will as well before I go I just want to once again thank the great courses plus for sponsoring this video and they are the reason that you haven't had any other ads on this video at all isn't that nice do go and check out that link below it's fantastic I'm really enjoying the great courses plus and I'm going to be spending many hours watching stuff on there and I'm very glad that I've got a membership on there now so once again give this video a like share it around subscribe to my channel if you haven't done already and it'll be great to have you here as a new member of the community if you're new to us and I will see really soon again for another video might be about gladiators or other Roman things might be about medieval fantasy movies who knows but I will see you really soon on scholar gladiatorial channel for another video cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 92,046

Keywords: gladiator, gladiator types, roman gladiators, gladiator movie, russel crowe, ridley scott

Id: Db7JtQ0Iur0

Length: 35min 56sec (2156 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020