Top Roman Historian Rates Famous Movie Scenes

i'm spartacus so i'm being really honest actually that i've had to try really hard to get pompeii wrong fantastic absolute rubbish my name is dr simon elliott historian archaeologist and broadcaster and today i'm going to be reviewing roman movies oh fantastic right this is the opening scene from the movie gladiator there is the marcomatic king holding the head up of roman messenger who he didn't like very much oh and he's giving it back to the romans which is quite nice [Applause] so maximus was actually a real general he was a contemporary of september severus and pertinex who later both became emperors themselves and also the imperial candidates paschenius niger and claudia salvinas who fought severus so so in terms of the historical setting for this battle there's a reality to it kit's not bad so i'm going to guess that's leather but actually it's meant to be laurica segmentata which is banda dynamo which which is accurate for this period of the principal roman empire three weeks from now i will be harvesting my crops imagine where you will be i love this quote as well i love it i love this quote russell crowe is absolutely on his a-game in this movie [Applause] [Music] they go to the former judo to um take the fire from the germans which is accurate something's wrong here in the sequence that's about to happen though in the way the legion is engaged so the legionaries should stop about 100 meters away from the germans and each each legionary should throw his lighter pillar um led way to javelin and then when he closes to almost point blank range he should stop again and then throw his heavier um pelham lead weight of javelin and then and only then should he draw his principal weapon which is gladius spaniensis the sword that is being used there actually by maximus by russell crowe is also accurate because it's not a gladius infantry sword which is a stabbing weapon more than anything the cavalry we're on with a spather which is a longer weapon giving greater reach so you can reach down and start smacking people from the saddle so the sword he's using there is actually accurate [Music] in the world of rome you have a theater which is the half round you and which you have a performance and poetry of things you have the odion which is the theater with the roof you have the circus where you have the charity races and then ultimately you have the biggie which is the the amphitheater in this case coliseum where you have the gladiatorial combats and etc [Applause] terrible weapon the gladius hispanic ancestors didn't have any blood rentals so there's no way for the air to come out of a wound and no way for the blood to run out we would either so therefore when the soil went in it was very difficult to take out so you had to give it a massive twist which created a terrible terrifying wound so it was a psychological weapon [Applause] there's whacking phoenix portraying i have to say commodus in an incredibly uh fantastic way it captures the madness of the man i i would say commodus there are a lot of roman emperors who are mad or bad but commodus is the one who is mad and bad if you watch any roman movie i can guarantee that some way shape or form the director or the producers will try and shoe in somewhere something to do with gladiators would you get a roman general even in the most extreme circumstances as um 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's 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 civil war context and that kind of thing so certainly roman soldiers may have found themselves in the arena as gladiators and then have been very good ones because they're trained soldiers fantastic movie um really really sort of like uh hits my mark where i want at least 50 to be accurate historically and a lot more is actually accurate historically some bits are wrong but particularly based on the initial battle scene which is fabulous i give it eight out of ten [Music] [Music] to be up front i don't think this is a very good movie okay but aspects of it are very very good and one of the best aspects is the recreation of the town of pompeii we'll meet you back at the villa the lady [Music] you're a woman girl or a woman from the top of roman society your your options your choices about your own life were limited um probably there was more choice lower lower lower down and actually there's a very famous um uh portrayal uh from pompeii of a baker and his wife which is now on display uh in the archaeological museum in naples the the baker himself the male is very well dressed clearly made it etc but his wife she's the one who's holding the stylus and the writing material so the literate one who's keeping the books is actually not the baker but his wife so you get a public toilet next door to a really posh house next door to a street vendor as we're seeing in this scene here etc so so on there we have there the stepping stone so that's that's fantastic so it really is a good recreation of pompeii and another thing you see actually this is a terrible movie in my opinion but another thing you see very accurately here which you really feel oppressively once you know where you're looking at is the proximity vesuvius wow right so we've got the plenium eruption so this is vesuvius at full blast so with this particular eruption you have the top blowing off vesuvius and actually you can see that writ large today which when you look at vesuvius from the uh even after subsequent uh eruptions if you look at vesuvius today from the forum in pompeii you can see the chunk to the right-hand side which got blown off in this explosive eruption [Applause] there you can see the huge amount of panic caused by this eruption what we do know now actually is that quite a lot of people had already evacuated pompeii because they've been telegraphed that there were going to be problems in the days before the event because there was a series of earthquakes and they could tell that the the the volcano itself was likely going to have some kind of eruption in actual fact we know huge amount of pompeii through the juxtaposition are two of the key tools that archaeologists use when they're trying to understand the site you've got history but also we have the amazing archaeology because the town was buried under um several meters tens of meters of volcanic ash and dust and waste and detritus and it's maintained much of the city in a way that you don't normally get in any roman sites all they're laid out for you know exactly where it is almost unlike any other roma site in the world so if i'm being really honest actually that i've had to try really hard to get pompeii wrong that's probably been a bit mean spirited i don't think it's a well-made movie that's not to take away some aspects of it which actually historically are very good the portrayal of pompeii itself is excellent and the portrayal of the pliny eruption is excellent but apart from that it's preposterous so i would give it three out of ten [Music] ship ready console this is a movie i'd probably end up watching even if it's only wallpapers on television probably twice a year actually here you have this elite piece of ancient technology military technology the warship probably a triarin gallery or a quinky marine um so that'll be three three backs of wars or five banks of wars being rowed by slaves absolute rubbish there is no evidence anywhere at all with the task of seeking out and destroying them [Music] no evidence whatsoever that they use slaves they were all professional rowers so in the roman world they were called romigas and they were paid the same amount of money as an auxiliary infantryman or an auxiliary cavalryman and and you know nine tenths of the crew of a war galley are going to be people rowing the oars so why on earth do you think you would like put the future success of this piece of elite tech military technology in the hands of slaves even if they were being whipped there's the drums bang bang bang bang bang that probably is accurate but there would have been professional rowers so that's absolute nonsense uh 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 being one in three which is like very very unusual those slaves themselves the one in term those slaves themselves there's a huge differential between their experiences of life as well so slavery is bad your experience of being a slave is bad you have no control over your own destiny that's bad right let's be absolutely clear about that but then once you look at the differential experience of being a slave you could on the one hand be sort of a greek scholar who is the teacher of of their own as children a grammarian and then all the way at the very bottom you've got people who are condemned to work in the metallic so they're working in the mines if you are condemned to work in the metalla the bit that's missing is you're condemned to work in the metalla to death if you go in the hole you don't come out the taller isn't mine if you go in the hole you don't come out fantastic right this is one of the most iconic scenes of any movie ancient history or otherwise it's the the chariot race in ben hur [Music] every roman major city sort of had a circus and the recreation of it here this sort of hippodrome for the horse racing is really really accurate i mean they've absolutely nailed it people of the past they're like us but different and one of the ways they're different is they have a completely different sense of um sort of like casual violence to us [Music] so this race here would have been sponsored by incredibly wealthy individuals and one of the things you have to remember if you remember the public that once you're sitting down you're not allowed to go anywhere because the lots of bayless and guards etc all around you don't want to be the person to be seen to be not being too grateful for the person paying vast amounts of wealth to shelf how clever they are and how successful they've been and again you can see here look at that you've got the side chariots there's no evidence by the way that side chariots were actually used in roman chariot racing actually it was proper racing as such you know like the formula one racing of their day clearly one of the things which is very wrong i think about ben hur is the fact that that judah ben hur is portrayed as a slave rowing in a warship you'd that that wouldn't have happened they'd have been professional rose but it does give a very good representation of what life is like as a slave in the roman world it's a very normal part of existence of roman life slavery so let's look at roman societal structure at the very top you have the senators and then below that two of the classes of noble are aroused to crap so you have the equestrians and then the curials then below that 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 they've been manumitted and finally slaves only the top senators are patricians everybody else is a pleb but the key there is even if you're a slave you can actually earn your money earn your way out of slavery through earning money or through good service and it's very common to be manumitted so a roman emperor pertinex was the son of a slave who became the emperor of rome ben hur is 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 seven out of ten this is a good movie [Music] i got so the way that the native britons of the far north of britain let's say the brigantes from from either side of what later became the light of hadrian's wall they're very well portrayed here they're exceptionally well portrayed here and they've got the right hand accurately very very good right hand accurately you can see also very accurately how high up the pommel is of the gladius hispaniensis actually and that's to allow it to be drawn in a very specific fencing technique so the blade flips up [Applause] [Music] formations holding this is elite military training using elite military equipment of the day very very very well represented in a movie and with the narrative of the movie uh based on roseanne circle's book making it a really really good watch even for a roman military historian like me who can get very picky i just think this is fabulous and they're now reforming while in combat which elite military troops including legions of the principate could do legions have been freed told to pick up a weapon because you don't carry anybody when you're in a military situation like that with huge amounts of jeopardy [Music] [Music] i can't remember if the chariots have got sides or not if they haven't got sides i'll be pleased because they shouldn't have size a key piece of technology oh they got size oh boo many people do think actually that these chariots actually weren't shock weapons at all but there were battlefield taxes to allow an aristocrat to ride up and down a roman line or an opponent's line so in terms of the romans engaging um the natives of the far north of britain they would have got nowhere near the scottish highlands and in actual fact this is portraying the britons that channing tatum's characters engaging with in the scene has been on the western isles and there's no way the romans would have got anywhere near that romano rashford so here there's no way on earth that the aquila eagle standard of the ninth legion as it's meant to be here based on roger suckler's book the eagle of the ninth would have found its way all the way through to the western isles to the romans it was very clear you were either part of the civilized world i.e in the roman empire or you were in barbaricum you were outside the roman empire so to them you're in or out that's it and the interesting thing for us of course is that we see things differently so we see things through the prism of on the one hand um 19th century and early 20th century imperialism in the way that the world's portrayed and the world of the passage portrayed through that so if you were to look for example the the the representation of the barbarians the bad guys in the movie the eagles a great example actually painted um other different in actual fact the way the romans would have engaged across hadrian's wall or the antenna wall with the people to the far north of britain um um would have been an absolutely normal part of their life and the people they're engaging with it were just northern britain how could you go wrong with the story of the eagle of the eagle of the night rosemary cyclists blockbuster sort of from the early 1950s and there's generations of children who've grown up and they're first learning about the roman world is reading her amazing book about the lost lost eagle the eagle of the nights which in this movie the eagle with channing tatum is beautifully recreated it's very faithful to the book um i love the book i've actually written my own book about what happened um to to the ninth legion and and i referenced the movie in my book i say in my book this is actually a very good recreation of what the roman military would have been like at this time the battle scene is nailed on it's spot on particularly the physical training of the roman soldiers the legionaries that really is nailed on um there are aspects of it which aren't as good so for example the fact that um the movie has the natives of the far north of britain in the scottish isles or the highlands well that wasn't the case but mostly this is a great movie actually and i will give this movie nine out of ten check out the history hit youtube where you can get great exclusive videos and a sneak peek at what's available on the world's best history channel history hit tv it's going really fast we're thrilled to have you all aboard

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Keywords: historical movies, roman empire, expert reviews movie scenes, expert reviews movie, expert reviews battle scenes, ben hur rowing scene, simon elliott historian, history hit, history hit youtube, historian reacts, roman movies, roman historian, expert rates, rome reaction, historian reviews, movie scenes, roman empire movies, historians react, movie reaction, historian reacts to movies, roman movie, roman films, gladiator reaction, best roman movies, top roman historian

Id: d_kwebDQ868

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022