You misspelled “Thpin”.
Indeed, which is precisely where your argument goes fundamentally pear-shaped.
You have forgotten that the guys your LB are facing are also professional athletes … but they trained to fight/kill and face whomever the ringmaster pits against them, regardless of size, however armed and equally trained to fight/kill.
There ain’t no rules in a knife fight and sudden death doesn’t end with a field goal.
What kind of quarterstaff do you have, anyway?
Buck and a quarter quarter staff, but I ain’t tellin him that.
This assumes ancient warfare was a one-on-one type of thing, which it was not.
Warfare is won by armies, logistics, and methods, not by individual heroes. If your NFL player is in a phalanx that is generally inferior to the enemy phalanx, his phalanx will break, and he’ll die or have to run away, and that’s all there is to it.
All this talk about their relative physical strength is a complete irrelevance. Some guys were strong, some weren’t. How they were led, armed and motivated was usually what won the day.
Fair enough. Put an entire NFL defensive or offensive line against your hypothetical Roman opponents. This is like algebra equation. You have to match one side to the other. Which one takes it assuming they are all willing to fight to the death?
I think I hear some people saying that Roman Legionaries could match an equal number of NFL players. I call bullshit on that one. Those were small little Italian guys and NFL players are much bigger, faster, and stronger than you think. Primitive weapons don’t have that much to do with it. Any manly, man knows how to operate a knife or a rock let alone a rifle well enough so that it isn’t as large a difference as pure size and strength.
Rome had the most disciplined and professional armed forces in the ancient world, not to mention the most brutal and relentless. They frequently put down larger men - Gauls, Germans, Iberians, Britons - who threw themselves against their shield lines, thinking that raw strength would be enough to break through the Roman lines. The NFL players would find themselves bombarded with pilum - the iron shafts designed to bend so they couldn’t be thrown back. Then if they survived that they would find themselves against the bosses of the scutum line while men who had spent endless hours practicing with wooden swords jabbed the gladius upwards through the ribcage.
Livy tells us how the Romans dealt with big lads who opposed them - stab them in the belly and groin until they no longer opposed them.
Livy also warns about underestimating the humble gladius;
And those were Macedonians - no slouches themselves in the war department. The NFL members may be terrific athletes but with next to no combat experience or knowledge of battlefield formation a Roman legion would hack them to pieces without breaking a sweat.
I see how he can win!
Hooh! Hah! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Thrust! <WHAAAMM>
Actually, I’m curious if he might bring back some 21st-century microbe to which he has immunity but which then wipes out ancient Greece or Rome.
It doesn’t matter if they’re bigger, stronger and faster. You’re talking about people who have trained all their lives to do something versus people who have no training at all.
This looks great, thanks.
The superior size and strength of NFL players would give them an advantage in the melee combat that characterizes conflict in early agricultural societies, but not in the organized combat of more complex civilizations, like ancient Rome or ancient China.
In places like northern Europe, sub Saharan Africa, and Polynesia, bigger and faster was better, and appears to have given the survivors of this type of combat a reproductive advantage.
On the other hand, bigger and faster isn’t particularly beneficial for nomadic hunter gatherers. They were and are typically lean and shorter in stature. Perhaps because truly big men don’t do so well on long foot treks or long runs, and require more protein and carbs to keep alive.
By the time you get to complex, hierarchical societies like ancient Rome and ancient China, the organization is way more important than the individual. Discipline, good strategy, training, all outweigh any individual physical advantage. In southern Africa, the Zulu made the transition from melee combat to an organized fighting force relatively recently, and established a formidable empire as a result.
Now, the default assumption of some posters seems to be that NFL players would demonstrate less discipline or organization than Roman legions. In fact, NFL players are selected not just for their physical ability, but also for their ability to learn complex plays, execute them flawlessly, and follow the orders of their coaches to the letter. Undisciplined athletes generally can’t endure the intense practice regimes - 2 a days in the hot summer sun, and the regimented lifestyle. Not to mention the necessity of playing through pain. The headcases and lawbreakers get a lot of media attention, but great athletes who can’t follow rules are more likely to play basketball or see their football careers end prematurely.
Ah, well there’s the discipline that athletes expect from their coaches and the discipline that an endlessly drilled legionary can expect from his centurion.
Quoting from the book mentioned above (I have it on my knee right now, and heartily recommend it), if you make a balls-up in the Roman army punishments can range from;
Castigato; a hard thwack with a vitis, a vine wood staff carried by centurions.
Aminadversio fustium; A serious flogging carried out before the unit.
Fustuarium; Beaten, kicked, flogged and stoning by the unit. Very popular soldiers may get away with being mauled for life.
And there’s collective punishments; of which decimation is the harshest. In 18 A.D. III Augusta was subject to decimatio by fustuarium for fleeing from Numidians.
They train every single day to kill with the minimum of fuss, with weighted swords to strengthen the stabbing arm. Nor are they clumsy, they are expected to vault a pommel horse in full armour with gladius unsheathed.
One other thing worth mentioning - our NFL players are the products of a free democracy, with the sensibilities of men born in the late 20th century. A stable society of law and order, crime and punishment. In World War II the gulf in combat effectiveness between the brutalised tyranny-born Wehrmacht and Red Army in comparison to the incredibly cautious soldiers of democracies was immense - and that was trained soldiers sent to fight Nazis. Untrained men against the most effective fighting force of the ancient world would be an even greater gulf - would an NFL player be really willing to kill with his own hands?
Confucius he say, “To send the common people to war untrained is to throw them away.”
Try this - how about a whole unit of offensive linemen?
They’re already trained to work together as a wall-like unit.
They are some of the biggest, strongest men to ever walk the Earth.
They know how to adapt and shift their tactics on the fly with minimal instruction from the Quarterback (reading the defense).
They’re among the smartest players on the field (really, look it up) and very quick to accept training and methods.
They are already used to “fighting” in a style similar to the Roman wall formation - locking themselves together trying to prevent strong, fast individuals from overwhealming them).
So, would a unit of NFL offensive linemen (enough to form a maniple, say), trained in shield and gladius techniques, fit the bill as an unstoppable force in the Roman world?
If we’re assuming the NFL players have no training in Roman combat, then there really isn’t a debate. Of course the Romans would tear the NFL players to pieces. It’s like asking how good athletes would perform in a sport they never played. Darrell Greene or Allan Iverson probably could have been world class soccer players if they’d starting training in their youth. As adults with no training, they’d have a hard time hold their own in a match against girls.
*A stable society of law and order, crime and punishment. *
Some the NFL players come from such a world, many don’t. I’m pretty sure the Norfolk housing projects Mike Vick grew up in were disorderly, violent places where there was only the loosest relationship between crime and punishment.
*the incredibly cautious soldiers of democracies was immense - and that was trained soldiers sent to fight Nazis. *
I see what you’re driving at. At the same time, NFL players are notably fearless, and aggressively put their physical safety at risk on every play. The physical damage some players sustain has been compared to that experienced in car crashes, and it unquestionably shortens their lifespans.
I’ve met Manu Tuiasosopo, and that guy was freakin’ huge. When I shook his hand, his hand completely swallowed mine. I think I could have worn his Super Bowl rings as bracelets. Around 1990 or '91 I got to cook dinner for most of the Seattle Seahawks defensive line when they came to the restaurant where I worked, and again, they were freakin’ immense.
Keep in mind, though, that those boys becoming pages and squires weren’t peasants. Medieval knights were almost always nobles - they were the only ones who could afford a warhorse and all the requisite equipment in a time when soldiers had to provide their own equipment. Sons of nobles were typically fostered out to another noble family, where they served as pages and squires to the other noble house’s resident knight(s), and received the training they needed to eventually become knights themselves.
The infantry in most medieval armies was typically made up of levies/conscripts drawn from the peasantry, poorly-armored and armed with farm implements.
More likely, an African giant. Aren’t most modern linebackers African-American, or otherwise dark-skinned enough that they wouldn’t pass for “Germanic”?
Ah, good, we agree then - I was specifically trying to refute the idea that the sheer strength and endurance of the NFL members as well as their prior sporting experiences would be enough to triumph over a legion. If he has training, that evens the balance - although he’s still got a long way to catch up. Since a legionary’s service length is 20 years (and men often re-enroled) there are men in the legion with decades of fighting experience, as well as his world view ingrained from birth.
That’s not to say that they’re somehow soft or decadent for this western sensibility (a point German propagandists used) - the WWII fighting man grew up in the Great Depression with its Hoovervilles and hardships, rather that we were unwilling to accept the kind of horrific losses and commonplace brutality of the Germans or Soviets (or in this case, Roman) due to the nature of the respective governments and societies. One brutal, authoritarian, for the state. The other liberal, democratic, individualistic. It is just as well otherwise the fighting would have been for naught.
Yet at the same time he is a rational man knowing he is playing a sport, against civilised men not unlike himself who know it is a sport, with rules that govern it. He knows at any time he can quit and his life will go on. Compare that to the Roman world, it’s a universe apart. A Roman was born into a world of endless mysticism and Gods, where men killed each other for entertainment. Where slavery was commonplace. Where it was instinct to stab his enemies up through the ribcage then twist the blade, knowing if he shows fear and flees before men trying to kill him his countrymen will try and kill him. Can a man from one world really hope to compare to the man from the other?
Unless the NFL player underwent a drastic change in mindset, no, they wouldn’t be competitive.
On the other hand, the kill-or-be-killed, and life-and-death loyalty to the group you describe resembles some of our criminal subcultures in street gangs, and prisons. So, perhaps the NFL player would adjust to the new mindset, the way people adjust when they go to prison or join a gang.
The NFL player’s physical advantages would not mean much because of his lack of psychological preparation for the horror of ancient hand to hand combat. If you are not raised in a culture that prepares you from youth to deal with that level of mental trauma, you are not going to be of much use on the battlefield.
That is why Spartans trained warriors from age 7 and exposed them to killing via the krypteia from their teen years. That is why Greek and Roman culture was so militaristic in general.
When you think about group bonding and cultural pressure to conform among hoplites, for example, it makes platitudes about “team spirit” seem like a joke. But that is what it takes to convince people to go out and get literally hacked to pieces.
Bullshit. Fighting in armour with dagger, sword and spear is not something “every manly, man”[sic] knows. And a man with those skills can take down any unprepared fool no matter how big and strong he is.