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My major nitpick with most Roman military portrayals in tv/cinema is that the soldiers predominantly wore white/off white tunics, not red.
Yeah. Dear directors and artists everywhere: red dye was expensive. You wouldn’t deck out common foot soldiers in anything red. Rome gets this part right.
Anyway, I went and had another look at the Philippi scene (thanks, YouTube ). You can see a bit more than what I remembered, though as I said, it’s a bit messy. There are units of different shapes and sizes , and you can’t really make out a formation. It does, however, mostly resemble what the article I linked to calls the “articulated phalanx”, with narrow gaps in the line, which certainly seems to be the most realistic option. Also, I was complaining about the lack of arrows and missile troops, but oddly enough, it turns out that this might be right for this particular battle. What is portrayed appears to be the second of the two engangements that made up the battle of Philippi , and according to Wiki: “The battle resulted in close combat between two armies of well-trained veterans. Arrows or javelins were largely ignored and the soldiers packed into solid ranks fought face-to-face with their swords”. So there you go. The action does cut from one side carrying their pila, to the other side just holding their swords, to the clash. This is a bit weird, like the director couldn’t figure out where to put the pila. Also, the way Brutus kills himself in the end by charging the enemy troops isn’t accurate. He certainly did kill himself, but according to Plutarch, it was by the more convential method of falling on his sword. However, one guy who *did *die like that, according to Plutarch, was Marcus Porcius Cato II, son of the famous Cato. He refused to retreat when the troops routed and charged the enemy without armor. So it seems that *Rome *conflates those accounts.
Apparently, the Wikipedia entries for each episode of Rome has a section with inaccuracies and errors (I sure already knew that there are plenty). That’s pretty cool. I think I shall be doing some reading…
The Philippi scene certainly does illustrate the problems with all theories about troop rotation. Sure, it’s all fine in theory, but how would it work in a real battle, when you have the front line all hacking and slashing at each other, with dead, wounded and confused men everywhere? How do you avoid your formation all turning into one big mess?
I’m pretty sure this was an instance of poetic license–there’s a parallel in how Brutus dies here and in the portrayal of Caesar’s death earlier in the series. (Overhead shot of the guy being stabbed from all around.)
How does it compare with the 2004 film? In historical accuracy, I mean.
(BTW, has anyone ever seen the 1915 film, Martyrs of the Alamo, by D.W. Griffith? I once saw only a brief clip of it on a PBS show.)
OTOH, I recall L. Sprague de Camp, in one of his popular-history books, mentioning that if you could see a whole crowd at a Roman amphiteater, it would look like a sea of off-white, most people wearing undyed tunics and togas (dying costs money); and that this is something Hollywood usually gets wrong, portraying a multi-colored spectacle.
Of course, it’s different when you’re dressing upper-class women.
Well, absolutely. The portrayal of Caesar’s death in the series isn’t accurate either, by the way. He wasn’t killed in the actual senate house, which was closed for renovation. The senate was meeting in the Theater of Pompey, which had a curia built into it. I can see why it was done like this - you don’t want to confuse the viewers by having several different senate houses - but it did make the series miss out on a case of delicious historical irony: According to reports, Caesar fell dead at the foot of a statue of Pompey the Great. That could have been a cool shot.
(Also, another thing I forgot to mention: Cassius wasn’t actually killed in the second part of the battle of Philippi, but committed suicide after the first part of the battle.)
Putting aside the little “KKK as good guys” part, Birth of a Nation is considered by some historians to be the best Civil War movie ever in terms of battle sequences and in its recreation of the Lincoln assassination. Really good reasons for both: filmed just over a half-century after the War, there were surviving Civil War vets who served as consultants (and by some accounts extras) on the battle sequences and some of the people present at Ford’s Theater consulted about the assassination scene.
Oh, I don’t know about that. Natural dyestuffs are easy to come by, and there are plenty of textile fragments that have traces of dye left on them. There are also plenty of references to slaves wearing tunics with colored stripes on the hems and sleeves marking their status. Undyed wool also comes in a range of colors, from black to brown to yellow to ash grey to off-white. Through history, dyeing has been expensive, but that hasn’t prevented even the very poor from wearing dyed cloth. This is especially true in times when used clothing markets were widespread, though I’m not sure how active the used clothing market was in Rome.
There were socially enforced and symbolic reasons for men to dress in white, but a true white is actually more expensive than dyeing a less pure fiber a darker color. Besides that, men frequently wore colored tunics under their togas.
It just sounds really silly to me to say that dyeing cloth made it prohibitively expensive for the majority of society, since the dyeing process didn’t really change from the time of Ancient Rome until the Industrial Revolution, and people have consistently dressed in color through the ages. It’s one thing to make that statement from a social point (“Men would be at amphitheaters in greater numbers than women, and so white would be more dominant.”) but to argue that it was the dyes that made it so doesn’t match up with anything I know about textile history.
In my humble opinion, that is.
What sort of clothes would the Roman poor have worn? Was a tunic out of the question? Clothing was handmade and very expensive-even the rich had their clothes extensively mended. Would the poor have made do with a simple cloak?
I thought the treatment of The Easter Rising in 1916 in the tv series The Young Indiana Jones was great. I’m not too sure on the whole historical accuracy (especially since Indiana Jones is a fictional character!) but it was a better portrayal than the one at the start of the Michael Collins film.
What would the Romans have used for red dye?
A knee-length tunic for men, with sandals if they could afford them. For women, a longer tunic, probably about calf-length, again with sandals if affordable. Endless permutations of that for both sexes, in various states of repair.
If you’re talking about homeless people, then whatever they could find, but it probably would have been more than a cloak.
Very young children sometimes ran naked, but clothing was expected of the average adult in public.
Disclaimer: I have never actually studied Roman clothing thoroughly, and all of this is picked up through casual reading. Buyer beware.
Madder (a plant root; the cheapest and common until non-natural dyes are introduced in the 19th century; it gives a range of colors from brown to rosy red to peachy pinks to yellow and green), kermes (an insect; expensive, gives a brighter red), and murex (famous seashell dye, really expensive, burgundy-ish red). I’m sure there are others, because there are various woods that give reddish dyes, but those are the three big red dyes through history.
Read The Face of Roman Battle by Philip Sabin (found in The Journal of Roman Studies, 2000, vol. 90). He provides good insight into how the Romans actually fought.
One of those things in history that viewers would roll their eyes at as way over the top, if it didn’t happen to be true. That was what blew me away about this miniseries–for what was shown, though they took considerable license with the details, the broad outlines of the story were nonetheless what really happened. Caesar did pursue Pompey to Egypt, the Egyptians did piss him off by presenting him with Pompey’s head, he did have an affair with the Queen of Egypt . . . I could go on and on. Of course, at this point I should probably abandon TV and read the real history books.
The musical 1776 is surprisingly historically accurate considering that
1- It’s a musical
2- The ‘congress’ had to be scaled down considerably to fit on one stage and be remembered by the audience
3- Some events had to be fictionalized (i.e. Martha Jefferson probably never came to Philadelphia at all and certainly didn’t during that time frame, but since they already have a ‘telepathic’* correspondence twixt John and Abby they really would be overdoing it with Tom and Martha)
What they did leave intact is the clash of personalities and interests, the notion that the 13 colonies were not all gung-ho for independence and were more like 13 separate mini-nations than an Atlantic/North American union, why the Declaration of Independence was written/what it was (not common knowledge among Americans), that slavery was already a divisive issue by 1776, that Adams was “obnoxious and disliked” and G. Washington “could depress a hyena” as his army was on the verge of complete annihilation, that Franklin’s son was royal governor of New Jersey, that the nation was penniless and had no reason to believe they could succeed alone in driving the English out (and that even among those who wanted independence the motives were different), that New York abstained (courteously), and that Jefferson played the violin (he tucked it right under his chin, in fact), etc… It recreates the moods, the characterizations, the issues, the non-virgin birth of the Declaration and the American political process, etc., better than any other movie yet made.
I was actually irked by an article in this week’s Time claiming that the HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti as John Adams is the first to give him his due as a complex and equally (if not more) important founding father than Jefferson and Franklin and Washington (“and his horse”). It’s definitely true that he’s gotten short stick in the public consciousness, but at least to those who’ve seen 1776 he’s far from being a cipher (and even though he was 41 and “mortgaged to the gills” and not exactly a leading man even in his day and already had a houseful of kids and she was pigeon toed and he was “always the first man in line to be hanged”, his correspondence with Abby was hot, especially when set to music… “do you still smell of vanilla and spring air?/and is my favorite lover’s pill’a still firm and fair?” is just a really sensuous couple of lines).
*I know it’s not really telepathic, but for lack of a better word I’ll use that to describe how their correspondence is portrayed.
Just out of curiousity, have you read the relatively recent publication of the various surviving letters between Abigail and John? From what I’ve heard (No, I haven’t read them, yet.) the exerpts from 1776 really were pretty accurate representations of their correspondence.
What I’m looking forward to reading when I get my grubby paws on a copy is the collection of letters beween Jefferson and Adams, after they reconciled after Jefferson’s Presidency. Just the idea of the two of them reconciling is a bit of a shock, considering the scorched earth tactics the two used against each other. Here’s a fascinating blog review of the book, and the two men, which really whets my appetite for more.
I don’t know if Sampiro has read it, OtakuLoki, but I’ve read selections of their correspondence, and it’s endearingly domestic and passionate. Their correspondence in 1776 is mostly lifted directly from the letters, if I remember correctly.
The reason that we know so much about their relationship is that they were frequently apart, often for months and years at a time, especially during and after the US declared independence. You can read most of their correspondence on the Massachusetts Historical Society website, though I can’t remember all the “lover’s favorite pillar” stuff excised is or not.
Sorry for the double post, but I found this on the website I linked to. It’s from early in their courtship, and I think it blows out of the water any idea that the olden days were stuffy. Bah!
Of course, I do find it mildly amusing in light of his constant money troubles later in life. Maybe that makes me a bad person.
I think it’s a case like the angel and demon in Good Omens who “were enemies so long they were friends”, especially as Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, etc., all crossed the shining river and their places were taken by the next generation who weren’t Present at the Creation.
Very interesting article, thanks! An interesting problem Sabin mentions is why the losses on the winning side in an ancient battle were often so low, with the losers soaking up most of the casualties, even with battles drawing out for several hours. I like the idea (which Sabin quotes from Adrian Goldsworthy) of battles being very tentative affairs, with most of the soldiers fighting mostly to stay alive rather than with the objective of killing the opponents – covering themselves as best they could with their shields to avoid exposure, only occasionally delivering a thrust (paralleling the situation for troops in WWII firefights, where the majority of soldiers would never actually fire their weapons at all or just take an occasional unaimed shot, mostly being busy keeping their heads down and generally freaking out). I’m sure becoming aware of one thing – if I was in the front line of an ancient battle, I would be totally shitting myself with fear when facing the enemy. And actually getting into close combat face-to-face with sharp implements – it couldn’t have been pleasant (then again, I’d probably make a pretty lousy legionary in most respects). Furthermore, in this model, the fighting would be punctuated by lulls, where the sides would have the opportunity to rest and replace the front line troops, solving the problem of how line relief would work in middle of combat. The battles might even, as Sabin claims, have been mostly stand-offs with only sporadic close combat. Most of the killing would happen only when one side broke and routed (as was certainly the case as well with Greek hoplite battles).
I got some good pointers for further reading, too. Brilliant.
Ah - the famous imperial purple, apparently a range of colors from, well, purple, to a deep red. Sounds like one of those things, like sausages, that people wouldn’t be so crazy about if they’d seen it being made: