This week, we’re going to take a close look at arguably the most famous and recognizable Roman battle sequence in film: the iconic opening battle from Gladiator (2000). Despite being a relatively short sequence (about ten minutes), there’s actually enough to talk about here that we’re going to split it over two weeks, talking about the setup – the battlefield, army composition, equipment and battle plan – this week and then the actual conduct of the battle next week.

The iconic opening battle, set in the Marcomannic Wars (166-180) during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180) dominates the pop-cultural reference points for the Roman army in battle and you can see its heavy influence in things like how the Total War series presents Roman armies (particularly in trailers and other promotional material). Students and enthusiasts alike will often cite this sequence as the thing which sparked their interest in the Roman army. It is hard to overstate how pervasive its influence is in the public imagination of what the Roman army, particularly of the imperial period, was like, especially as its style is imitated by later pop culture works.

Which is why it is so unfortunate that it is such a deceptive historical mess. This sequence in particular is a banner example of what I’ve termed elsewhere the ‘perils of historical verisimilitude,’ the habit of historically based popular-culture works including what we might think of as fake signifiers of research, things that seem historically grounded rather than being historically grounded, as a way to cheaply cash in on the cachet that an actually grounded representation gets a work.

Gladiator actually provides a perfect metaphor for this: its main character’s name. Russell Crowe proudly informs us he is, “Maximus Decimus Meridius,” a name that certainly sounds suitably Roman, picking up the three-part name with that standard second declension -us ending. It sounds like it could be a real name – if you didn’t know Latin you would probably assume that it could be a real Roman name. But, as we’ve noted, it isn’t a Roman name and in fact gets nearly all of the Roman naming conventions wrong: Roman names are ordered as praenomen, nomen and cognomen, with the nomen indicating one’s gens (‘clan’ more or less) and the praenomen selected from just a couple dozen common personal names. Decimus is one of those two-dozen common praenomina (which also means it is never going to show up as the name of a gens), so it ought to go first as it is actually his personal name. Meanwhile Maximus (‘the greatest’) is very much not one of those roughly two-dozen praenomina, instead being always cognomen (essentially a nickname). Finally Meridius isn’t a Latin word at all (so it can’t be a praenomen personal name nor a cognomen nickname), meaning it has to be the nomen (referencing a fictive gens Meridia). Every part of his name is wrong and it should read Decimus Meridius Maximus.

It sounds just right enough to fool your average viewer, while being entirely wrong. It is ‘truthy’ rather than true – verisimilitudinous (like truth), rather than veristic (realistic, true).

In the case of Gladiator‘s opening battle scene, the attention is on creating verisimilitude (without fidelity, as we’ll see) in the visual elements of the sequence and only the visual elements. The visual representation of a Roman army – the equipment in particular – is heavily based on the Column of Trajan (including replicating the Column’s own deceptions) and since that is the one thing a viewer can easily check, that verisimilitude leads a lot of viewers to conclude that the entire sequence is much more historically grounded than it is. They take their cues from the one thing they can judge – ‘do these fellows wear that strange armor I saw on that picture of a Roman column?’ – and assume everything is about as well researched, when in fact none of it is.

Instead, apart from the equipment – which has its own deep flaws – this is a sequence that bears almost no resemblance to the way Roman armies fought and expected to win their battles. The Roman army in this sequence has the wrong composition, is deployed incorrectly, uses the wrong tactics, has the wrong theory of victory and employs the wrong weapons and then employs them incorrectly. Perhaps most importantly the sequence suggests an oddly cavalry-and-archer focused Roman army which is simply not how the Romans in this period expected to win their battles.

Now I want to be clear here that this isn’t a review of the film Gladiator (2000) or my opinion in general on the film. To be honest, unlike the recent sequel, I enjoy Gladiator even though it is historical gibberish. So I am not telling you that you aren’t ‘allowed’ to like Gladiator, but rather simply that, despite appearances, it is historical gibberish, particularly this opening scene, which I often find folks who are aware the rest of the film is historical gibberish nevertheless assume this opening scene is at least somewhat grounded. It is not.

But first, if you want to help support this project you can do so on Patreon! I don’t promise to use your money to buy myself more arms and armor, but I also don’t promise not to do that. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.

Maximus’ Un-Roman Army

We pick up in an improbably mud-soaked clearing with a title card informing us that we’re in ‘Germania,’ which is correct in a very broad sense that this is the Second Marcomannic War and the enemies here are the Marcomanni and Quadi, who are Germani (Germanic-language speakers), but the army here isn’t operating out of the Roman provinces of Germania (superior and inferior) which are on the Rhine, but rather on the Danube, from the provinces of Noricum and Pannonia (Superior). But in the sense that we’re in germania magna, the greater zone of Germanic cultural influence, sure, fine.

In the process of Maximus riding up, the failure of negotiations and Maximus riding to join his cavalry, we get something of an overview of the Roman army and its position and both are wrong. Let’s start with the soldiers: we see a very clear distinction between two kinds of soldiers, the mail-clad auxilia, all archers, and the legionaries wearing the lorica segmentata and there appear to be about the same number of both groups. And here is where we first see the clear influence of the Column of Trajan (and to an unfortunately lesser degree, the far more appropriate Column of Marcus Aurelius) on the depiction, because this use of armor to distinctly signal the Roman citizen legionaries and non-citizen auxilia is straight from the Column of Trajan, completed probably around 113 and commemorating Trajan’s two Dacian Wars (101-102, 105-106).

What this sequence gets correct is that the Roman army was divided into those two groups, they were roughly equal in number (by this period, the auxilia probably modestly outnumber the legions in total manpower) and Trajan’s Column does use that visual signifier to distinguish them. This component is the crux of the verisimilitude that leads people to trust the rest of this sequence.

The problems start almost immediately from there. Roman auxilia were far more varied than what we see here in terms of equipment and tactics and only very few of them were archers. So let’s break down Roman auxiliary contingents. With all due caveats about the limits of our evidence, infantry auxilia outnumber cavalry by about 2:1 in attested auxilia units (auxilia were grouped into cavalry alae and infnatry cohortes, generally of 480 men (sometimes around 800), but unlike for legionary citizen-infantry, these cohorts were not grouped into larger legions). So we ought to expect about a third of our auxilia to be cavalry, which is important because the cavalry detachments of Roman legions were very small (and mostly for scouting and messenger duties). Auxilia cavalry ranged in equipment and could include horse archers and even ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry, but most were mailed shock cavalry, equipped quite a lot like how Gallic or Germanic warrior-aristocrats or Roman legionary cavalry would be.

Of the remainder, the most common kind of infantry auxilia by far seem to have been heavy infantry, fighting in fairly heavy armor. These fellows get depicted in Roman artwork generally in mail armor, with flat oval shields (as opposed to the curved, rectangular imperial-period Roman scutum), spears and swords. These fellows, totally absent in this sequence are all over the Column of Trajan, with their flat oval shields being frequently seen (although one must distinguish them from Dacians who carry the same shield; the auxilia stick out for their mail and helmets). A bit less than 10% of auxilia units are attested as cohortes sagittariorum (‘cohort of archers’). We also know the Romans used slingers within the auxilia, but as far as we can tell, not in specialized units; they may have been brigaded in with other auxilia cohorts. In either case, they appear in fairly small numbers. Finally, we also see on things like the Column of Trajan Roman allied or auxiliary units that are substantially lighter infantry: on the Column of Trajan, these are local troops shown wielding large clubs and stripped to the waist, presumably representing troops local to the Danube region, fighting in local (unarmored, with heavy two-handed weapons) style.

So whereas the army we see is a nearly even split between legionary heavy infantry and auxilia archers (with a small amount of legionary cavalry waiting for Maximus to show up to lead them), in practice a typical Roman field army would have far fewer archers, indeed around ten times fewer: not almost 50% of the force, but in fact probably a bit less than 5% of the force (since they’re less than 10% of the auxilia who would make up around half of a Roman field army). Meanwhile we’re simply missing the – by far – two most common sorts of auxilia cohorts, those of heavy infantry or heavy cavalry. This mangling of the structure of a Roman army is going to have implications when we get to Maximus’ overall plan for the battle as well.

Meanwhile, the legionary infantry are also much too uniform, literally. This is easily the most pardonable error, because what has happened here is that director Ridley Scott has copied the Column of Trajan but far too uncritically. After all, the Column of Trajan is not a photograph and thus has space for the artists producing it to take liberties, particularly in the name of imperial ideology and propaganda. In this case, showing large numbers of identically equipped soldiers, often moving in unified formation, serves the same rhetorical purpose in antiquity as it does today, suggesting an impressive, inhumanly uniformed and disciplined source. Moreover, the segmented Roman body armor, which we call the lorica segmentata (we don’t know what the Romans called it), was very distinctive to the legions, as it was the one armor that it seems like the auxilia probably (the evidence here can be tricky) didn’t share. And keeping the legions distinct from the auxilia also matters, as the legionary soldiers are higher status citizens who thus get ‘higher billing’ in the imagery, as it were, than the auxilia. So showing all of the legions equipped neatly with this armor makes them seem distinct, impressive and uniform.

In short, it served Trajan’s image (and thus the artists aim) to suggest that all of his legions wore this armor.

Archaeology tells us quite clearly it was not so. Indeed, the lorica segmentata, so iconic because of its use in this way on the Column of Trajan, was probably the least common of the three major types of Roman legionary body armor in this period. This most common armor of the Roman legions was almost certainly still – as it had been in the Late Republic – mail, exactly the same as we see the auxilia wearing. We find fragments of Roman mail in legionary sites in all corners of the Empire and it remained common everywhere. To head off a standard question: no, it does not seem that the Romans ever got the idea to layer other defenses over mail, so when it was worn, it was the ‘primary’ armor (worn over a padded textile defense called a subarmalis, but not under any other armor). We also see mail represented in Roman artwork, including on very high status soldiers, like senior centurions.

The next most common armor was probably scale armor, which we find very frequently in the East (that is, on the frontier with the Parthians/Sassanids) and often enough (if less frequently) in the West (that is, the Rhine/Danube frontier). We also know that some auxilia units wore this armor too and we see quite a bit of scale armor – wholly absent in this sequence – on the Column of – wait for it – Marcus Aurelius (completed c. 193). That’s the column that commemorates this war. Contemporary with this fictional battle. But it is less famous and somewhat less well-preserved than 70-years-earlier Column of Trajan, which they pretty evidently used quite a bit more of.

The lorica segmentata shows up the least often and – to my knowledge – effectively exclusively in the west on the Rhine/Danube frontier, where it is still probably not the most common (although it may have been more common than scale on that frontier). So what we ought to see in this army are legionaries who are marked out by their large scuta (the big Roman shield, by this period distinctly rectangular and also (as in the republic) curved), but in a range of mail, scale and lorica segmentata (with mail and segmentata being the most common, because we are on the Danube frontier, but scale hardly rare), along with auxilia divided into specialist cohorts (480 man units) each with different sets of armor and weapons: a few missile cohorts (archers, slingers), a lot more heavy infantry cohorts with spears and long shields, some lighter troops, and so on. The auxilia ought to be wearing basically every armor under the sun except for the lorica segmentata (which to my knowledge we’ve only ever found in sites associated with the legions).

Finally, these units are backed up by a whole load of catapults. We see two kinds, dual-arm arrow-throwing machines (which most folks would casually call ballistae) and single-armed pot-throwing machines (which most folks would casually call catapults), all of them in stationary mounts. Now on the one hand, ‘the Romans use lots of torsion-based catapults as artillery’ is a true statement about the Roman army of this period, but on the other hand once again beyond that basic idea, most of this is wrong. Once again there’s an issue of verisimilitude here: the appearance of strange catapults and the true fact that the Romans used a lot of unusual catapults is likely to lead the viewer to assume some research has been done here and thus that these are the right catapults. For the most part, they are not.

We can start with the easy one, the larger single-armed pot-throwers. These are onagers, a late-Roman simplified single-arm torsion catapult, named for their fearsome ‘kick’ (like an ass, an onager). These are popular favorites for Roman artillery, for instance showing up in both Rome: Total War and Total War: Rome II (both of which have main campaigns set during the Late Republic). There’s only one problem, which is that Gladiator (much less the even earlier Total War games) is set substantially too early for an onager to appear. Our first attestation of the onager is in Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in the last two decades of the 300s AD about the events of 353-378 (his work was broader than this, but only the back end survives). Vegetius, writing roughly contemporary with Ammianus also mentions them. But before the late fourth century, we don’t have any evidence for this design and it doesn’t show up on the Columns of Trajan or Marcus. So this isn’t just a little bit too early for these catapults but, given the evidence we have, around 150 years too early, the equivalent of having a line of M1 Abrams show up in a film about the Battle of Gettysburg.

What we do have are a number of twin-armed bolt or arrow-throwing machines and the Romans certainly had those, though what we see doesn’t match up well with what the Romans used. What we see is a single size of fairly large arrow-throwing engines, aimed upward to fire in fairly high arcs and built with large metal cases containing the torsion springs (generally made of hair or sinew, tightly coiled up; it is the coiling of these springs which stores the energy of the machine).

These two-armed torsion catapults came in a wide range of sizes and could be designed to throw either arrows/bolts or stones (the latter carved into spheres of rather precise caliber for specific machines). And we ought to see a pretty wide range of sizes here, from massive one-talent engines, which threw a 1 talent (26kg) stone and stood about three times the height of a man, to much smaller anti-personnel weapons (scorpiones) that were more like a ‘crew served’ weapon than a large artillery piece. By Trajan’s time, the Romans had even taken to mounting these smaller crew-served engines on mule-drawn carts (called carroballistae) to allow them to be rapidly repositioned, something like early modern ‘horse artillery’ (they were not meant to fire on the move; when we see them on Trajan’s Column, at least one of the operators is usually standing on the ground outside of the cart to winch the machine). These smaller machines, which would have made up the bulk of those deployed in a field battle, seem mostly absent in the sequence.

The result of all of this is that the Roman army presented in the opening moments of Gladiator manages to strike a remarkably unhappy balance: having just enough of the appearance of accuracy to decisively influence two decades of subsequent depictions of the Roman army without actually being particularly correct about anything beyond a very surface level. But subsequent pop-culture (again, I think Rome: Total War played a significant role here) would codify this vision of the Roman army – fire-throwing onagers, lots of auxilia archers, legionary rather than auxiliary cavalry, uniform use of the lorica segmentata – as the dominant model for quite some time.

But the army isn’t the only thing that’s wrong.

Maximus’ un-Roman Fortifications

The army is also deployed wrong.

What we are shown is pretty clearly a prepared defense on a hillside, with a series of raised terraces, with a mix of abatis (sharpened wood obstacles, often crudely cut wood stakes set in an X pattern) and mantlets, with gaps in those defenses to allow units to move and a whole bunch of catapults positioned up on the hill. The terraces make for a layered, multi-stage fighting position at each level. On the one hand, the Romans were hardly averse to field fortifications and one wonders again if this set was a product of someone with an active imagination looking at the Column of Trajan, which features a lot of scenes of Roman soldiers cutting trees and building bridges, roads and forts.

The problem isn’t that there are field fortifications, it is everything else about them: the style of field fortification, their position, layout and use. As we’ve noted before, Roman armies on campaign built fortified marching camps nightly, so we would expect Maximus’ army to have such a camp, but as we’ve discussed even more so, one of the classic, famous features of Roman armies is that they build the same layout of camp wherever they go, the famous Roman ‘playing card’ forts, generally built on flat, open ground (rather than hillsides). That defense would not look like this, instead consisting of a ditch (the fossa) behind which would have been a earthwork rampart (the agger) topped with a wooden palisade (the vallum); thus rather than successive layers, you’d have a single clear fighting position (the vallum) on a mount with the ditch directly in front of it. And that would be a continuous line, with just four gates (at the center of each side), rather than this kind of checkerboard pattern of fortifications, because of course the purpose of this defense was to prohibit entry. Moreover, the line of field fortifications we see are not part of, nor connected to, a marching camp: it is simply a line of fortifications on the side of the hill with nothing on the flanks, rather than the distinctive ‘playing card shape.’ We don’t see the camp sitting behind it either.

But the really immediate problem is that Maximus’ army has formed up within his troops strung through the field fortifications, with legionary soldiers mostly in front of them (but some are behind them) and the archers in between the stakes and mantlets. This may seem like a sensible way to form up a defense, but it is not the Roman way. Maximus is very intentionally “offering battle,” – inviting his opponent into an open field engagement. The way a Roman army did this was invariably forming up on the flat, open, unfortified ground in front of the camp, toward the enemy, signalling that they would fight in the open, outside of their walls (as Maximus does indeed intend to do).

So what we ought to see is Maximus’ army formed up outside in the open field, with the camp likely visible some distance behind them. That camp would be protected by very different fortifications: you’d be able to make out its ‘playing-card’ shape, with watch-towers on the corners and the raised vallum running the exterior and the relatively neat grid of tends in the interior.

Finally, before we get to the battle plan, I want to note one more oddity here, which is the battlefield itself. The battlefield is a muddy field, which it looks to have been recently clear-cut, otherwise surrounded by dense forest. Of course part of the reason is that this is Bourne Wood, a coniferous tree plantation (and frequent filming location) in Surrey, England (which is why the trees are all the same species, so neatly spaced out) rather than the edge of an old-growth forest somewhere in southern Germany.

But the thing is, the Marcomanni, Quadi and other Germanic-language speaking peoples were an agrarian society, same as the Romans: their villages were surrounded by farm and pastureland. Of course a lot of the forest – old-growth forest, rather than tree-farms as here – remained, but if a Roman army wanted a flat, open space to offer battle in, they needn’t have cleared it themselves (and indeed probably couldn’t, at least not in the time frame they’d have to prepare for a pitched battle), but could simply march to the nearest village with its patches of farmland. Getting a Roman army to fight in dense, old-growth forest, after all, famously required clever ambushes, as a Teutoberg Forest (modern Kalkriese) in 9 AD. And if the enemy didn’t want to fight in the open, Roman armies were perfectly happy to burn villages and pillage crops as the standard way of attempting to force an enemy to accept an offer to battle or else vacate the area.

A Very Un-Roman Battle

With all of that established, we can now get to Maximus’ battle plan. The attentive reader may already have begun to notice the cracks forming here as we’ve discussed how different the composition of a Roman field army would have been from what we see here, but I am always struck by how this scene, which for so much of the public is the paradigmatic Roman battle, is very un-Roman way to fight a battle.

Now some caveats here are necessary at the start. One of the oddities of studying the Roman army is that the gaps in our evidence shift between periods. So, for instance, the Roman army of the Middle Republic (that’s c. 343 BC to c. 101) is quite poorly attested archaeologically – being always on the move in offensive operations will do that – but its structure, equipment and tactics are very clearly described by our literary sources, such that we have detailed narratives for quite a lot of large-scale pitched battles. For the first two centuries AD, this problem is in many ways reversed: the Roman army, now permanently stationed in frontier forts, suddenly becomes very archaeologically and epigraphically visible, but our literary sources lose interest in the details of Roman military operations. They still report outcomes – victory and defeat – since those matter for the reputations of emperors and their generals, but since those historical sources have shifted their focus from the politics of the Roman Republic, where common soldiers were also key voters, to the politics around the emperor, in which even a frontier general might be a relatively minor figures, their interest in the detailed conduct of battles trails off.

As a result, somewhat paradoxically, while overall our information for the Roman army of the Early and High Empire is much better that that for the Middle or Late Republic, our understanding of its tactics is actually a fair bit weaker. We do get a few, generally relatively brief, battle descriptions in authors like Tacitus and Josephus, but there’s far less detail here than what we get for the Middle or Late Republic from authors like Polybius, Livy and Caesar. We also get some discussion of tactical dispositions in Vegetius and Arrian’s Array against the Alans, but we have a lot of reason to suspect that these are not typical formations but rather fancy, special use formations that may have been rarely, if ever, used.

All that said, we do have one significant advantage which is that our fictional battle in Gladiator is taking place in 180 AD, at the end of two centuries of relative stasis in Roman organization, equipment and tactics. The Roman army will change substantially between the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (in 180) and the end of the reign of Constantine (in 337) but it changes very little between from the reign of Augustus (r. 31BC – 14AD) all the way to Marcus. Indeed, from a tactical perspective, Marcus Aurelius’ legions seem to have been little different in their approaches and capabilities to those of Julius Caesar two and a half centuries prior. And given that broad sweep of time, we get enough battle narratives to track the development, or more correctly the lack of development, of large-scale Roman battle tactics.

Maximus’ plan of battle in Gladiator, however, fits the Roman way of battle so poorly that the limits of our evidence mostly don’t matter very much: even with what we know, this is not how the Romans win a battle.

Maximus’ tactical plan comes in roughly three stages: first he plans to ‘unleash hell’ with massed archer and catapult ‘fire’ (which I can write here with no issue because they’re all fire arrows and pots), a huge part of his plan to the point that he sets the forest ablaze. He then advances his infantry to draw the enemy into the open ground and then finally he charges the enemy in the rear with his cavalry, having apparently galloped all the way around the enemy force.

Though Rome: Total War wouldn’t come out for another four years after this movie, this is pretty classic Total War tactics: archers, positioned safely behind heavy infantry, wear down enemy forces, which the infantry then pins and cavalry flanks in a ‘hammer and anvil’ attack. Functionally no ancient army regularly fought this way; it remains really striking to me that as fun as they are, Total War games really struggle to reproduce the actual tactics of the periods they are meant to describe. Historically, archers are more generally deployed interspersed with the infantry or on their flanks but only rarely tucked in as a distinct unit behind them, for the obvious reason that archers who can see and shoot directly at their targets are more effective. Meanwhile when you read about Alexander or Hannibal flanking an army with cavalry, they are almost always punching through and collapsing an enemy flank and then ‘rolling up’ the army, not galloping all the way around and behind an army, for the obvious reason that real armies are a lot bigger than Total War armies (and, as we’ll see next week, a lot bigger than Gladiator armies) and take a lot longer to gallop around and more to the point few commanders were willing to leave a flank ‘in the air’ (unguarded by any natural obstruction) if they could at all avoid it, which they usually could.

But plan is an even worse fit for the Romans compared to most armies. Even before we look at battle records, simply thinking about the composition of a Roman army can give us a sense of which ‘arm’ (that is, type of soldier) they expect to be decisive. We’ve already discussed the breakdown of the auxilia, but putting the legions that sit at the core of a Roman army back in the picture can really make the point. As noted, a Roman field army is about half legions and about half auxilia and other allied forces. The legions (generally two or three of them) in a Roman field army are in turn roughly 98% heavy infantry (5,280 heavy infantry with a small contingent of 120 legionary cavalry, serving mostly as scouts and messengers). Meanwhile, as we’ve noted, the auxilia are roughly 2:1 infantry to cavalry, with the majority of the infantry being heavy infantry. Cn. Julius Agricola’s field army in northern Britain had sufficient heavy infantry auxilia that he was able to fight an entire pitched battle (the Battle of Mons Graupius, Tac. Agricola 29-38) using only his auxilia to mount a heavy infantry assault (some 8,000 strong) while his legions – kept entirely in reserve – never needing to be committed. Some auxilia probably formed lighter infantry units and we certainly seem the Romans employing irregular allied formations of light infantry as well to screen the army; the auxilia always took the forward screening position for an army on the march, for instance. As noted, dedicated missile troops make up at most something like 10% of the auxilia.

Putting those numbers together, we might posit a model Roman field army that is about 49% legionary heavy infantry, around 29% auxilia heavy infantry, around 17% cavalry (almost entirely auxiliary, not legionary, cavalry) and about 5% archers and other missile troops. Adding in some irregular local forces for light infantry or other roles would push these percentages down a bit, but we are still fundamentally talking about a Roman army was roughly three quarters heavy infantry by total numbers.

That is not a pinning force. The heavy infantry is instead the decisive army of a Roman army: the Romans expect the heavy infantry to win the battle, with the other ‘arms’ (archers, cavalry, light infantry) merely screening or assisting in that process.

Indeed, as I joke to my students, the Romans believed that the quickest way to an enemy’s vulnerable rear was through their front, the same ‘theory of victory’ on the battlefield as Roman armies had in the Middle and Late Republic. Roman armies generally aim to win through direct heavy infantry assault on the enemy’s front, typically with a ‘linear’ assault – meaning that they are attacking cross the entire enemy line, without forming a wedge or refusing a part of their army. It is an extremely blunt way of battle, but it works remarkably well because the Roman army is built for it: loaded with heavily armored infantry in fairly flexible maneuver units (by this period, cohorts of 480 men), arranged typically in three battle lines (each typically about 6 men deep), one behind the other. That arrangement means that the Romans have tactical reserves, but assuming the army isn’t seized by panic, it also limits the ability of an enemy to win suddenly by breakthrough: they’d just be breaking through to the next full battle line. It’s a way of fighting that locks an enemy into a grinding, head-on-head attritional battle which – far more heavily armored and well armed – the Romans are generally going to win.

Indeed, for much of the imperial period, Roman strategy seems to have been built on the reliable assumption that if the Romans could bring an enemy to a stand-up pitched battle, they would almost always win and usually win easily. Precisely because this way of battle was so damn blunt and direct, it was also reliable.

Of course such an approach was vulnerable to being enveloped (as the Romans had been at Cannae in 216 BC) but that is generally what the auxilia were for. Generally, it seems that the auxilia were deployed on the flanks of the legions (where, in the Republic, the socii would have gone) and the cavalry to the flanks of the auxilia. The cavalry were not expected to win the battle (indeed, they frequently vanish from battle accounts in both the Republic and the Empire) but rather simply to screen the flanks of the advancing heavy infantry. Light infantry and missile troops likewise seem to have been used mostly as harassing or screening in battle, to enable the heavy infantry – legionaries and auxilia – to deliver their assault with minimal fuss. And I do mean assault: Roman armies functionally always assume they will attack, advancing into contact with the enemy; they do not wait to receive an enemy attack. It takes fearsome odds indeed to get a Roman army to take up a defensive position and hold for an enemy’s advance.

Maximus’ battle plan here is actually somewhat Macedonian (the Romans would have said Greek, probably with a sneer) in style, treating his cavalry as the decisive arm and the infantry as a mere anvil against which the cavalry hammer would strike. The Romans, simply put, do not fight that way. So while the barrage of flaming arrows and catapult shot is very cinematic, the Romans do not fight that way. While the image of Maximus charging through the forest shouting ‘hold the line’ (for some reason) is really cinematic, the Romans do not fight that way. Indeed, Roman generals do not command from the front of their cavalry (again, “that’s a Macedonian thing,” the Roman says with condescension), but rather from behind their legions, ‘driving’ the legions into battle.

What I find ironic here is how Ridley Scott, like many modern directors, can’t quite shake out of a concept of battle rooted in ‘fires’ (that is, attacks with ranged weapons, often artillery). Modern warfare, after all, is dominated by the side which can put the most metal in the air. But the armies that Ridley Scott ends up putting to film – the Romans, Latin crusaders and even to an extent Napoleon himself – are examples of quintessentially shock-based armies that expect to win by pushing into contact. However out of place they are, massive volleys of catapults and fire arrows are ‘cinematic’ in a genre that has a far more developed visual vocabulary for fires than it does for shock (which often turns into a confused mess on screen). Of course a talented, visionary director might try to find a way to make a shock action equally cinematic and Scott occasionally manages, but more frequently relapses back into the easy solution of “more catapults on screen.”

A Proper, Roman Battle

So how might a Roman general approach this problem instead? What would an actual Roman battle plan look like?

Well first, the Romans will have constructed a fortified marching camp as Roman armies build one each night and will certainly have done so here given that they have to show up, encamp and then wait for the results of diplomatic negotiations. Chances are on arrival, our actual Roman general – lets call him ‘Decimus’ – is going to end the day’s march by throwing forward a light screen while he builds his camp and then pull his army back within the camp for the night. He’ll send out the envoy in the morning.

Since Decimus expects the negotiations may fail, he’s likely to draw up his army in the morning, as the envoy departs, to offer battle. He’ll have planned this process the night before with his officers and senior centurions, probably aiming to use more than one of the four gates his ‘playing card’ fortified camp will have so that his army can draw up quickly once the men have eaten breakfast. We might expect Decimus to have some of his better auxilia cohorts exit the camp first to screen the rest of the army against any sudden surprises as it forms up, although it would be fairly hard for an enemy army itself to form up and advance quick enough to launch a surprise attack.

Decimus is going to draw his forces up at the edge of the flat, open ground where he’d prefer to fight, some distance from his camp – essentially daring his opponent to meet him in the open. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘offering battle:’ by forming up this way, Decimus makes clear he is willing to leave the protection of his fortified camp and fight in the open – his opponent could then accept his offer or alternately (by drawing up on terrain more favorable to them) refuse. In real historical battles, this sort of negotiation – “I’ll fight here, will you?” – can go on for a few days, but the demands of logistics means neither army can afford to sit still for very long.

The battle formation is likely to be pretty standard. Even for very talented generals like Julius Caesar, Roman tactics are about reliability, rather than fancy maneuvers. Generally this means the legions – a Roman field army will typically have two or three in the imperial period – will go in the center, one next to the other. The heavy infantry auxilia cohorts will form up on either side of them. That full line – auxilia – legion – legion – auxilia will have reserves. The equipment distinctions between the hastati, principes and triarii of the old manipular army are gone but the unit titles remain and Roman armies still generally seem to have formed up in three successive battle lines, just like they did in the glory days of the Republic.

Decimus is likely to want to anchor at least one of his flanks on some sort of obstruction – a river, hill, dense forest – rather than leaving it ‘in the air,’ but in any case, his cavalry will be deployed to protect those flanks while the infantry wins in the center. Catapults and archers might be deployed to support the infantry or to close off a specific troublesome line of advance. Caesar does this, for instance, at the Battle of the Axona (57 BC), putting catapults in a fortified position on his vulnerable right flank to prevent it being enveloped (Caes. BGall., 2.8). Archers and other light troops might likewise be used to holds space in rough ground if, say, a flank was anchored on something like a bog or rough hill, unsuitable for cavalry or heavy infantry.

In either case, Decimus is not going to be with the archers or the cavalry, but in a command position behind his legions with his retinue. Roman generals, after all, were not warrior-heroes who led their troops from the front, Alexander-style, but ‘battle managers’ who commanded from the rear where they could issue orders effectively and observe the battle as it developed. From that position – being on a horse, Decimus would be able to see over his infantry – he would observe the enemy forming up themselves. It is, by this point, too late to make major alterations to his own dispositions- it takes a lot of time and creates a lot of vulnerability to shift units around – but he can decide if he wants to wait where he is in the hopes that the enemy will accept his offer of battle in the open. If not, he can either retire the army back into the camp or – if he is feeling confident – advance to accept battle on the enemy’s terms (in this case, on the treeline and up the high ground). In practice, Roman generals were generally pretty willing to accept battle on these terms, so I expect Decimus would advance.

We’ll get into what that would look like as a smaller tactical level next week, but the key thing here is that Decimus, unlike Maximus, would be expecting to carry the day by advancing his heavy infantry directly into contact and breaking the enemy that way. Given how much more heavily armored his soldiers are, he can expect that, even if the initial morale shock and impact of his charge doesn’t shatter the enemy line, his heavy infantry are likely to grind through their opponents quite rapidly, as heavy infantry that meets lighter infantry in contact in good order generally makes a pretty one-sided slaughter of the fight quite quickly. If for some reason the first line fails to win, it can simply fall back to let the second line try, by which point the enemy is almost certain to be too badly wearied and wounded to withstand the attack. So long as he can keep from being enveloped or ambushed, Decimus is probably pretty confident in his ability to win, probably with very few losses.

Maximus, by contrast, is going to launch a tactically poor attack over bad terrain which very nearly gets him killed and looks like it costs him a good portion of his army. But we’ll get to that next week.