This week (and next), I want to talk a bit about the recent release of Gladiator II. Now I’ve written a review of the film for Foreign Policy, which you can find here (behind the paywall). I also discussed it with Jason Herbert and Sarah Bond over at Historians at the Movies, which is a blast of a podcast in which Sarah absolutely kills it and I am also present. But I had a lot of miscellaneous thoughts, which wouldn’t fit into an 1800-word review, so I thought I would pull those together here. There were enough of them that I’m also going to split this into two posts: this week we’ll look at chronology, battles and weapons and the next week we’ll discuss Rome, the Colosseum and the Severan Emperors.
Now I should be clear this isn’t my review of the film (that is linked above). I’m not going to talk here about if I think you should go see the film (mostly no) or what worked (mostly the action scenes, Denzel Washington) or what didn’t work (the story, everything else). To be blunt, this film is mostly a reenactment of the first Gladiator (2000) and at the same time, remarkably weaker than the original.
Instead, I want to expand a bit on what I think the historical themes of the film are and why they are both so troublesome and also so ill-fitting to its historical period. But mostly I want to do a lot of the sort of largely empty nitpicking and rivet-counting that has perhaps less intellectual merit but is just fun. So on to the nitpickery! Also warning, spoilers: none of the ‘twists’ in this film struck me as particularly shocking (the major ‘reveal’ was heavily hinted at in the first film) but I am going to ruthlessly spoil the movie in discussing it, so if you are still planning to go see the film and value the story – well, first, um…unusual choice there – but more broadly, maybe hold off on reading this until you’ve seen the film.
Also, I should note that because the film is still in theaters, I don’t have lots of images from it because I can’t take screen captures. So I’m going to be forced to describe a lot of things I can’t yet show you pictures of. There’s enough military equipment – good and bad – that when the film does come to streaming and I can take screencaps, I might do another post on “wait, what is that helmet?” but that will have to wait.
Now I want to be clear before we get going to avoid some of the common, empty waste-of-time criticisms here. I did not go to Gladiator II expecting a historically accurate film. I was hoping to see a compelling film (which did not happen) and was thinking, in the best case, I might get a film that, while basically historical nonsense, at least traded in broadly historically interesting themes (like Kingdom of Heaven or, indeed, to an extent, the first Gladiator); this also did not happen. Mostly, I expected to at least be entertained; that…also mostly did not happen, unfortunately.
That said, when you spend hundreds of millions of dollars making a historical epic which uses the names of real historical figures (Lucilla, Geta, Caracalla and Macrinus) and says it is set at a specific time in a specific past culture, I think you do, in fact, open yourself up to historical critique. The fact that Ridley Scott regularly acts so angry and hurt by such critique seems to have created something of a permission structure for his super-fans to get really angry and harassing over critiques, but in practice is just childish and embarrassing for both Ridley Scott and his fans.
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Wait, When Are We?
The film opens, as the first one did, with a big Roman battle, because this is a film largely about reenacting Ridley Scott’s other, better films. One of these days, we’ll get to discussing the famous, iconic big opening battle in Gladiator. In short, having a big ‘ol battle with Germanic peoples on the Danube late in the reign of Marcus Aurelius makes a fair bit of sense – he was with the army there on campaign. The battle itself there is mostly tactical nonsense and doesn’t offer much of a grasp on how the Romans fought open field engagements, but the context at least made some minimal sense.
Not so for Gladiator II‘s opening! We’re informed by a title card that we are both 16 years after the events of the first film (which ends with the death of Commodus) which should make this the year 208 (during the reign of Septimius Severus), but also that this is during the joint reign of Geta and Caracalla, which itself lasted less than a year before Caracalla murdered his brother in 211. But then the opening scene tells us it is 200 A.D. and we’re in Numidia. Nor, I should note, can you hope that this is all explained by time passing; unlike the first Gladiator which is reasonably and productively vague about how much time Maximus spends training as a gladiator, Gladiator II sets a clock. The film opens with the fictional Marcus Acacius attacking ‘Numidia’ (suddenly a city and not a kingdom) on the orders of Geta and Caracalla in a big battle that he wins and then the rest of the film’s action takes place over the course of ten days of celebratory games marking his triumph. So this is a film that, at maximum, covers something like a month or two of real time, not the years required to make the timeline work
But that’s not the biggest timeline problem! Instead, the biggest timeline problem is that it is the third century AD and we are attacking Numidia. Numidia was an ancient region of North Africa mostly in what today would be northern Algeria. The Numidians, famed for the quality of their horsemen, were split initially into two states, Massylii to the East and Masaesyli to the West. Early on, we see Carthage maintaining some control over this region by playing the two states off of each other, often recruiting Numidian kings (and their high quality cavalry) into Carthaginian armies. In 203BC, the king of Massylii (Masinissa) allied with the Romans in the Second Punic War and defeated the king of Masaesyli (Syphax), which was swiftly followed by the Roman defeat of Carthage at the Battle of Zama (202 also BC), which enabled Masinissa to absorb the Masaesyli and thus create a united Kingdom of Numidia, which was essentially born as a Roman client state.
That client state churns on, with occasional Roman intervention (and a major war from 112 to 106, still BC) to the 40s (still BC), when the client kingdom was absorbed to create the province of Africa Nova (‘New Africa’ – briefly name-checked in the film as the name of the region) although neighboring Mauretania remains a client kingdom until 40 AD.
Which is to say, by 200 A.D., the earliest of the multitude of possible dates for this film (which mashes together events from 211 to 218), Numidia has been a Roman province for two-hundred and fifty years. By this point, North Africa, far from being some foreign ‘barbarian’ land is distinctly Roman. Indeed, North Africa, by 200 has already supplied its first native North-African emperor, Septimius Severus (r. 193-211), a Roman man of mixed North African (Berber) and Punic (Phoenician) heritage who really ought to have come up in the prep-work for writing this film given that he is Geta and Caracalla’s father. More on that in a minute. But the upshot here is that Numidia has been an important, core part of the Roman world for a long time when this film opens.
It makes about as much sense for Rome to be invading ‘Numidia’ (which, again, the film treats as a town and not a large region) in 200 A.D. as for a film to open with dramatic footage of the initial European settlement of Tennessee in 2024.1 The last time it would have made sense for a Roman Fleet to have been approaching the coast of Numidia with violent intent, realistically, would have been during the Jugurthine War (112-106) and the last time it would have made sense for this large of a fleet to have done so would have been the Second Punic War (218-202, again, we’re still BC here).
One gets the sneaking, terrible suspicion that in writing this script, someone mistook BC for AD on some dates, because the film is supposedly set between 200 and 211 AD, but the opening battle would make some sense if we were between 211 and 200 BC.
Regardless of how it happened, I think it’s not quite a harmless error. Students and the general public often have an idea of ‘Africa’ including ‘North Africa’ which ‘others’ it very strongly from the European tradition. I regular see students confused, for instance, that one of the most important early Christian centers in the Roman world is in Carthage or that Roman emperors like Septimius Severus came from North Africa. The fact is, North Africa was a relatively early Roman acquisition which was quite well integrated into the Roman world.
This film reinforces that incorrect perception of a ‘barbarian’ Africa in ways we’re going to be unteaching for the next decade.
The Ships
But then, of course we get a big battle, in which the Roman fleet, under the command of Marcus Acacius attacks the ‘town’ of Numidia, which were told, somewhat fantastically, is the ‘last free city in Africa Nova.’
Again, I must stress, this film takes place between 200 and 218. It wants a major theme to be how ravenous over-expansion is weakening the Roman Empire, but the problem here is that Rome’s rapid expansion largely ended with the reign of Augustus (31 still BC – 14 AD). The last significant expansion at all for Rome was under Trajan (r. 98-117) a century prior (with the conquest of Dacia, 101-106). We’ll come back to this, but one of the key problems here is that Ridley Scott wants to make a movie about the decline of the Roman Empire, but appears to have functionally no understanding of why or even when the Roman Empire was to have ‘declined.’
In any case, the film opens with a massive naval assault on a fortified town. And it is kind of astounding just how much is wrong here.
We can start with the premise. The scene shows a large Roman fleet of massive warships with big siege towers and catapults making a direct assault on the seaward wall of the town.
And in that basic premise we already have a bunch of problems, beginning with opposed landings were exceptionally, fantastically, incredibly rare before the modern period. I can only think of one opposed landing of note in the whole of Roman history (Caesar’s first landing in Britain in 55) off the top of my head, despite the Romans doing quite a lot of naval operations. Ships, after all, tend to be faster than armies on foot and so can simply choose an empty beach. You are even less likely to opt to disembark in to prepared fortifications, because, again, you can simply land somewhere else. What has happened, so far as I can tell, is that every director watched Saving Private Ryan (1998) and wants to do the Omaha Beach scene (and hasn’t necessarily the self-reflection to ask, “can I out-direct Steven Spielberg‘s most famous scene?”). But that sort of opposed landing is a creature of modern warfare and modern armies and simply doesn’t happen much at all in the pre-modern world.
The Roman fleet that performs the assault is several different stages of wrong. These are the wrong ships for quite a few different overlapping reasons. The first problem is that the ships we see are large, multiple-banked oared warships, ‘polyremes’ we might say. The Romans did use such large warships during the Republic. But by the second and third centuries, Rome has been the unquestioned, unchallenged master of the entire Mediterranean litoral for a long time and its fleet has changed to match. In 200 AD Rome no longer builds large warships of this type, but instead has a navy composed of smaller coastal patrol ships called liburnians, named the Dalmatian peoples who originally came up with the design. Most notably, liburnians were ‘aphract’ (‘uncovered’ or ‘undecked’) in their design, meaning the rower’s space was uncovered (as opposed to a ‘cataphract’ (‘covered’ or ‘decked’) warship, which had a flat upper deck for marines). Indeed, it is something of an irony that Roman victory in the Middle and Late Republic, using ships in the Greek design tradition (triremes, quinqueremes and so on) brings an end to that shipbuilding tradition – later medieval galley warships derive from these smaller patrols hips, scaled up into the late-antique/early medieval dromon. So this fleet should be composed of lighter, uncovered liburnians, rather than the larger and heavier ‘decked’ warships of the Middle Republic.
But even if this battle scene were in the Middle Republic, there are also problems. Now, as W. Murray, Age of the Titans (2012) argues, there were, in the Hellenistic period, large warships designed effectively as siege platforms. Murray argues that with the emergence of larger warships, we see a split of their roles: the triremes (‘threes’) of the Classical period become essentially lighter escorts and cruisers, while heavies polyremes – quadriremes (‘fours’), quinqueremes (‘fives’) and hexaremes (‘sixes’) instead come to make up the core of the battle line of fleets engaging other fleets, with their heavier builds designed for frontal ramming which a lighter trireme cannot do safely. And then the very biggest of these ships – septiremes (‘sevens’), octeremes (‘eights’), enneremes (‘nines’) and deceremes (‘tens’) and larger2 – were intended as flagships to anchor the center of the line on and massive siege-support ships to engage enemy harbor defenses. So the idea of an ultra-jumo oared warship designed for siege support isn’t insane, though it is about two centuries too early for this film.
Except there’s a problem here, because one interesting thing about the Hellenistic period is that while the Romans adopt the Greek/Carthaginian ship tradition (which was shared), Rome and Carthage almost never deploy those massive ultra-polyremes. Roman and Carthaginian flagships will occasionally be ‘sixes’ or ‘sevens,’ but Roman and Carthaginian fleets seem to be all ‘threes,’ ‘fours’ and ‘fives’ otherwise.3 The reason seems pretty simple: neither power has much of any use for them. The Romans expect to take fortified cities by storm (the standard Latin word for ‘siege,’ oppugnatio, really means ‘assault’ or ‘storm’ – the Romans rarely starve out defenders) by land and so the value of a fleet is to cut off a garrison from reinforcement and resupply while the Romans build up their works to get over the walls. Carthage prefers more often to fight defensively, but on the attack seems to have a similar approach; Hannibal has no problem storming fortified towns (like Saguntum). With that approach, engaging harbor defenses is unnecessary – a fleet that can anchor off the port (and resupply from the army on land) is enough.4
If you can reliably – and goodness the Romans are reliable at this – take fortified towns from the landward side, gigantic, expensive floating siege platforms aren’t all that useful. You simply roll up with your fleet, drop the army off a day or two’s march away from the city, then shadow them up the coast as they move in and invest the place, before sealing the port, while you resupply from the siege camp.
So these are a type of ship (siege support polyremes) the Romans broadly don’t use and in the wrong period for anyone to use them. So it will surprise no one that they’re also wrongly designed in any case. When we see the inside of these ships, we ought to see densely packed, vertically stacked rowers, either in two or three levels.5 Space inside these ships is very tight and the annoying thing is Ridley Scott almost certainly could have filmed inside one, as there is a single modern trireme, the Olympias, built in 1987 under the direction of J.F. Coates and J.S. Morrison. The ship is long in the tooth these days, but has been out a few times (I know folks who have been on it) in the last few years and I have to imagine for a movie like Gladiator II it could have been possible to film on it. Instead, the interior of the ships we see is comparatively open, more like the ships of the sword-and-sandals Hollywood epics of the 1950s and 60s.
And that gets us to the battle.
Equipment Potpourii
I want to start with the equipment. Now I can’t go back through the scenes with detail, so I can only talk about what I noticed, but essentially the problem is that the equipment on both sides is a pastiche of around four or five centuries of military equipment. I honestly found myself wondering if the production crew for Gladiator II had looted the prop room from HBO’s Rome, because there was a fair bit of stuff that seems like it would have been at least somewhat costly to make and one assumes that somewhere in that process, someone would have asked, “hey, is the stuff we’re making for the film actually more expensive and complex than this era’s equipment?”
First, to be clear, our period dates are: Classical (480BC-323); Hellenistic (323-31BC); Principate (31BC-284AD) and our movie takes place in 211(ish)AD. So anything that isn’t from the principate is way off.
The most glaring example I noted were the defenders of ‘Numidia’ wearing pretty clear examples of phrygian helmets, a Hellenistic helmet-type generally associated with elite units like Alexander’s hypaspists.6 We see less of this helmet by the Late Hellenistic period (though it was still in use) and it seems pretty well gone by the end of the Roman Republic. In short, it’s a helmet that would have already been somewhat out of place in HBO’s Rome, two and a half centuries before this movie takes place.
Likewise, a lot of the Numidian defenders (and later some Roman soldiers) wear mail. That’s fine, lots of mail in the Roman Empire, but they wear a distinctive pattern of mail with an extra layer over the shoulders, what we call ‘shoulder doubling.’7 When the Romans first get access to mail armor (the lorica hamata) in the late third century BC,8 this is the form, with the doubled shoulders, they encounter (from the Gauls). Early in the imperial period, however, the pattern changes a bit: the shoulder-doubles drop away in favor of a tunic of mail, often with ‘false sleeves’ (a flat flap of mail extending over the shoulders and upper arms). This is, for instance, the pattern we see on the Column of Trajan (c. 113), a century before this film. Meanwhile, many of the Roman soldiers in the same scene wear, appropriately enough, ‘so-called’ (its a modern term) lorica segmentata, the famous Roman segmented armor; that’s period appropriate.
So essentially we have the equivalent of a scene where special forces operators are fast roping down to fight the Taliban with cocked hats and muskets: a chronological jumble across multiple centuries.
Finally, as an aside: the film absolutely loves black or blackened armor. So that we know the Praetorians are Bad Guys, their armor is always dark in color, but also the Roman legions have worn, dull armor and most of the Numidian armor is also dirty and unpolished. Likewise, Maximus’ breastplate and Acacius’ breastplate are both muscle cuirasses in black with just some shiny metal detailings. But one thing we know quite well in antiquity is that it was not black armor that was impressive or frightening, but bright, shining well-polished armor. You wanted the enemy to see the gleam of your armor, because that was intimidating: it meant you were wearing lots of expensive, high quality, well-maintained equipment.
Homer, for instance, has a touching moment in the Iliad where Hector on the walls of Troy reaches for his infant son Astyanax but Astyanax shrinks back, afraid, as Homer puts it, “of the bronze and the horsehair crest” of Hector’s helmet (emphasis mine, Hom. Il. 6.469). Onasander (Strat. 28) notes that “advancing companies appear more dangerous by the gleam of weapons, and the terrible sight brings fear and confusion to the hearts of the enemy.”9 The fear caused by shining, polished armor (and weapons and shields) is a commonplace in ancient literature and we can be quite sure it was common practice for the Romans to polish the exterior of their armor and then probably oil the surface to deter rust rather than other processes that would dim the shine, like blueing or blacking.10
But to me the biggest problem is actually one that Gladiator II shares with the battle scene in Gladiator: bows.
Bowguns Are For Monster Hunter
Now don’t me wrong, the Romans did employ archers, sagittarii in their armies. Just not Roman archers; Roman Italy doesn’t seem to have ever had much of a military archery tradition – the missile weapons of choice were javelins and slings – and Roman armies in the Republic were overwhelmingly ‘shock’ based. So when the Romans employed archers these were auxiliaries, non-Romans (at least until 212) employed to support the Romans. Given that the legions were effectively entirely heavy infantry and made up half of the force and that the remaining auxilia were split between numerous kinds of units (heavy, medium and light infantry, archers, slingers, skirmishers, shock cavalry, bow cavalry), as you might well imagine, sagittarii tended to be specialist units rather than the mainstay of Roman armies.
Instead, the Roman army was a shock based force. Missile weapons – javelins, slings, bows, darts and so on – were support weapons, but the expectation was always that a Roman army won by marching into contact with the enemy and engaging with swords. As an aside, while some sloppy and bad scholars like to represent shock-based armies as a uniquely ‘western’ feature, most agrarian pre-modern armies have a significant shock-component, often a dominant one, for the clear reason that you can turn a lot of farmers into soldiers very rapidly by handing them spears and then marching them into contact with an enemy. But even by those standards, the Roman army is a very shock based force.
This poses a problem to uncreative directors or once-creative directors gnawing at the long, frayed ends of their creativity at the tail end of decades of making first great and then more often mediocre movies because what they’re used to are modern firearms and thus modern fires-based militaries.
You can see this sort of problem really clearly if there’s a whole lot of “people holding other people at [cross]bow-point” as if they were carrying a gun in the film (Game of Thrones is absolutely lousy with this trope). And indeed, in Gladiator II the Praetorians around the Colosseum are all armed with bows and at points in the film hold the crowds at bow-point, which doesn’t really work. After all, if the crowd charges you with your bow, you will get maybe one arrow off, which won’t stop the crowd. Unlike a modern firearm, you cannot put enough ‘fire’ in the air to prohibit the crowd’s advance and unlike early firearms, bows do not have bayonets. What did pre-gunpowder societies use for crowd control? Spears.
In the large battle scenes in both Gladiator films, Scott’s fires-based mentality translates into Roman armies that employ massive numbers of archers and enormous amounts of catapults. We all, I assume, remember the enormous barrage of arrows, bolts and bombs in the battle scene of the first Gladiator film. Before the legions advance in that battle, the Romans absolutely pummel their ‘barbarian’ foes with arrow and catapult fire for about a full minute of screentime in a five minute long battle sequence. And the second film continues that trend: the marines on the decks of the ships are a handful of legionaries and a ton of archers, with lots of catapults. The sky is thick with arrows as the Romans storm their way into the fortified town.
Those arrows are, of course, all fire arrows and equally the catapults are throwing exploding incendiary munitions. Lloyd (Lindybeige) already has half a dozen videos or so complaining about this sort of thing, so I’ll just note that while the Romans did have incendiary arrows, javelins and catapult shot, they don’t have napalm. Their incendiaries are much less powerful than this and so incendiary rounds are not about burning people or ships but about setting fire to things like wooden palisades and roofs, usually over the course of a longer siege, not to kill anyone but to force the defender to waste the manpower putting out fires that could be used to man walls, repair fortifications or engage attackers.
So the way Ridley Scott represents the battle is that the attackers approach in ships with big siege towers on their bows, ram up against the walls while deluging the town with massive amounts of arrow fire and then rush off of their towers to capture the city. And that’s just not how Roman sieges (or battles) worked.
Instead, what we might expect a Roman army to do is disembark its main force somewhere up the coast from the target city and march on it; the fleet would mirror its progress at sea (so it could resupply from the army on the coast) and complete the siege by closing off the port. The Roman army would arrive at the town and build a fortified marching camp, and then usually a defensive inward facing ditch or wall to contain the defenders around the whole town (this is called circumvallation, “walling around”). If enemy reinforcements are expected, a second defensive line, facing outward (contravallation) would also be built.
Then usually the Romans are going to build a ramp (called a ‘mole’) up the side of the wall of the city. This is where you get archers and slingers and catapults deployed: they’re used to suppress defenders on that specific section of wall, while the legionaries provide the labor and security to build the ramp (or in some cases, advance a ram to the base of the wall to batter the wall or a gate down). The purpose of towers was not to storm up the wall (they’re very vulnerable for that) but to provide elevating shooting positions for archers who could then shoot down on the wall to prevent the defenders from disrupting the mole construction. Finally, once the wall was either breached or surmounted, the Romans would shock their way through with their usual heavy infantry tactics. This – a siege assault – by the by, is where you would see a testudo (the famous Roman turtle-formation), not in an open battle.
This kind of shock-centered warfare, in which missile weapons are supplementary, rather than primary, can be appropriately cinematic. I think HBO’s Rome showed this really quite well, with solid battle lines advancing and meeting and getting a sense of the carnage that happens where they come together (although the Roman pilum is sadly absent from Rome‘s battles). Another director who used to be better at this is Ridley Scott in Kingdom of Heaven; the battle scenes in that film are over the top (and for some reason Scott’s armies never move in formation, but as big screen-filling clumps of men with lots of superfluous flags) but we do see efforts to repeatedly force a breach in a wall using shock (and the massive of arrows in the air are a bit more excusable in the context of that period).
The arrows-as-guns problem continues, by the by, when we get to the Colosseum. We’re going to talk a bit in Part II about gladiators as highly specialized professionals, but gladiators didn’t generally use bows (the Romans knew, as Ridley Scott does not, that bows are boring)11 but nevertheless our hero Lucius manages to get ahold of one in the naumachia scene to fire up at the imperial box. As an aside, having lots of archers in your naumachia is a terrible idea, because that kind of spectacle in which most of those involved are going to end up dead is going to be performed by prisoners or criminals under death sentences, who have nothing to lose if they, say, fire their arrows into the crowd. Or at you! But likewise, arrows claim the lives of three major characters (including fully 66% of all female speaking roles in the film), which is a really high number for a society that didn’t use bows very often.
And I think part of the problem here are mistaken assumptions about the lethality of archers and other missile weapons. In films, when the archers volley, tons of men all go down at once, in visual language that seems taken directly from films about the gunpowder warfare of the 17th-19th centuries (e.g. the American Civil War or Revolutionary War). But archery volleys simply aren’t that lethal: they’re much, much easier to defeat with shields and armor. As a result a heavy infantry formation that was decently cohesive could effectively always count on being able to march through a heavy arrow barrage into contact. Indeed, even at Agincourt, the paradigmatic ‘archer victory’ in the West, the dismounted French knights were able to march through the longbow volleys just fine into contact with the English men-at-arms and indeed initially seem to have pushed them back in the center (before being pushed back in melee fighting).
This flawed ‘fires centric’ vision of pre-gunpowder warfare shows up in a lot of pre-modern Hollywood battles (and video game battlefields), but I notice it has begun to seep pretty deep into the public conception of how ancient armies worked, with the ‘Total War‘ standard formations often being very missile heavy and I find students often assume that a sort of ‘default’ pre-modern military force features a ‘back line’ of archers that are at least if not more tactically significant than the contact infantry or cavalry. As a teacher, that creates a real challenge, because I effectively have to deprogram those assumptions about how battles even work before descriptions of battles or summaries of standard tactics begin to make sense.
Well, so far, not so great but alas we are not really out of the opening sequence of this film. Next week, we’re going to look at the action in the back…80% of the film…in Rome and see how Gladiator II treats Roman politics.
Badly, it turns out.
- That’s unfair – to get the chronological gap right, it’d have to be settlers arriving not in their 2024 Chevy Tahoes but rather in their 2044 Hovercars.
- At one point the Ptolemy IV builds a tessarakonteres, a forty! though it probably was more for display than fighting.
- Polybius presents the quinquereme, the ‘five,’ as the standard warship of both navies, especially during the First Punic War (264-241) but based on the finds off of the Aegates Islands, we’ve begun to suspect Polybius might be fudging here and triremes, ‘threes,’ might have remained more common than he lets on. That said, this is an area of considerable uncertainty – many questions and, for now, few answers. That often happens when, as in this case, we get archaeological finds that don’t seem to fit our previous understanding (the rams we’ve found are smaller than we’d expect).
- We’ll come back to this in the new year, I think, with a look at the naval tactics and capabilities of the First Punic War, because I think it is easy to miss what these ships and navies are and aren’t capable of, given the technology they have.
- Assuming they’re Hellenistic-era polyremes. If they are period-correct liburnians, there shouldn’t be an ‘inside’ for these rowers to be in; they’d be open to the air.
- On this last point, see P. Juhel, “The Regulation Helmet of the Phalanx and the Introduction of the Concept of Uniform in the Macedonian Army at the End of the Reign of Alexander the Great” Klio 91.2 (2009).
- Note that in some patterns, this is actually doubling, a whole second layer of mail to protect the shoulders, and in others these are essentially a yoke pulled over the shoulders to fasten the armor, in the manner of a tube-and-yoke cuirass. In the latter case, there’d be just one layer of mail over the shoulders. The Romans seem to have preferred the former method of doubling, but evidence is limited.
- On this, see, uh, me “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022).
- Trans. Illinois Greek Club, which you can find on Lacus Curtius.
- On this, see Sim & Kaminski, Roman Imperial Armour (2012), 65-78.
- Unless you are the Mongols.
Possible typo: “First, to be clear, our period dates are: Classical (480BC-323); Hellenistic (323-31BC); Principate (31BC-284AD) and our movie takes place in 211(ish)BC. So anything that isn’t from the principate is way off.”
I thought you said the movie was in the 200s AD. Or are you mentally retconning it to the appropriate time frame for Romans attacking Numidia?
Ah, thanks, fixed!
Oh, please please do the ancient naval warfare post/set of posts. At least from a total amateur’s perspective, I do not understand why even dilettantes like myself who are interested in ancient warfare seem to often give naval warfare short shrift. Especially since the number of people involved often dwarfed that of land warfare by an order of magnitude; presumably because it’s much easier to mobilize poorer people who might not be able to afford body armor but can afford a place at the oars.
But most people seem to forget it exists at all, or if they do pay attention to it, consciously dismiss it as unimportant. I don’t understand how you can take one look at say, anything related to Classical Greek warfare and come away with that absurd conclusion.
Indeed, there’s very little talk of ancient naval warfare beyond, perhaps, Salamis. This is reflected in the ancient source material too, especially for the Romans. But there are also simply far, far more land than naval battles; I’d struggle to name a dozen major ones in antiquity even using wikipedia but could probably recite land ones all day long. Naval battles could be larger (because doing logistics by ship is easier, and navies always have ships) but not by an order of magnitude – a standard Roman consular army is ~20,000men, and even the largest sea battle (which includes a whole army on transport) caps out at ~150,000 in the sources and is probably an exaggeration. Most naval battles would have been a bit larger than a land battle of equivalent importance, but rarely by a full order of magnitude. If you don’t want to wait for Brett to cover this, I can recommend some reading:
Grainer’s Hellenistic & Roman Naval Wars (2011) that covers the chronology and tactics of naval warfare in the period in question.
Pitassi’s Hellenistic Naval Warfare and Warships 336-30 BC (2023) is almost exclusively about the ships present during the first century of that period, and especially on guesses of what they’re rowing layouts might have been.
Pitassi’s The Roman Navy (2012) is an encyclopaedia of close to everything that’s known about the Roman navy from 500 BC to AD.
Murray’s Age of Titans (2012) mentioned in the article is a thesis (only partially convincing IMO) about what the purpose ships greater than 5s were for. But the appendices are a fantastic collation of source material.
And, in terms of books written in the last couple of decades and covering ancient naval warfare post 300BC ish, that’s pretty much it AFAIK.
In the vein of pedantry, 150,000 is an order of magnitude larger than 20,000. It’s counted by 6 digits rather than 5. Anything 10,000-99,999 is on order of magnitude, and anything 100,000 to 999,999 is the next order of magnitude. That’s how that functions.
Apologies if I’m teaching you to suck eggs about that, but people often use ‘order of magnitude’ in a colloquial sense to mean ‘not significantly larger’ when there is a clear definition of what ‘order of magnitude’ means (and thus implies some form of significance).
I hope you won’t mind me pendanting your pedantry – I, like most physicists I know, use “within an order of magnitude” to mean “within a factor of 10”. It’s the same idea as taking the number of digits, but is relative to the relevant reference point rather than fixed at powers of 10. Your definition would have 1,000,001 be an order of magnitude away from 999,999 which is not exactly super helpful in communicating whether a thing is much bigger/smaller than another. And if we’re defining terminology, helpfulness is really what we should be going for. So “within an order of magnitude” of 20,000 really ought to mean between 2,000 and 200,000.
Stunning double-pedantry 😉
Fully accept this. Makes it a much more useful term, as you describe. Will use this going forwards!
Except it should be “pedantry” rather than “pendantry”—pedants are not pendants.
To metapedant you, the point of comparison would not be 20,000. The post you replying to didn’t actually specify the size of the largest land battles, it merely noted that naval battles were not an order of magnitude larger. The Battle of Cannae seems to have involved more then 100,000 soldiers so it would be in the same order of magnitude as the battle of Cape Ecnomus where we can be pretty confident the numbers did not go past a million.
(Fingers crossed someone can keep this chain going and we can get a metametapendant).
Metametapedant
Unless you’re referring to how you’re hanging around.
They were not an order of magnitude by size, but could be so by casualties. Warships were so lightly built and so unseaworthy that a storm could sink a whole fleet – and all the people on it. Likewise, most of the rowers on a rammed ship drowned, and retreat was harder at sea.
> Grainer’s Hellenistic & Roman Naval Wars
This book is so depressing. Pretty much every chapter starts with “Here’s a list o sources for our era, but they all cover this battle poorly…”
Lol, that’s honesty for you!
In a film full of baffling anachronisms, the bows as guns annoyed me the most. It feels… lazy? Like a fight choreographer that’s used to pistols and carbines from a western simply doing the same stuff in the Roman era, and replacing the probs with bows at the last second.
The only way I found the film passably entertaining was not to think of it as a film set in historical Rome, but as a film with modern characters/ ideals /action in Roman fancy dress. More toga party than toga. Definitely disappointing not to take the opportunity to explore actual Romaness, but I guess modern audiences don’t want to shift outside their modern perspective. But if you’re going to cater to that, then having real historical names and fixing the dates simply becomes misleading.
“as a film with modern characters/ ideals /action in Roman fancy dress”
Ah, like the 1996 Romeo and Juliet film, which is word-for-word Romeo and Juliet but with modern clothing and environment.
To be fair, that approach could be used at least semi-universally for a lot of historical mass media.
Or possibly more like A Knight’s Tale.
Well, more like the opposite of that. In the Romeo and Juliet movie, the clothing and environment is modern but what they’re saying and doing isn’t.
True. Different sign, but same equation. Ignoring the directionality, it’s an anachronistic story dressed up in fancy dress of a different time.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Star Wars is Space Kurosawa. Harry Potter is Magical Whodunnit. Both are good stories. It would be good if people paid a little more attention to their fancy dress costumes though, but then again if we didn’t hold that view we wouldn’t be commenting on this blog!
I think a key point is whether you _know_ that’s what you’re doing. A Knight’s Tale or Romeo and Juliet are both good examples of films doing it consciously and deliberately.
And if you’re willing to honestly communicate it with the audience. A knights tale gets panned for the “we will rock you” scene, but it very nicely conveyed that while this story was going to use the artifice of medieval times you really shouldn’t take it too seriously in terms of accurately conveying a setting or sequence of events. It was more concerned with emotion, and only using history as a means of conveying themes.
So of course the entire film critic establishment seemed to hate it.
Idiots.
Ah, what they’re saying isn’t modern, what they’re doing really still seems to be.
It’s been said before on the blog: most filmmakers mostly look at other films. Hence the standard tropes of any premodern setting:
– random leather wrap on the forearm;
– brown, black, and/or dirty clothes for everyone (except barbarians, who wear fur pelts), possibly except elite Romans;
– horses work like motorbikes except you can fit them in your inventory;
– chaotic melee with the two sides mixed together, with an extra dramatically half-backflip dying from a weapon strike at first collision (possibly except pikemen, where an extra runs himself onto a pike);
– since armor is so useless, helmets are for extras;
– arrows extremely penetrating (see above), but also on a very high arc (because, partly for safety and partly so the extras can draw them, the bows have a very light draw weight) and holding people at arrowpoint;
– but the high arc allows the grenadiers, pardon archers, to support the melee from behind (if somehow the two sides didn’t mix so thoroughly as to make this inadvisable);
– archers and thrown melee-spears, never slings, dedicated javelins, plumbata, or other dedicated throwing weapons (e.g. francisca bouncing axes);
– wounds instantly fatal or fully incapacitating, except to the hero, who is only upset but not hindered as long as he has at least 1 HP remaining;
– boiling oil (not hot water or hot sand, or room temperature bricks);
– charge the castle at full running speed (lest the upgrade ticker to MG bunker fills), escalade, no pavise/mantlet, no ditch, no hoarding, no wooden railing on the back edge of the wall (so that people can fall off, the hero onto a soft thatch roof), yes immaculately complete stonework, chest-high crenelation;
– thin and/or shallow thatch roofs, which burn very slowly, whereas handspan-thick beams light up like matchwood (as do living trees covered in lichen, sopping wet from fog);
– “napalm” and fire used for traps (setting mud on fire in “Barbarians” Teutoburg forest scene);
– very “gunpowder magazine” explosions;
– everything lit with torches on the wall, from rarely-visited confined spaces to courtyards during the daytime;
– interior decoration very sparse and/or faded (hey, I actually went to a museum and copied how it looks; what do you mean, 800 years ago it was brand new?);
– intimidating army in rectangular blocks, order of battle at least a hundred men deep;
– battleplan drawn in sand;
– all banners the same;
– sports coach speech;
– either no baggage, or an arsenal of spare swords plus some barrels and crates (at least we can reuse the props from the ship unloading scene);
– no foraging (or agricultural devastation);
– marching a mile wide and spooning the fellow in front;
– social structures are either “none, officially we are all equals here, in practice everyone usually defers to Bob” or “extremely rigid 1D who-outranks-whom with everyone (except the good guys) infinitely obedient to those who outrank them, with everyone instantly notified of new ranks being granted” with nothing in between. Indeed the two can overlap (“missing king”). There are either no dispute-resolution and no deliberative advisory/decisionmaking bodies, or if they exist (“court” and “senate”, respectively) they are puppeted by the baddie.
Actually, I’ve recently come to think the last one is concerning. The rest are on the level of “they are lazy, incurious, projecting modern assumptions, and teaching object-level incorrect lessons”. Not good, but even if everyone (potentially even historians) became convinced of some stupid falsity, that would have negligible effect on the current world. However, with the last one — what do the “modern” assumptions projected (and, implicitly, taught) actually match to? As far as I can tell, they match to the social structure of anthropologists’ favorite peoples (e.g. Yanomamo) and to gangs. Which societies, running on deterrence by reputation (and the reputation-defending violence required for it), are sort of the floor that populations of the great ape homo sapiens are incapable of falling below. Everything less internally violent and/or more prosperous depends on a “tech tree” more or less rooted in common-knowledge-creating dispute-resolution, a.k.a. courts. (Fancy term for “ends feuds by putting everyone not yet involved onto one side as opposed to letting the two sides recruit with roughly equal success”.) Above that the tech tree branches in several directions: recordkeeping/literacy; imperial consolidation and infrastructure (road&post&coin leading to marketization, famously including of farming); advisory institutions starting with “council of elders”. But while roadless subsistence farmers can have courts, the reverse isn’t possible, murderous feuders can’t maintain roads and trade. Maybe we should have some films where a Bronze Age itinerant judge calls together the village, and either solves the subplot, or replaces it with the “90% of the village comes together and pummels the unrepentant outlaw and his one idiot buddy into the ground” subplot, so that everyone can get back to living less-unhappily ever after.
I wonder if it’s film makers thinking other films are accurate, or them knowing that it’s what their audience is familiar with, and so deliberately going for what they’ll recognise. If a director want a visual way of telling their audience “those guys are praetorians,” and the audience expects praetorians to wear purple and have head-crests, then they give them purple cloaks and horse-hair crests. It’s more important (to film directors) to communicate to the audience effectively than to educate them about historical facts, and that means reusing tropes the audience is already familiar with.
In an interview some years ago, a Norwegian moviemaker talked about a movie he’d made which included a flashback scene set in the Viking Age (“Gåten Ragnarok” of 2013). Apparently he’d originally planned to do the scene with authentic costumes, according to the best archaeological knowledge and interpretation available, but showing some test footage of this to a trial audience led him to go for standard issue Hollywood barbarian kit instead – apparently the trial audience responded a lot better to that.
I’ve heard similar stories in other contexts, although I can’t quite remember where. Honestly, it’s kind of funny that in a thread where people are accusing directors of being arrogant; they are supremely confident in their directing skills from the comfort of their armchair.
A lot of directors can be safely assumed to be overly powerful idiots *and* the actual meat of the film is made by people whose only reference is the visual shorthand of other films.
There’s also a bit of classism-the typical Hollywood director or producer thinks that most of the audience are mouth breathing invalids. So if by chance some consultant tells them that the “have all the extra run at each other” battle model is stupid they immediately go to assuming that the audience wouldn’t understand or care about anything more complex, along with it being more technically challenging to convey via film.
This isn’t by any means contradictory with point one, mind you.
And of course, the biggest part is that conveying complex events is more technically complex. It’s hard to concisely film a bunch of scenes that make it clear that your army is building or built a series of siege works that need to be defended against sallies and archer fire over a period of months so they can build a rampart up to the wall…in 10 minutes. It’s why miniseries are sometimes be better on historical settings even if they have the budget of a shoe-string, they just have more time to communicate things.
I have no expertise but I’m pretty sure they could do an excellent job of it with a little imagination.
King Stately: – Ansom, try an escalade. Ossomer, your men circumvallate, starting with the trebuchet stands. Tramennis, set guards on the works.
(Saying this takes no more than half a minute.)
(other things happen, hasty escalade fails, council of war)
Ossomer: – My king, the trebuchets are being erected as we speak, their palisades are completed.
(Saying this takes no more than half a minute.)
Later, Aragorn and Gimli sally and don’t quite manage to damage a trebuchet before they are driven back.
This is the best part about starting from history. Reality is tremendously rich in details, many of which are natural plot hooks. This results in a story that “couldn’t have happened otherwise”, and is firmly set in its era. By contrast, starting with the emotional drama and then draping the standard tropes on it tends to show the method of production, especially in that a lot of the draping could be trivially replaced with the tropes of a different setting.
Basil, I admire your confidence that a) the average director knows what those words mean and in turn b) that the average director thinks that his audience knows what those words mean.
@Basil Marte
There’s a lot of telling rather than showing in that example. More to the point, what’s the point of showing a failed attempt at destroying a trebuchet? Or of telling us someone is digging a ditch? Does it advance the plot? Does it develop characters? Does it explore a theme? If you’re telling a story (rather than making a documentary), those have to come first.
Maybe you can write a sally during a siege that does all of those things, and having it spread out over months doesn’t ruin the pacing of the film or the character arcs, but it’s a lot harder than you make it out to be. And it would require the whole film / series to revolve entirely around it. Would I like to see something like that? Sure! But I don’t think every show that has a siege needs to be solely about the siege.
And if a scene doesn’t advance the plot, develop characters, or explore a theme; then it’s not worth having. Historical accuracy is less important than story telling. Films are unrealistic in myriad of other ways: nobody goes for a bathroom break, people fall deeply in love over a few days, scientists solve an impossible problem outside of their field in a week, hardly anyone ever eats (even in scenes set at a meal)! It’s part of the language of cinema to cut, compress, and condense.
@ajay: the technical terms aren’t necessary. You can still use them, though — just as audiences pick up in stride the meaning of “wyvern” or what have you, they can identify the referent of of at least one new term per scene. But using 1000-word-English descriptions instead is also viable.
@holdthebreach:
What a footsoldier does is to swing his weapon at the enemy; what an officer does is to swing his soldiers at the enemy, if you will. Getting this right is how you can show a commander being good at his job; the unwillingness to even attempt it is how we get “authority equals asskicking”. But we know it can be done very well: Star Wars has the boardroom scene and little bits such as “intensify the forward firepower!”. If that nonetheless counts as “telling”, so be it.
I would think that if a film has a siege at all, that’s usually a central element of the plot; the film is already about the siege, as you put it. Obviously not every movie with a siege needs to elaborate it further, but doing so — having an organic subplot of the siege — should be a natural option. In this case, refer to the two LotR sieges. In particular:
– A sally is a mini battle scene with all the inherent options. (Characterization: heroic sacrifice to give time for the rest of the group to retreat is obvious. But you can use the “skill checks” inherent in a raid to have a character overcome a flaw — the hesitant committing to the attack, the clumsy/motormouth taking the care to not blow their cover too early. Or Gimli consenting to be tossed.) It’s also a way to have a character captured/maimed/killed and see how the social graph adjusts around their absence/transformation.
– If there was a disagreement before (did someone say “we came to fight, not to dig”?) this shifts their relationship.
– It builds the setting where sieges are a well-understood art. Evidently filmmakers love their “clever” tactics. How about wowing the viewer by drawing on the results of a community of practice operating for centuries?
– It builds both sides as not flat cardboard playing pieces for the author but as (multitudes of) living characters who have things they want and try to achieve them. “Both an opportunity to show, and natural consequence of doing, your work.” It is easier for the audience to get invested in humans rather than puppets.
– The theme (or is it characterization?) of a competent general (whether embodying staff+XO+SNCO functions himself, or following good advice, and in any case delegating well).
– I straightforwardly disagree. There is a whole “documentary with plot” genre, the highest-profile examples of it are about aircraft accidents. Some of them use an Information (“detective story”) plot, consequently jumping quite a bit in the timeline, others (e.g. MentourPilot) generally use an Event plot, mostly following the chronological order. I find many of these “documentary with plot” works to be riveting (but then, I also read this blog; I’m a nerd). Going completely overboard and showing our protagonists’ troubles with the march/camp/baggage/logistics would be …brave, but “war movies” with a sometimes surprising amount of realism are also absolutely a genre that exists (with some big-name successes among them). Incidentally, “The Martian” is adjacent inasmuch as its plot is predominantly “man vs. nature” — its success didn’t require more than incidental human-vs-human tension.
>> I would think that if a film has a siege at all, that’s usually a central element of the plot
There’s all kinds of irony in saying that as a comment to a blog post about Gladiator II and its opening siege that barely feature at all in the rest of the film, either thematically or narratively. Obviously if you make a whole film about a siege then, yeah, details about sieges might matter. But not necessarily, the Iliad is set entirely during a siege, but siege works don’t matter, and what battles there are involve a highly stylised and personal approach to battle which is far more Hollywood than late-Bronze / early-Iron age history. Hell, even the Trojan Horse is a very Hollywood-esque idea as an showy but impractical method of winning a siege without doing the boring stuff. I don’t think it would be much improved by having Agamemnon telling an officer to dig a ditch, and having that officer telling off soldiers who are complaining about it.
>>“The Martian” is adjacent inasmuch as its plot is predominantly “man vs. nature” — its success didn’t require more than incidental human-vs-human tension.
Yes, not all films are the same. Ridley Scott knows this – which is why he did stick to a comparatively strict realism when he made The Martian. In man-vs-nature, nature is a character and see needs to be developed in a believable way. [I say comparatively, because a blog by an engineer or a biologist would have a lot of complaints about the accuracy of that show]. That the same Ridley Scott didn’t do this with warfare in Gladiator (I or II) shows that it’s a question of artistic vision. You might disagree with that vision in Gladiator II, like I do, but that’s very different from saying it arises from ignorance, stupidity, or incompetence like some commenters are doing.
Incidentally, that comparison with The Martian makes me think that a film about a gladiator where the antagonist isn’t an evil emperor, but the amoral, impersonal machinery that keeps the city of Rome ticking could be interesting. I’m seeing it in the style of early Soviet cinema. It could even be made to explore very modern themes of loneliness & isolation, and how the camaraderie of shared violence ends up as a trap of masculinity. If you wanted to make it political, set the whole thing during the time of Milo and Claudio, and contrast the “good” violence of gladiatorial games with the “bad” violence of street gangs; the message being that the dichotomy is flawed – with a possibility for allegory vis-a-vis modern gang/police violence and the penal system. I can even imagine a scene where gladiators disagree about whether Spartacus, from a generation prior, was right to lead a revolt the way he did (dialogue written by Tarantino, naturally).
See ‘Reality is unrealistic’ and ‘Aluminum Christmas Trees’ on TVTropes for some examples of why this is so
There was a Robin Hood movie in the 2010s that took the “bows as guns” thing and ran with it so hard I’d swear you could hear slide racking noises when they pointed them at people. It was so absurd that for me at least it looped around to being funny and enjoyable, although unfortunately the rest of the movie was pretty forgettable.
I don’t know if it’s what you’re thinking of, but there was a Ridley Scott Robin Hood movie in 2010.
Which, as I recall, featured the French attempting an opposed landing on an English beach, using wooden WW2-style landing craft.
So “Ridley Scott wants to do his own version of the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan” is an ongoing thing…
I seem to remember that Marcellus’ siege of Syracuse involved “warships with big siege towers and catapults making a direct assault on the seaward wall of the town”. But doubtlessly there are other issues with the scene (not having seen the film, I’m reliant on our host’s judgement here).
Assault from the sea was achieved in Hellenistic warfare, I think by Poliorcetes. The basic motivation was that sea walls were small and not sophisticated so an assault from ships might get a foothold. The main deterrent was that sea walls were protected by some iron chain which closed the port or shoals close to shore.
Richard Lion Heart pulls a successful amphibious assault in Cyprus. But he manages to put his men into boats and row into the harbor against an inept garrison.
AFAIK, sea assaults were almost always part of a joint sea-and-land attack. Either aspect could lead while the other blockaded, or it could be a simultaneous push. What I’m not aware of *ever* happening is a sea-side attack without any troops on land to blockade, feint, distract, or support. Especially with the fleet seemingly sailing straight from open waters without re-provisioning first.
In Tyre the navy supported the attack across the mole, and eventually sneaked some men in. At Rhodes, the initial attempt where by sea, which when thwarted turned into mostly a blockade while the main attack took place from land. The 3rd Punic war involved intermittent assaults from both land and sea. Similarly for the many, many sieges of Syracuse, from the Athenian one of the 5thC to the Roman one under Marcellus.
‘and hasn’t necessarily the self-reflection to ask, “can I out-direct Steven Spielberg‘s most famous scene?”’
I think it’s pretty much a requirement in Hollywood to be a director that you have the ego to answer (at least looking in the mirror) “Of course I’m better than that hack.”
Directing does require a large ego.
“‘Total War‘ standard formations often being very missile heavy”
As an aside to our host, this is partially an impact of how high skill players engage with the game’s campaign challenges on high difficulties. The trend has been to arbitrarily up enemy unit attributes, particularly melee attack and defense skill, at high difficulties. For reference these represent hit chance and deflection chance. A unit with 30 melee attack attacking a unit with 10 melee defense might have an 75% hit chance every animation cycle-it can be more complicated (attacks from a models behind get melee attack bonuses). There’s a cap on how much defense matters, but this in effect just means that heavy infantry always takes some casualties from peasants on normal difficulty; it doesn’t influence my point.
However none of these defenses apply to either a portion of the charge damage from Cavalry (which also boosts melee attack to extreme degrees) or the damage of missiles.
This means that even shock units highly specialized at melee combat can and do lose to peasants with sticks (I wish this was an exaggeration) and the only reliable sources of damage are siege, archers, and cavalry. So high skill youtubers and other players end up implementing incredibly archer centric forces, abusing line of sight, firing modes, angles, formations, expendable units, and flanking to wipe out entire armies with massive arrow fire, often with singular units of fodder to screw with the pathing AI to hold enemy units in place for more arrow fire.
This is most noticeable with factions that already have poor infantry, like Parthia in Rome games. Your infantry is literally worthless against legendary AI, the most buffed units you have will lose to literal peasant levies with sticks. It’s actually most disruptive to factions like Rome, which ends up not being able to fight as it did historically because sending legionnaires into Celtic warriors or whatnot is so unreliable, and simply takes so long even if you do win. Rome ends up being fine because it has so many other advantages, but it’s still noticeable.
The only other point I have to add here is that the newer Total War game, Pharoah Dynasties, is actually quite enjoyable, and even has a somewhat nuanced view of the bronze age collapse. It models the collapse as a gradual increase in faction wide penalties to settled factions and buff to nomads as city centers along the major trade networks (called “Cult Centers” because religion is modeled) are destroyed. These penalties are associated with an increased chance of disasters like crop failures and plague, which in turn accelerate the collapse and lead to more advances by the nomad factions. The inciting incident is still an invasion and political disunity rather than climate change (although why the people are invading is open to question) but you end up with a pretty solid system to capture the feel of a civilizational crisis. The one thing that isn’t modeled that probably needed to be is the tin trade in bronze manufacturing, but the resource model is already more complex than other games which encourages trade (which, in turn, suffers from collapse).
It’s a bit too easy to prevent right now, but it’s a good try at a system that produces an outcome.
Combat wise infantry is generally lighter with linen or other cloth armors except for elites who wear bronze, and a lot of combat is focused on Chariots which act as harassment and shock units. The effect of terrain is actually severe enough that you can manipulate mud, forests, or hills to counter-charge and overwhelm chariots that do something stupid. Weapon wise most factions have a core of archers, spearmen, chariots with bows, and often some form of club, sword, or axe infantry, although it varies enough that you end up using native auxiliaries to supplement your forces if you want something unique.
The one downside is that, to your point, it appears that archers and slingers are a bit to strong, although that may actually be realistic given the period-I don’t know enough. The main culprit appears to be the overly responsive nature of total war combat alongside with units being able to volley at targets scouted by other units with indirect fire, which leads to some absurdities like half a stack of archers all hitting a single unit they knew the location of because of telepathy and instantly killing everyone in it.
All that said, not terribly relevant to your discussion. Just thought I’d share because you said the magic words.
If I was redesigning Total War, I think the two key changes I’d make to missile weapons are:
1. No indirect fire, period. Maybe with an exception for siege artillery.
2. Substantial nerfs to damage and accuracy with range.
The aim being to make long range fire harassment only, if you want to try and actually destroy units with missile weapons you need to deliver concentrated fire at close quarters.
Ideally then pair that with substantial tweaks to the morale system: taking casualties is much worse for morale, coming under fire without taking casualties still puts a debuff on it.
It would be nice to see your unit command options limited by circumstance. Like, undisciplined units under fire don’t instantly break…but you can only charge the offender, retreat, or hunker down until morale breaks. A realistic order mode that’s more context versus line of sight limited, where you still play the hand in the sky but are limited by what humans are willing or able to actually do under combat conditions.
As for indirect fire, it should be either impossible or hilariously bad depending on weapon and context. Pharaoh dynasties actually has tools for this-archers will by default contextually fire depending on line of sight, but can be told to either arc their shots or direct fire-but arcing fire is far to effective. Aldi men shoot bows through each other.
Pharaoh also does actually have what seems like reasonable lethality for how light most units are, if the arcing fire problem was fixed. Heavy infantry with shields can basically ignore frontal fire with some minor casualties but are genuinely rare, light infantry with shields care but as long as you respond shooting them isn’t cost effective, and unarmored troops have a bad, bad day. Although even then chariots should probably do more harassment morale damage; as is they seem best as battering rams that shoot arrows randomly, the archery component isn’t effective enough to matter.
Based mostly off my experience with Three Kingdoms, I’d extend point (1) further: Ranged siege artillery should be able to destroy towers (probably) but not walls, with walls being vulnerable only to blockade effects and rams. (which should gain the ability to actually damage more than just gates)
#2 is already the case, actually. One of the Total War youtubers (Zerkovich, I think?) did a video showing how your missile units are significantly less effective at max range compared to 50% of max. However, one can basically ignore this because ammo tends to be plentiful enough that you don’t need to worry about wasting it on targets that are too far away
At least in the iterations of the series I’ve played, the penalty is nowhere near as big as I’d want it to be – I’m proposing like a 99% debuff at max range. Although I’d also consider making javelins immune to it, or substantially less affected.
I don’t think there’s any change that would be better than removing the arbitrary twenty unit cap so end-game armies, especially in Warhammer, don’t look like a couple of elite units and then a bunch of monsters, exotic war machines, and famous heroes. It’s less egregious in the historical games, but it’s still silly that armies end up being composed entirely of the very best elites that faction has to offer.
I actually quite liked the workaround to this implemented by mods like Divide et Impera. That started tracking individual ethnicity and class populations within your cities, and restricting recruitment of certain units to their relevant classes and ethnicities. These classes and ethnicities recovers as a percentage modifier on the current population in a city, if I remember rightly.
As the elite units from nearly all factions are taken from a very small demographic core, you could either run out of Spartiates (to pick an example not actually used IIRC) before you can make an army of them, or go ahead and make an army of them but totally cripple that sub-population’s growth so you run into a demographic crisis for your most powerful troops (especially if you end up getting them all killed).
It’s another degree of micromanagement that likely wouldn’t go down well with the majority of TW players, but I rather liked it.
That definitely helps, and the Steel Faith mod for Warhammer has a more manageable system where everyone gets the Tomb Kings model of buildings increasing your cap on non-basic units, but lifting the unit cap would allow for actual historically/thematically accurate battles and make quantity over quality an actually viable strategy. If they wanted to make it more fair they could have technologies and General skills that increase the cap or make it much easier for multiple stacks to coordinate.
They don’t do this because of player feedback from the first Rome TW, where soldiers were 1-to-1 city population. Just for fun once I evacuated an Italian city to London. It also required a southward expansion strategy for the Scythians, because fighting other barbarians didn’t give you enough population to simultaneously recruit and pay armies.
Now, because of the way that slavery was abstracted, you could ‘reload’ a city with new population. Spartans (were an easter-egg unit but one player faction could recruit them) and any unit that required a building you hadn’t yet put in all your cities were something you could exhaust the local population building, and I did have the experience at least once of sailing an army to Egypt to deliberately capture a new population of Spartiates because I’d run out.
They don’t even really have to do that: Thrones of Britannia had a fairly interesting recruitment system where your units were recruited from regenerating pool of units of different classes, the key was that they regenerated at different rates, so even if you could pay for them you would not have enough elite units to fill out your armies in most circumstances.
And here I though my comment about Command & Colors was going to be the most nitty-gritty gaming comment!
I do ask myself, why bother playing at such high difficulties when such amounts of cheese and metagaming are required to succeed? (I ask as someone currently playing both Steel Division and Unity of Command 2 on Easy).
I do feel the approach to increasing difficulty by buffing enemy troops isn’t the way I’d do it.
I understand the issue with raising the number of armies an enemy can produce (it gets boring chewing through 8-12 enemy armies that aren’t particularly challenging to defeat), though I must admit I had more fun in Rome 1 fighting never-ending full stacks of Egyptians than I did in Rome 2 fighting 3 of them and then absolutely nothing over the entire rest of their territory.
I’d probably do something to buff an AI opponent’s economy so they can produce more armies of more expensive troops, then raise the unit cap for their armies or something. So each individual unit is like-for-like strength to mine, but I am always fighting at a significant numerical disadvantage because they can field 25-30 units in an army and I can only field 20. Add that to allowing the enemy to field more armies as well (either economically in Rome 1, or through increased army cap in Rome 2) so I have to fend off threats from multiple directions and you end up with a much more difficult situation in a campaign.
Personnally I like playing increasingly disadvantaged positions. In Vicky 3 I instantly clicked on the Sikh empire and had to learn by trial of fire to keep from being swallowed by the British. Did a Oyo playthrough next. I can also tolerate arbitrary difficulty when it’s justified, like in Warhammer total war when baseline humans elites really do such that much compared to, say, basic orcs.
The problem with total war is it’s gamified to the extent the base mechanics are too fair. Even playing as the Epirus and trying to take on Rome you only need a basic understanding of how to use hammer and anvil tactics to smash them. You don’t even need to be particularly fast, your phalanx can actually just beat Roman infantry, despite never really managing that in reality. This is firmly a game mechanic thing, and it’s part of the game identity, but there are parts to fix.
In particular the games really ought to get past the limits of unit formations for all skirmishers and the ability to indirect fire. It has all sorts of effects like making skirmish mode a pure trap in every release because of formation movement forcing units to stop firing while being advanced on, and letting archers way over perform in way too deep formations. The games actually backslid a bit since medieval 2 here; archers used to suck unless they were direct firing but were too finicky with unit delays, line of sight, and skirmishing to use for most people, so instead they can aim and fire volleys by telepathy and melt armies so that they will actually shoot what you click on. It’s way too simplified.
The unit card system is also a trial to modeling combined arms units like Chinese weapon squads, Assyrian shield/archer teams, or early modern Tericos. There really seems like a more granular system is needed; it’s not like they’re going to meaningfully iterate on graphics anytime soon, might as well increase modeling complexity with new computer components instead.
Me too on the disadvantaged positions. My favourite play style in Rome 1 was a sort of ‘scattered colonial empire’ approach where I’d conquer all of the little islands and a handful of ports scattered across the Med, Black Sea and Atlantic. That would inevitable get me into half a dozen different major conflicts wildly isolated from each other, and almost always at a severe local manpower disadvantage. Sufficiently challenging even at lower difficulties.
Was looking forward to this even more in Rome 2, but they nerfed transport ship speed so hard it totally ruined it. I could walk from Spain to Egypt via southern Europe and Asia Minor quicker than I could sail there.
I suppose what I’m saying is you could keep the gamified unit parity if you wanted, but up the difficulty through campaign-screen mechanics. Though by all means fix ranged troops. It was less their lethality that irritated me, more that they only seemed to carry 10 arrows with them to battle. Reducing their lethality would allow you to up their ammunition without unbalancing things.
the gameplay of total war is too arcadish. Aside from warhammer, in most TW games hammer and anvil is the only tactic needed. As soldiers can run across the battlefield and formations can turn direction very quickly, there is no difficulty like in real life. Some other games like ultimate generals can model battlefields more realistically.
I’ll note that the misplaced lethality of missile-based-infantry is likely tied to the compromises the gameplay has to make with the effectiveness (or lack of in the game) of shields and armour for all units.
Using Rome 2 and Attila as points of reference, one reason why all missile units (bows, slings, javelins and crossbows) tend to pack more of a punch beyond what they should is because otherwise factions that don’t have an easy access to armoured units will run into severe problems when dealing with factions that do armour up their workhorse medium infantry, which are essentially all state factions in the campaign map, with Rome itself being the most notorious of them all. While there are some non-state factions that do have reliable mediums (the Iberians for instance), there’s no mechanism for them to keep up with the other advantages that state factions have like disciplined units and/or access to battle formations.
Attila attempted to solve this issue by taking the upgrade mechanic from the previous game, which was used to simulate the changes that the now debunked Marian reforms did to the legions, and extended it to all factions that climbed the technology tree, allowing the “barbarian” factions to replace their infantry for better mediums in time. Even then, this is a sidestep because the problem remains that missile infantry is still too effective overall.
Now, this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be useful, that we know about the balearic slingers, the cretan archers or the velites means that missile infantry did have an importante job in these armies. It’s just that their role would be more contigent if the game was more realistic in its engagements.
Though granted, if it came to that then regular battles wouldn’t end like potential bloodbaths but, as has been pointed out in this blog before, with maybe a 10% casuality rate overall.
Good points. Another thing is that, AFAIK, the battles in TW tend to be way too lethal for the winning side in prolonged melee-heavy contests, hence the tendency to try to do as much killing as possible before it comes to that.
That said, mods somewhat fix the archery issues, especially strictly historical ones like Stainless Steel. Sending archers there against anything that has any armour is usually an exercise in futility. Especially on higher difficulties with all those defense bonuses.
Now I’m having flashbacks to Civ II. “How did that bronze age pikeman shoot down my flying wing stealth bomber?!?!?!”
The Roman army models (and the battle simulation engine) for the first Rome: Total War were designed in 2003, for history television shows; those shows were greenlit specifically because of the popularity of the first Gladiator, and I don’t think Creative Assembly would have done a Rome game if Gladiator hadn’t happened in 2000. It was the first TW game that didn’t feature gunpowder and the Mediterranean setting remains the only place they’ve done gunpowder-free games.
In addition to the difficulty factors you cite, the development of combat in TW reflects a desire to have the battles *look more like the battle at the beginning of Gladiator.*
From what little I’ve played of Shogun: Total War or Medieval: Total War, it did not seem like gunpowder combat were selling points of those games at all. Neither of the games’ tutorials had you handle gunpowder unit, IIRC – the first tutorial for Shogun had you use bowmen on top of a hill to take out a unit of enemy spearmen.
In both they are mid-to-late game units, and Medieval does some fun things with bombards too. Of course, Shogun only has one ending video: mass crucifixions and a ban on all guns, but earlier guns are the reward the player gets for letting missionaries in and that is a significant choice. They are hard to use, with a flat angle of fire that forces you not to put them behind much, but if you can find the hill from the tutorial they really do shine.
And now I’m going to be thinking about horde elephants all day.
The other problem with melee infantry in Total War games is that it doesn’t offer interesting tactical options that you can use to overcome a disadvantage. Ranged units can focus fire and prioritize targets. Cavalry can outmaneuver slower units and strike isolated and vulnerable targets. Infantry can only stand in a line and trade hits with an enemy, but any attempt to concentrate force using melee infantry tends to be too slow to matter. When battles in total war are decided by infantry, it usually means the battle was decided on the campaign map by who brought the most or best infantry, and not in the tactical layer. Since the core gameplay of Total War revolves as much around being able to overcome the odds in battle as it does around trying to stack the odds in the campaign, melee infantry needs to take on a support role for the more tactically flexible parts of the army that can actually punch above their weight with clever guidance.
(And to be fair, there is some historical accuracy to this. Roman infantry was decisive because they tended to have far better armor than most of the infantry that they fought and because Rome could field more armies than their enemies, allowing Rome to win both battles and wars through attrition. One might compare the Roman Republic to a human player with all of the AI cheats. Macedon, on the other hand, did tend to use their infantry as a holding force so that their cavalry could make a decisive strike on vulnerable enemies, a tactic more familiar to veteran Total War players.)
Part of this is that terrain has historically barely mattered in the series. Playing Pharaoh it’s actually incredible how simple changes like how unit weight interacts with mud and forests let’s you implement some actual tactics, like envelopments, flanks, and force concentrations.
Still, the arcade nature of formation s cripples a lot of tactical depth here, in a way without obvious fixes in total wars current paradigm.
I actually wonder to what extent terrain doesen’t matter and to what extent the game is just bad at showing you this: Even in Warhammer the terrain debuffs (from something as simple as higher ground) can be quite significant it’s just that they’re not directly *shown* (until the last patch)
One interesting thing about Total War is that you often see multiplayer being a bit less ranged centric than single player campaign stuff: Largely because of the simple reason that multiplayer is all about winning one battle, while campaign is about winning one battle with the least amount of casualties. (and thus abusing range, where enemies can’t hit you back, becomes a lot more important)
Putting together all the comments about how wrong the battle setup is, I realize that it only gets past the planning stage because it’s so far in the past that no one cares/the fact have no awareness with the general public.
Now I’m kind of sad that I won’t be around in a couple of centuries to see the Blockbuster production where the WWII Western Allies stage their surprise Assault on Leningrad using Zeppelin air mobile operations.
You can watch Enemy At The Gates to get an idea of that, though
“Herr commandant, the British are parachuting from their space bridge, they’re laser targeting their muskets on our biplanes in support of their Ukrainian allies!”
“Nein! The partition of Poland cannot be stopped! Deploy the Zeppelin carriers and airdrop our jet planes directly on top of them! They shall learn to fear the Stuka Zero!”
Reminds me of the video game Crimson Skies. There, the Interwar U.S. balkanized into various corporate factions, with sky pirates flying in zeppelin flagships to prey on merchant ships. Most missions started with your character, pirate captain Nathan Zachary, launching from the mother zeppelin in a propeller craft, by default a push-propeller X-wing biplane in the style of the XP-55 Ascender, and most missions ended with you docking back into the zeppelin. ‘Twas kinda cool, to be honest.
I’ve yet to see any accurate portrayals of geologists on screen (small or silver). And there are millions of us running around. Same with computer programming and most medicine–the latter is bad enough that it adversely impacts medical students to a fairly large degree.
Turns out most people don’t care about accuracy in their entertainment. Sure, it’s easy to make it accurate (“Less bows, more swords”), but you need someone actually care before it’s even discussed. And since most of the time accuracy isn’t directly connected to the themes of the story, or the story itself, accuracy can easily be sacrificed when it comes time to cut things. Remember, most directors aren’t reading blogs by ancient historians; this stuff requires research, which isn’t free.
It can be done. “Master and Commander” is fairly accurate from everything I’ve seen and read. But it doesn’t have to be, and it takes a special person to care enough about it AND be in a position to do something about it in the movie industry.
I recently came back to playing Valkyria Chronicles 4, and there’s a battle where your (non-paratrooper) line infantry platoon does a parachute drop from ship-launched balloons! It’s not literally historical, but given how much the series is magitech WWII, I’m tempted to argue that we’re already getting there a bit.
There’s a roleplaying game called Diana: Warrior Princess, with the premise that someone centuries in the future made the equivalent of a TV adventure series featuring famous 19th and 20th Century figures, with the same rigorous attention to historical accuracy as the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess applied to Classical history. (The supplement Elvis: The Legendary Tours features “bass player John Lenin, guitarist ‘Senator’ Joe McCartney, mystic roadie Bob ‘The Builder’ Marley, frontier law-woman and medic Billie ‘Doc’ Holliday, and martial artist and shaman Jean Claude Van Halen.”)
We can only admire its creator.
Don’t worry, AI will soon make that for us.
In the Equipment Potpourri section, I think you mean “211(ish) AD” (not BC).
Typo hunt:
“liburnians, named the Dalmatian peoples who originally”
“named after the”?
“First, to be clear, our period dates are: Classical (480BC-323); Hellenistic (323-31BC); Principate (31BC-284AD) and our movie takes place in 211(ish)BC.”
” in 211(ish)AD.”?
“a ‘back line’ of archers that are at least if not more tactically significant than the contact infantry”
at least equally?
Possibly “named by”
“our movie takes place in 211(ish)BC”. An easy mistake to make 😀
I have heard something about this before, but would not the Praetorians be more likely to be wearing white tunics? Bleached White cloth being a status symbol.
The dawning realisation of ‘oh god, we’re going to have to deprogramme a load of junk assumptions people have gathered form this’ is probably my only major gripe with the new Dune films. Specifically about its treatment of the Harkonnens compared to the books.
In the books, Herbert is very careful to describe the Harkonnens as people. Horrible people, sure, but people nonetheless. He makes it very clear that these are just (mostly) regular folks like you and I, operating in a society shaped by manipulative and self-interested leaders. This encourages and enables these regular people to do horrible things. You can make arguments all day long about how they chose to go along with it, but you can’t argue that they are irredeemably less than human. This is very much influenced by the post-WW2 environment Herbert was writing in, and is all the better for it.
I was really hoping that the films would bring this through strongly. They seemed to have a lot of other post-colonial nuanced conversations moving in the right direction, but stumbled at the last hurdle with the Harkonnens. Depicting them as faceless, inhuman oppressors without a jot of humanity is a childish view of an oppressor. Oppression doesn’t occur because 90% of a given population are irredeemably evil. It occurs because regular people live in an environment where doing these things is encouraged and rewarded societally. That may include a number of genuinely evil people at any given stage, but psychological research has consistently demonstrated that regular people will generally just go along with things if they’re told to do it.
I would have loved to see little snapshots through the film humanising the Harkonnen troops. Just have two of them in the back of a shot sharing a cigarette, of showing a picture to another one. Have a bored guard in a quiet area bouncing a ball against the wall, or a pair quietly playing cards. Have one of them saying goodbye to their crying wife and child. By all means, show Gurney to be absolutely right about them being brutal. Do not shy away from the oppression they exact on the Arrakeen natives. But for love of all that’s holy show him to be wrong when he describes them as ‘not human’. Show us that it is possible for humans to do this to other humans if we don’t think critically about who is telling us to do them.
The reason this is important is it helps fight the natural tendencies towards tribalism and othering in conflict that drives so many problems we see in the modern world. From wartime atrocities enabled by one side viewing the other as sub-human, to deep political divides where any measured debate is seen as an attack against ‘my side’. Films and other forms of media are a really powerful tool for getting concepts like this into everyday public consciousness, and opportunities like this need to be missed less. It’s literally written in the book for the director to use!
> In the books, Herbert is very careful to describe the Harkonnens as people
Are there any particular parts you are thinking of when you say this? Because I dont remember any moments of Herbert using a soft touch to depict the Harkonnens.
None of the depictions that I talked about. Those were more pitched at how a visual medium like a film might achieve this, rather than written media.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the first book (where most of my impression on this was formed) so can’t pick out any particular instances at the moment. Perhaps it’s a fabrication of my general interpretation of the themes of the book, and later comments by Herbert about Paul and the Atreides ‘not being the good guys’ and the general theme Herbert wanted to portray as being the danger posed by charismatic leadership. Will see if I can re-read it to verify that, it’s about time I gave it a re-read!
From what I can remember, there’s a fair amount of emphasis placed on the manipulative schemes of Baron Harkonnen, buying the adoration of his people through provision of vices and pleasures (contrasted against the Atreides approach of projecting integrity and a ‘royal right to rule’). He talks to Feyd Rautha at length about his plan to manipulate the people of Arrakis to hate Rabban as a prelude to installing Feyd as a beloved saviour. To me, this manipulation by authority humanises the people on the receiving end of it (knowing the results of the Milgram study, which pre-dated Dune by 2 years, though how widely it was known I don’t know).
Will definitely flick through for more concrete examples.
[ “I would have loved to see little snapshots through the film humanising the Harkonnen troops. Just have two of them in the back of a shot sharing a cigarette, of showing a picture to another one. Have a bored guard in a quiet area bouncing a ball against the wall, or a pair quietly playing cards. Have one of them saying goodbye to their crying wife and child.” ]
The Rings of Power did this with the orcs. Very many viewers were furious at this, citing such a scene as another proof this production was the most heinous thing that has ever taken place.
True.
I feel people are more tolerant of messages being portrayed in media if the media itself is actually good. Triply so if the messages run counter to the general societal zeitgeist (of whichever particular subset of society you’re part of).
For instance, people complained vociferously about orcs being portrayed as more nuanced in Ring of Power, but it was so well received in Warcraft 3 that it started a whole renaissance of ‘cultured orc’ tropes.
Criticism is often cumulative I find.
Say we want to produce a piece of media that depicts Spartans as they actually were (lazy, decadent slavers and child-abusers who sold out Greece to the Persians to maintain their life of luxury). It would have to be a really, really good piece of media to get people thinking about it in a way that wasn’t just a knee-jerk reaction. If we made something that was 95% ahistorical, with a rubbish plot and shoddy props, then it makes it very easy to just brand the whole affair as ‘so rubbish as to be beneath our attention’ and avoid thinking about any tough questions it asks.
Dune is a really very good piece of media. There was an opportunity to bake in some nuanced messages about this sort of thing that could slip into people’s thinking without them knee-jerk dismissing it as ‘bad writing’. That opportunity was missed, in my eyes.
One component of quality is consistency with existing works in the same (fictional/”brand”) setting. There are previous Warcraft games, and 3 doesn’t contradict them. Indeed, the writers anticipate this criticism with the character of Grom, implying that many orcs share his opinion and have to be convinced. There are also previous works set in Middle-Earth and, um, in those it is word of author that the orcs have been created/transformed by the god of evil. And that Sauron is an angel of evil, categorically above mortal beings’ ability to politically outflank.
If Rings of Power tried to create its own setting, or used an existing setting with orc/goblin characters that can be passed off in a sympathetic way if you want to (e.g. some Warhammer Fantasy Battle waagh-bosses look a little bit like drug lords) they could have their antivillain, or sympathetic villain, orcs.
The bigger problem is that it’s unwilling to engage with the small amount Tolkien actually wrote on non evil orcs, which was ironically best handled by that “we don’t want to go to war today” song from the animated film. Tolkien did entertain the idea, but it was subtle and only made it’s way into the books in the smallest ways.
The orcs are evil because the process of making orc troops makes them evil. Sauron controls them, and orcs without Saurons obvious control still maintain his systems of power internally. Non evil orcs are likely possible, although they may not be orcs then. Most likely Tolkien would say they’re only possible if not in an orc society, just like Saurons orc society leads to a bunch of evil men or men compelled to evil ends, or Sarumans petty imitation led to similar orc-like behavior in even hobbits.
But the way the idea was implemented part of that insane Sauron incognito plot ruined any larger messages about the industry or institutions of evil that might have spoken to something found in Tolkiens musings on morality, however faint.
Not wanting to go war does not make you non-evil. Especially when it’s clear you don’t care that the war’s being fought, you just don’t want to get hurt or killed yourself.
Not wanting there to be a war is stronger evidence, but both not proof and not in evidence here.
I think people often conflate ‘dehumanisation’ with ‘evil’, but it’s not the same thing. It’s understandable, because ‘evil’ things often get dehumanised, and one of the ways to humanise them is to show they have capacity for good (I sort of did it myself in some of my suggestions, which won’t have helped make my point clear).
However, you can have 100% evil humanised characters. You can have dehumanised good characters. They present differently, but are just different symptoms of the same cause (in my head at least).
The ‘we don’t want to go to war today’ song is a classic example. I agree with Mary that it’s not evidence of them not being evil per se, but it does humanise them. Animals may be scared of dying, but it takes something quite human to complain about it.
Another way to do it, and I think where I was getting the sense of humanised villains from Herbert’s Dune, is by making their evils very human evils. I don’t think Herbert ever shows Harkonnens not being evil, but the way they are evil is petty and greedy and lecherous and small-minded. The big name characters get a bit of this in the film (Rabban especially), but we spend (a little) more time with the mooks in the book that shows this extends past just the named characters.
The LoTR films give us an interesting set of examples here between the goblins of Moria on one side, and the Uruk-hai and Orcs on the other. The only times the Moria goblins are ever on screen is when they are mercilessly and relentlessly attacking the Fellowship, making faces and hissing at them, skittering down the columns in a bug-like horde, or fleeing in terror from the Balrog.
For the Orcs and Uruk-hai, we get the excellent little argument between Gorbag and Shagrat at Cirith Ungol over who gets to keep Frodo’s mithril shirt. Both unequivocally evil characters, but so much more humanised than the faceless, voiceless Moria goblins. Are they as humanised a villain as it’s possible to get? No. But it’s a spectrum, and they’re further along it.
I don’t necessarily think that the Moria goblins should have been humanised more, they served their purpose in the story absolutely perfectly. It’s just an example of how to humanise something without reducing their ‘evilness’.
A lot of the things in Warcraft are unattributed adaptations of Cherryh’s Gate Cycle, and in that the Horde is a mass-movement of climate refugees that have been taken over by a supernatural demagogue but are nevertheless quite human. With that background there was no way to really make those orcs function like the always-evil orcs of Middle-Earth.
“Not wanting to go war does not make you non-evil. Especially when it’s clear you don’t care that the war’s being fought, you just don’t want to get hurt or killed yourself.”
“The ‘we don’t want to go to war today’ song is a classic example. I agree with Mary that it’s not evidence of them not being evil per se, but it does humanise them. Animals may be scared of dying, but it takes something quite human to complain about it.”
I mostly agree with both, but on a larger philosophical point-that would probably convince Tolkien-the very human instinct to complain and moan and *communicate* their displeasure and will to live in comfort implies that they aren’t inherently and totally made to be evil, that something shines through of a larger and more complex capacity and self that needs to be brutally suppressed to maintain it’s malice.
I suspect Tolkien would agree with this as Sauron can’t actually create things, so anything evil had to be made from something once good. His capacity to change can’t be total-or if it is, it depends on his proximity. Nazgul never talk except to hurt. Orcs do.
@Dan I’d agree with you, and I think Tolkein would too. I think that might have assuaged some of the concern he expressed about his depiction of orcs.
I’d suggest that ‘evil’ and ‘capacity for good’ are different, inter-related concepts.
Not wanting to go to war isn’t evidence you’re not evil (though it could contribute), but it is evidence you have some capacity for good.
At that point I suppose we get into the philosophical weeds a little here about how utilitarian your concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are. How much weight is placed upon the result vs the intent when a judgement is being made. If that one was clear cut the legal profession would be a lot lower paid…
Why is not wanting to go to war evidence for capacity for good? All it requires is the judgment that you will get nothing better by going than by not going.
@Endymionologist said:
Both Warcraft and Starcraft are full of ‘unattributed adaptations of…’
The genius isn’t that they ‘borrowed,’ the genius is that they put it all together and made it work right. (In the same way that George Lucas’s genius was “putting it all together and making it work right”)
“Why is not wanting to go to war evidence for capacity for good? All it requires is the judgment that you will get nothing better by going than by not going.”
Because it implies your core values align in a way that makes that judgement possible. I’d agree if the judgement was purely pragmatic-we shouldn’t go to war because we can kill more later-but the orcs involved don’t want war, period. They don’t “own” it, it isn’t theirs, they’re forced to it. They want something *else*.
We might not associate their reasons with traditional virtues, it’s unclear in the text we have what those reasons are, but even laziness or cowardice also indicate values that aren’t motivated by malice. Tolkien doesn’t describe the hobbits laying about for no reason; it’s a simple and pure pleasure of all creatures to relax. They were designed to eat and live and be content. That’s…correct. Simple happiness is as close to pure good as we see in LOTR.
Even outside of Tolkiens framework basically all moral systems are partially founded on the fact that shared desires and experiences are the basis of empathy and understanding.
My point is that even the most banal of desires that doesn’t lead to evil indicates a capacity for good. Tolkiens orcs have shreds of that capacity, left over from before they are remade into weapons, a necessity to have servants whom are meaningfully independent. The only servants Sauron has that are indicated to be made of pure malice are his Nazgul, whom are basically hollowed sockpuppets filled with ambition, fear, pain, and hate in the shape of men, an analogy made literal.
That would require the something else to be a good thing. An Emperor who does not want to go to war because it would interfere with his luxuries is not good.
“Why is not wanting to go to war evidence for capacity for good? All it requires is the judgment that you will get nothing better by going than by not going.”
I feel like you’re not applying a sufficiently low enough baseline for the relative humanisation of fictional races/characters. Which if you think about it is fairly admirable when we’re talking about humanisation.
Frequently in media, we’re exposed to ‘evil’ characters and races who are so dehumanised as to not even be capable of ‘should I attack or not’ thought. They are mindless killing machines without a single drop of self-preservation.
If it’s a spectrum of humanisation from ‘mindless killing machine’ all the way to ‘nuanced character capable of considered thought’, having an ‘evil’ character state that they do not wish to go to war is a little nudge further up that spectrum. At some point on that spectrum, we will reach a point where the vast majority of people will agree that ‘this character has the mental capacity to be capable of good’.
This is what I mean by it not being evidence per se. In isolation, it is not, but it would be supporting evidence should there be other evidence alongside it. Where we’re starting at a baseline of high humanisation (i.e. with real-world humans), it’s not very much evidence at all. Where we’re starting at a baseline of mindless killing machines (i.e. many depictions of Always Chaotic Evil Races), it is evidence enough to bring them up from the floor in my opinion.
For me, this as a concept sits outside of the world of LoTR (for which Dan has outlined some arguments). It is generalisable to any medium you wish (real or fictional), should you wish to.
“That would require the something else to be a good thing. An Emperor who does not want to go to war because it would interfere with his luxuries is not good.”
I disagree. An emperor not wanting to go to war because it would interfere with his luxuries has, in fact, displayed a capacity for good. All the requested pieces to make a good moral decision are there-an impetus to a set of values other that aren’t in isolation evil and the capacity to reason sufficient to make rational choices. Even laziness can be used with reasoned empathy to form a benevolent worldview, and any reasoning creature can develop empathy. It can be rare, an instinct that isn’t commonly gone to, but its too vital a tool of navigating social interaction for any complex creature to lack. Hence if a creature has a desire or value that they can empathize with in others it can form the basis of what we’d call good. It’s a common misconception that a lack of empathy is a trait, when in truth empathy is a mode of thinking and all but truly malfunctioning people can empathize-evil persists because they choose not to, either because they are legitimately stupid and self centered or do not have desires that they can collaborate with others to achieve.
There are only a few desires I can think of that are incapable of being meaningfully good in that context-in fact the only two that aren’t trivial are a desire to dominate and a desire to hurt, both of which are rare but present in humans. Domination, bloodlust, and sadism can be put in their proper places, moderated by emotional circumstances, but without a larger value structure are pretty close to pure evil. They aren’t even that useful in the sense that they are or can be a part of human evolution or design. Humans controlled by a need to dominate are prone to be social parasites, often driving themselves and society to ruin as they try to benefit to the detriment of the species, and bloodlust and sadism are similarly destructive to the person feeling them in all but very specific circumstances. Orcs may be dominated by those impetus but they have others as previously established..
They’re still evil, in part because they aren’t human. Humans feel those malicious impetus rarely, unless trained to them-some of the most helpless people are so trained or inclined to need dominance that they cannot interact with society except to try to seize power, or so prone to violence that they default to it. But it’s rare in humans for those to be controlling; they’re disorders. These disorders are the default in orcs on screen, primarily sadism driven sociopathy, but they aren’t *ubiquitous*.
That leaves the question of if the average orc is a sociopath or malignant narcissist or if they have to be trained into it, which is really a question of how successful Sauron was at engineering those traits by birth or society. We simply don’t see anything in LOTR that would firmly indicate either, but my reading of the text is more consistent with the later being dominant as Sauron can and does export those traits to humans with his society.
No, not all the pieces are there.
@ianargent
“‘You are well-informed,’ said Morgaine […] ‘I will tell you what I told them: your land is invaded. Men and _qhal_ have come through the Fires at Azeroth, and they are a hungry and dangerous people, from a land in which all law and reason has long since perished. We fled them, Vanye and I…but we did not lead them here.’ […] ‘When we began our flight, it was not at Azeroth. It is your misfortune that the Shiua horde chose this direction, but that was not our doing. They are led by a halfling _qhal_ named Hethulu; and by a halfling man named Chya Roh i Chya; but even those two do not fully control the horde. There is no mercy in them…'”
– Cherryh, _The Fires of Azeroth_, ch. 3
I don’t think anyone will ever see this but I don’t want to leave on the impression that I was making a criticism, or even an argument. Blizzard transformably slathered fantasy pastiche all over what is frankly a very creative science fiction story. If I were making an assertion about credit and whatnot I’d be talking about how much EVE owes to Cherryh, and thus the whole MMPORPG scene descends from her, but I’d get my own blocg for that fight if I wanted it.
I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that the invasion of Azeroth was inspired by the invasion of Azeroth, even if the latter has orcs and the former brought horses.
“No, not all the pieces are there.”
I’m not sure you understand what the pieces of morality are then. Care to elaborate?
>There are previous Warcraft games, and 3 doesn’t contradict them.
They do, actually. They’re mostly fairly inconsequential retcons but there are a couple of them.
And orcs are *not* humanified in Tolkien’s books, in fact it’s the exact opposite. They’re not just ordinary creatures like any other that happen to do evil under charismatic leadership/when it’s way more convenient than the alternative, but bred and raised by a great evil force to be evil in everything. The show could’ve used the outsider men of Harad/Umbar/western wilds for that and it would’ve made vastly more sense.
Before complaining about complaining, you need to first understand what the complaining is even about.
See my comment above on how ‘dehumanised’ and ‘evil’ are often conflated but very much aren’t the same thing.
LoTR (both book, animated film, and live action film) actually do a fair bit of humanising of their orcs. You will often find them complaining, or arguing, or just having very human discussions with each other. There’s no doubt that they are still ‘evil’, but that is not coterminous with ‘dehumanised’. If there’s anything to learn from history, it’s that 100% real-world flesh-and-blood humans are fully capable of incredibly evil acts.
I will fully caveat though that I’ve steered well clear of Rings of Power, so don’t actually know anything about the contentious scene in question.
“I will fully caveat though that I’ve steered well clear of Rings of Power, so don’t actually know anything about the contentious scene in question.”
I’ve given up on it, being burned after legitimately giving it a shot, so you’re missing nothing in my opinion.
That said the cliff notes is that there is an orc child, meaning it’s showing you something you knew had to be true (no, orcs weren’t made from mud, at least in the final drafts) and the orcs are more or less manipulated into attacking the elves versus just being ordered to; Sauron’s control is more subtle and allows for orcs to have inner systems of belief and goals.
This doesn’t make them less violent or prone to evil. They still try to solve every single problem with violence, no matter who dies. This is extremely easy to manipulate, and Sauron does so with basically trivial effort. It’s honestly not a bad depiction of what a society designed for evil from basically human individuals would be like, as you can easily justify their actions but they are still the result of a deeply malformed culture. They automatically gravitate towards authority, solve their problems with violence, don’t respect other lives, and aren’t undertaking actions for rational reasons but rather out of emotive hate. Irrational, stupid, violent hate is evil…And human.
Of course the rings of power is written by incompetents, so none of this lands properly. It’s gross when it should be subtle, subtle when it should be bold, deviates from the source when it should be faithful, and faithful when it should deviate from the source.
Interesting. As a pitch that sounds fully reasonable to me, but as you say Rings of Power seems to be written by incompetents I would have bet my mortgage they would have screwed it up.
Glad I’ve given it a miss.
Counterpoint: in LotR only hobbit and orc background characters get to have hobbies, preferences and agendas.
Granted, those are very limited for orcs, but it’s written as more of result of culture they’re existing in rather than orcs being unable to be anything but archetypical evil.
Yeah that’s one of the ways you can have dehumanised ‘good’ characters. We’re just generally more tolerant of it I feel, probably as we find it easier to imagine ‘good’ characters being just like us off the screen. It can often be a necessary evil in writing (LoTR is already long enough without reading 30 pages of Gondorian card games and Rohan horse polo), but it’s part of the same spectrum that contributes to the same societal fallacy (that my group is unimpeachable and X group is irredeemable).
Further along the spectrum you get complaints about people writing ‘Mary Sues’, where ‘good’ characters don’t even have recognisable flaws. People tend to be find those incredibly irritating.
In between the two you have ‘good’ characters who are always 100% on task with doing the ‘good’ thing. Or, rather, when every single character we get is like this. I don’t mind that Aragorn is an unalloyed good if he is counterbalanced by more troubled characters like Boromir or Grima. Even Tolkein’s angels get this treatment with Gandalf vs Saruman.
Even then Return of The King’s first chapter does end with Pippin going on a picnic and having a lovely chat with his new Gondorian friend. Tolkien does spare some time to remind us that people as a rule have self expression, even taking time to pick people out of the background to do so. It is quite rare though; Tolkien has places to be!
It’s mostly a style thing that he moves past it quickly. I’m currently reading the Stormlight archive, and Sanderson, telling a similar story with similar scope and several shared themes just spent three pages describing two young men playing bridge. And it was fascinating! But very different and a completely different indicator of both the authors style and even society; Sanderson puts us in a rotating casts full first person viewpoint and it that this is what we look for says something about us.
The difference was that, as a supposed “adaptation,” ROP was under some obligation, or at least expectation, of not contradicting the original, in which Orcs were irredeemably evil. (This posed a problem for Tolkien, since it rather violated his catholic theology, but it’s notable that of the various ideas he conceived and rejected to get out of the box – “Orcs are clever animals,” “Orcs are ‘organic robots'” etc – not one envisaged them as being anything other than complete Evil Minions)
I think what you mention about ‘expectation’ is a key thing here. ‘Expectation’ need not be accurate for it to be powerful.
I understand that Tolkein struggled with reconciling his depiction of orcs and his Catholic theology. In the intervening 70 years of non-fiction media, I personally feel like his inner conflict has borne fruits in this regard that aren’t present in other, less conflicted authors’ works.
Objectively, we are only given evidence that orcs do evil things, that everyone else considers orcs to be irredeemably evil and that no orc we know about has been visibly redeemed. From this, many readers and viewers have drawn the conclusion that orcs are irredeemably evil. That’s not necessarily a surprising conclusion to draw, and it may well be accurate, but it is not conclusive enough evidence to state with 100% certainty. As counterarguments to this, we get the following:
1. We only have a small snapshot in time and geography of orcish behaviour.
2. Much of the information we do get is from their mortal enemies.
3. We are provided with glimpses that orcs do, in fact, have motives other than all-consuming destruction (self-preservation, loyalty, fear etc.).
4. LoTR’s broader cosmology includes an all-loving, all-powerful god.
5. LoTR’s broader cosmology states that evil cannot create things, only corrupt things that were once good. Ergo, orcs were once good, which suggests the possibility of their corruption being reversed.
Are these enough to conclusively prove that orcs aren’t irredeemably evil? Not for everyone I’m sure. But they absolutely do leave the door open in ways that many media since has not.
I’d argue that people’s interpretation of Tolkein’s orcs as irredeemably evil either haven’t taken the time to understand LoTR’s cosmology (understandable), are basing their understanding of LoTR’s orcs on an amalgamation of a number of similar depictions of ‘evil races’ (also understandable, and many of those are depicted as completely devoid of humanising features), or have switched their brain off before working through the logical conclusions of what is presented to us in favour of a more comforting worldview where we don’t need to concern ourselves with the redemption and forgiveness of evil things (understandable as well, but a little disappointing, especially from a Catholic point of view). Mix up all of that with RoP’s hamfistedness and I can understand why people had a knee-jerk reaction to it, but that doesn’t make it correct.
I’m undecided as to whether Tolkein would find this comforting or not. That the orcs he was concerned about are actually fairly middling in terms of their depictions of ‘always evil races’. I can’t tell if he’d find it comforting that his depiction had enough redeeming features to bring it up off the floor…or if he’d be disappointed at just how far below his orcs other people had managed to plumb.
Well, yes, with reservations.
We really have much more than a “snapshot in time” given that we also have the Silmarillion, which covers some four centuries after the return of the Noldor alone, and there and in all the Sil’s offshoots like The Children of Hurin et cetera, Orcs are consistent, and iredeemably bad. If we want to be harsh, Tolkien needed a population of mooks whom the heroes could slaughter without qualm. But that bothered him. After all, he conceived them as the Faceless Enemy Horde when he began his mythos as a very young man and then as a much wiser old man had to deal with what he had done.
While what you say about the sterility of evil in Tolkien is correct, and the Orcs’ origin was “good”, what that means is that the first Orcs were Elves, twisted and ruined (or Men, depending on which version you prefer). Orcs qua Orcs are always bad, and a problem Tolkien perceived was that while the originals may have been Elves or Men to start out with, what about their children and further descendants? Would God create souls for beings predestined to damnation? Of course not (JRRT naturally was no Calvinist). You might find interesting his long essay, or memo-to-self, on Orcs written in the late 50s and published in the 10th volume of the History of Middle-earth. He was as aware of the problems as anyone!
Shippey also has some interesting things to say about the Orcs (in the Lord of the Rings) being capable of conceiving good- he points out that yes, they are capable of it, but incapable of acting on it. They are rational, sentient beings, but seemingly condemned to make the wrong moral choice every time; or put differently, their love of violence, destruction and innate selfishness is always too powerful for any residual good impulses to overcome. Somehow I’m reminded- it’s not a perfect analogy – of Mafiosi who profess themselves devout Catholics.
“Objectively, we are only given evidence that orcs do evil things, that everyone else considers orcs to be irredeemably evil and that no orc we know about has been visibly redeemed. From this, many readers and viewers have drawn the conclusion that orcs are irredeemably evil. That’s not necessarily a surprising conclusion to draw, and it may well be accurate, but it is not conclusive enough evidence to state with 100% certainty.”
No, the conclusion wrt faithfulness to source material is that orcs *should be displayed as* irredeemably evil unless truly extreme reasons to the contrary are provided in the adaptation’s narrative. 100% certainty is a terrible requirement as it’s far beyond suspension of disbelief expected for any adaptation of any work.
As to your point-by-point:
1. Tolkien has chosen to write those descriptions of orcs and not any other. We don’t know with 100% certainty that he did it for a reason, but it’d be stranger to assume that wasn’t the case.
2. Those are specific examples that go with general out-of-story descriptions by author and in-story narration. All consistent in 1 direction.
3. Not contrasting with it though, and no true loyalty, only self-serving one. Evil isn’t the same as all-consuming destruction all the time that doesn’t allow for anything else.
4. And yet evil exists, in other forms that caused this one most of all. The all-loving, all-powerful god allows it to exist.
5. Not everything is within our power to reverse and in this case it’d be more like creating something new.
It’s more telling that Tolkien was aware of all those things you mention and decided that no, there will be no mention of a possibility of redemption of any orc (or Melkor or Sauron for that matter). For all we can discern, it’s put squarely Beyond The Realm Of Human/Elven Possibility as a feat by Lucifer-expy. Anyone in that tier of power and therefore who we should expect capable of accomplishing something like that is going fully hands off until rapture-expy.
I should probably caveat that, being British, ‘a little disappointing’ should be translated to a straight ‘disappointing’ for a US audience. If we’re only a little disappointed in something…we just don’t bother mentioning it.
Watching the movies, I got exactly that sense from the various advisors and servants, who act basically like someone would if commanded by some out of control extremely violent people. In the “Rabban kills advisors/Feyd kills servants” scene, the people involved come across as either acting like anyone else, or following orders, or attempting to stay in the background and not get noticed. Harkonnen soldiers look more brutal and threatening, but still in the typical range of soldiers. Arena does have the chanting crowd of course, which would be interpereted either way.
But everyone takes something different from what they see, and I can see where your post is coming from.
Yeah I can definitely get that. Would have liked to see more for my tastes, but I suppose I can’t argue it wasn’t present at all. Perhaps my ‘humanisation quotient’ is skewed from too much ‘grey area villains’.
I think part of my issue is in the visual language of the Harkonnens in the film. Very uniform, not a single hair on them, and greyish skin. Things that make it easy to dehumanise them. In hindsight, one of my favourite things about Lynch’s 1984 iteration of Dune was just how human the Harkonnens looked.
Evil yes. Repulsive yes. But in very human ways.
The more I think about it, the more I think the visual language is one of the real pillars of my complaint.
Dune (2021) is very much a post-colonial interpretation of Herbert’s Dune. It literally starts with an Arrakeen native stating ‘[I wonder] who our next oppressors will be’. Broadly this is a narrative I agree with, but is one that needs to be given the utmost care (in my opinion).
We are told fairly early on by Gurney that the Harkonnens are ‘not human’. At this point in the film I’m thinking ‘ah, I’m liking this addition. People always think of the Atreides as ‘the good guys’ despite Herbert stating Word of God that they are not. This is teeing up to show the Atreides have their biases and flaws as well, dehumanising their enemy’.
We see the Atreides rocking up to Arrakis in full military-oppression-mode. So far so good. We’re building notes of how, at least outwardly from the perspective of your average denizen of Arrakis, Chani’s words at the start seem quite accurate.
Then we actually get to see a Harkonnen…and they actually look less human than everyone else. Oh. Right then. I was rather hoping for them to look a bit more ‘Atreides in a different colour jumpsuit’. Again, justify the whole ‘cycle of oppression’ perception they’ve been building. Set up a springboard for a nuanced conversation after the film about whether or not the Harkonnens and Atreides were meaningfully different from one another, and if so how (Harkonnens were clearly worse in their actions, but both are participating in colonial oppression).
Because the Harkonnens started from a more dehumanised standpoint, it would take more humanisation in other ways to set up that nuanced conversation, which might have prompted some genuinely nuanced discussion about the legacy of colonial powers in the real world. That didn’t really come about, so we’re left with a story where there’s one 100% clear ‘evil’ colonial power, and a clear 95% ‘good’ colonial power that is far less open to meaningful criticism.
I do appreciate just how hard Dune is to adapt to a film though, and still think Dune (2021) is a towering achievement and an excellent film. Just seems like a missed opportunity from something that was so on the point for everything else.
Dune part 1 vs. 2 does effect this, I suppose, you don’t see much of Harkonnens at all in part 1 except the major characters (who are obviously shown as bad guys), plus the Paul and Jessica kidnappers n the ornithopter, who aren’t shown well. Then in part 2, you see the things described in my comment, and Harkonnen come across more as people in a twisted environment responding to it in various ways, plus the main characters.
But yes, this little subthread got a lot of writing to say “meh, can see either way” so I’ll probably leave it there. 🙂
“Very uniform, not a single hair on them, and greyish skin.”
There is a Michael Scott Rohan fantasy novel called Shadow of the Seer, with a moment I quite like in which a character sees a number of supernatural creatures disguised as human women. Or rather, as what he guesses are human women from distant parts of the world, as many of them look strange and seriously creep him out. Particularly the ones with skin so pale their only colour comes from the blood beneath the skin.
By comparison, I’m not too bothered by people who clearly take their morning shave far too seriously.
And I’m slightly tired of “villain kills random underlings to show how villainous he is”…
In the paragraph about periodization, you accidentally state that the movie takes place in 211(ish)BC instead of CE. Which is understandable given the content of the movie.
I’ve been playing through a campaign with a friend in Command & Colors: Ancients, and as heavily abstracted as it is in most cases, the mechanics really illustrate the difference in impact between missile and melee.
Medium and heavy infantry units under good leadership can inflict terrible damage in melee (scoring a hit is basically 50/50 with each die, and 4 or 5 dice are rolled).
Missile units can at most roll two dice, with a one-of-six chance of any given die scoring a hit.
You can use missile units to keep lighter infantry and cavalry honest, but it basically takes an act of divine intervention for them to have any kind of leverage in a fight.
“opposed landings were exceptionally, fantastically, incredibly rare before the modern period”
What I’ve been learning about the Taiwan situation leads me to believe that they will also be so rare *after* the modern period. Imagine attempting D-Day if the Nazis had precision standoff weaponry.
But the Allied forces would have had standoff weapons too. Look at what’s been happening in Ukraine. We have seen artillery and landmine use far beyond what anybody expected, drones and cruise missile attacks are now being counted in the millions and we still see infantry and vehicle assaults. Absent lopsided air supremacy, standoff weapons are a sword that cuts both ways and neither side can completely paralyze the other with them.
Anyone except readers of The Good Professor’s WWI-era military history articles, maybe?
Your smug rejoinder is simply incorrect.
The prewar expectation was that a greater level of *effective* firepower would be needed then was used during the world wars. It was correctly anticipated that this greater level of effective firepower could be achieved with fewer shells. However the amount of firepower needed was an even greater increase then expected and planned for.
Landmines and drones did not play a major role in WWI.
Landmines didn’t play a major role in WWI? My general knowledge of the period has minefields as a common component of trench warfare. What do you consider a major role?
> However the amount of firepower needed was an even greater increase then expected and planned for.
this is always the case. to a first approximation, the amount of firepower an army will consume given the options is “as much as you have, and then some”
@xellos
Antipersonnel mines weren’t a particularly major part of WWI trench defenses, at least on the Western front. They were around, but wire and firepower were the standard defensive tools.
You parsed my statement much too literally.
I mean exactly what you said I did not, that “the amount of firepower needed was an even greater increase then expected and planned for..” And to a lesser extent, that we still saw infantry assaults despite the overwhelming superiority of the then-new “standoff weapons” of machineguns and registerable artillery.
Also, the Shell Crisis is here again
Point taken, but I don’t think it’s quite an equivalent circumstance: there’s a big difference between a hardened, land-based launch system and… a boat. In order to cancel the advantage, the attacker would have to hit the defense systems before beginning to move to land. But the trouble of locating the desense sites, neutralizing them, and moreover confirming their neutralization I would submit is unfeasable. It’s far more likely that you could counterstrike launch sites after they had revealed their position *by firing* at which point you’re already in hot water.
Plus, infantry and land vehicles or launch sites are not as personnel-and-materiel-dense as landing craft so there’s a value imbalance between targets. Casualties at Normandy were like 7-10%, but the lethality, speed– not to mention path-complexity– of modern weaponry makes those numbers sound, let’s say, optimistic. I mean, your intercept opportunity in the English Channel vs a cruise missile launch from the coast of France is pretty slim.
This applies of course waaaay more in the case of Normandy, given Nazi control of vast swaths of Europe, than in the case of Taiwan… which is why there’s even any uncertainty at all wrt Taiwan. But I think the position that opposed landings in peer or even near-peer conflicts will be vanishingly rare is pretty defensible.
> Plus, infantry and land vehicles or launch sites are not as personnel-and-materiel-dense as landing craft so there’s a value imbalance between targets.
One of the key reasons that stand off munitions on land did not prevent assaults is that land forces could become a much more dispersed target then expected. It turns out that dispersed troops still can launch assaults. I expect that the same would be true in a naval invasion context. Yes you can’t go in like Omaha beach, but the defenders can’t be packed together like the Axis forces were either.
Again, I don’t think you’re wrong: after all, to quote Michael McManus, “there’s nothing that can’t be done.”
But naval dispersal is more expensive than land dispersal (unless you ask the men to swim,) and I think ultimately the solution you’re proposing is highlighting precisely the point; if opposed landing is so unfavorable that the best solution is to find a landing envelope such that opposition is minimized, then, well, there you go.
I actually had something like that picture in mind when I imagined how D-Day would have to look in a modern context to have any shot at success. I was thinking of just thousands of speedboats zipping across the Channel (150k soldiers at, what, 8 per boat? That’s like 19,000 boats. Oh, you wanted mechanized infantry?)
Some terrifying numbers:
https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA6173-PGM2_Report_WEB_2.pdf
I don’t know what numbers you want to highlight and I don’t think anyone will try to find out by reading a 100-page document dating from before the Ukrainian war.
Sorry for that, I was looking for an unclass description of
a) How sophisticated modern salvo fires are and,
b) How expensive missile defense is.
It’s not a great source on point a, although they have a picture of an “any-angle” HGV attack that, when you add the concept of “coherent”, is pretty frightening. The idea is that you can’t depend on the stike arriving from a particular sector–it’s everywhere, at the same time, all at once.
On point b, here’s the analysis:
“if a long-range interceptor such as SM-6 has a probability of kill (Pk
) of 70
percent against a particular ASCM, an attacker could defeat the entire VLS magazine of a $2
billion DDG-51 with a salvo of thirty-two ASCMs, costing the attacker less than $100 million.
Meanwhile, the DDG’s unsuccessful defense would have cost more than $300 million”
And we have already not done the procurement, so… scary.
I don’t think the Ukraine war has changed much for this calculus.
Yet the effect is a return to attrition. We still saw infant and vehicle assaults in the world wars. They just failed to breakthrough due to volume of fire. Well, efficiency has matched that; assaults are slow grinding affairs, and the rare breakthrough have clearly involved mistakes by one side.
The bigger answer is nukes. Amy amphibeous invasion force would have to helpfully move away from civilians before landing, meaning that smaller tactical nukes might theoretically be usable without instantly triggering a full exchange-or, as happened in 1950, early weapons were sufficient and only one side had them. Because amphibious assaults can be thwarted by nuking ocean there’s a narrow escalation zone of deep, dark grey that no one wants to poke that technically doesn’t target civilians, but does involve nuclear warheads.
And if course you need to concentrate landing forces to even have a prayer, so a couple dozen tactical devices would render the operation one of three types of suicidal.
Given how much of the world is under some form of nuclear umbrella amphibious landings are going to be exceptionally rare until nuclear missiles stop existing. At least involving near peers; if you consider helicopters to be landing craft than Vietnam air cavalry doctrine involved lots of contested landings, and it sucked but was doable with air supremacy.
Or you send your troops across in small overcrowded boats, unarmed and not in uniform in a years long campaign. To blend in with the populace until the time comes.
This scenario does require some implausible weaknesses on the part of the enemy.
And, notably, was tried. There’s a lot of propaganda, some of it absurd, but infiltration was rampant by all historical accounts. The reaction against it was likely used to justify removing rights, but there’s no reason to suspect the communists didn’t actually try to infiltrate Taiwan.
“What I’ve been learning about the Taiwan situation leads me to believe that they will also be so rare *after* the modern period.”
AIUI, opposed landings were rare because they were difficult, and it was usually much easier to sail or steam past the opposing army and land somewhere the enemy army was not present.
The more dispersed the enemy army, the more coastline they can defend, and the less undefended coastline there will be to make an unopposed landing on.
So as effective firepower goes up, and armies get more dispersed, I would expect unopposed landing to get rarer, simply because there will be fewer opportunities to make them, whether you want to or not.
Whether you make an opposed landing or not is a question on which the enemy gets to vote. And it is getting easier for them to vote to oppose your landing.
Exactly. We live with the memory of D-Day, and the evidence is that it has colored our (or, the popular,) understanding of how these things work. All I’m trying to point out is that the preconditions which made Overlord feasible are very rare, even unique.
And maybe I’m just reacting to an implication which our host did not really mean to make, and which is not logically necessary. That opposed landings were “fantastically” rare before the modern period does not imply that they are common in the modern period, although the rhetoric might be taken to imply this. Honestly I would not be surprised to find that the likelihood has been a steady state, historically.
Elsewhere, I once saw it argued that airborne assault has only really worked twice, with the Normandy landings being one of them. (The other one was Germany’s rush through the low countries, with the attack on Crete being rated “impressive, but a failure”.) I’m sort of inclined to wonder if something similar can also be said of opposed amphibious landings. Normandy was an absurd undertaking. Dieppe and Gallipoli (WWI) were famous failures. Sicily, Anzio, and pretty much all the Pacific islands were unopposed. I guess there’s Salerno for other successful opposed landings in WWII? Looking at Wikipedia does inform me that the US managed to do it particularly successfully in Korea (6 years after Normandy), but also the attacking army had a gigantic advantage in manpower at the beaches.
But also, I’m inclined to suspect that, even with modern helicopter logistics as an option, the biggest problem isn’t really landing into the teeth of guns. It’s supplying everything after that, and based on some of the stuff tried in Gaza, even the US has forgotten how to rapidly turn a beach into a dock, so it will once again hinge on whether a port can be captured quickly.
Sicily was definitely not unopposed.
The Gazan genocide is strongly influenced by the fact that no one is acting with a modicum of honesty, to be fair. I don’t want to distract, but it’s really not an indication that US engineering or industrial capacity cannot solve the problems there. It’s purely and absolutely a question of political power and will. The powers that be either don’t care or want everyone there dead.
Helicopter tactics do help but even then they just make your supply incredibly vulnerable; para dropped supplies are also possible and introduce different vulnerability. It can work, but only when overwhelming power is invoked. Tactically both are a way to turn airpower into boots on ground, which requires similar air supremacy. That’s never going to be cost efficient, but if you’re stupid rich it works.
This speaks to modern US doctrine, which can basically be summarized as “speed is expensive, time is moreso.” Every aspect of US war fighting is designed to rush down the enemy in days at tremendous cost so that the fight can stop sooner, costing less. Who cares if your logistics base costs ten times as much per day if the war is over in a week versus three years? It’s just that whenever that hasn’t been possible money vanishes, rapidly, into a black hole of inefficiency.
This lets the US do stuff like force a landing in contested waters behind half the enemy army and nearly cut them in two. The Ichon offensive was incredibly costly (I dearly wish I had figures)…
And yet it was a bit over a year after it that costs bloomed it 10%+ of GDP. The fast and expensive four day operation was trivial compared to two years of fighting. Obviously.
“Elsewhere, I once saw it argued that airborne assault has only really worked twice, with the Normandy landings being one of them… I’m sort of inclined to wonder if something similar can also be said of opposed amphibious landings. Normandy was an absurd undertaking. Dieppe and Gallipoli (WWI) were famous failures. Sicily, Anzio, and pretty much all the Pacific islands were unopposed.”
Sorry, can you please clarify your definition of “unopposed”? Because Sicily was definitely opposed, as were a lot of the Pacific island landings, in the sense that as the first troops came ashore there were enemy soldiers trying to stop them.
In fact I would probably say that of all the types of major combat operation, “opposed amphibious landing” probably has the highest success rate in modern warfare! I’ll grant Dieppe as a failure, and Anzio too, and even Gallipoli (though I would argue that’s more of a successful landing followed by a defeat in battle) but other than that, you’ve got successful opposed landings in Norway, Denmark, Malaya, North Africa, Sicily, the landings in southern Italy, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hollandia, Leyte, Makin, Kwajalein…
And after 1945 you can add Incheon, Suez, the Falklands, Cyprus, both al-Fao landings (by the Iranians and by the Coalition).
The reason for this very high success rate may be that, by its nature, an opposed amphibious landing is never something that you absolutely *have* to do, because you always have the option of simply keeping your troops and the other guy’s troops safely on opposite sides of a body of water. (whereas you might *have* to mount an armoured attack, for example, or defend a fortified town.) So you can pick your moment and ensure you have the resources to make it work.
I don’t know if you’ll go into this next time or if you did in your official review, but the most interesting part of Gladiator 2 to me is that it was willing to question the very concept of empire and the “dream of Rome”. Macrinus is the villain, sure, but no one ever actually refutes anything he says. Acacius can be brave and noble (to his own people) but he certainly does first appear in the movie by sacking a city and packing its population off into slavery, no matter how vaguely sad he is about it.
It’s not even that clear to me that Lucius/Hanno believes in restoring the republic or the dream of Rome or any of that. He’s just in a position where he needs to play the returned prince who is restoring honor because that’s what will get the troops on his side with a very pretty speech. But this is still a guy whose beloved wife was murdered by Roman conquerors. I don’t feel that the movie takes the position this is all the fault of “bad emperors” at the top. I mean, back in Gladiator 1, the very first scene was of Maximus in much the same position as Acacius… just now you get to see it from the side the Romans are conquering.
Is it willing to engage with this? The opening is certainly set up so that it could engage with that, but in the end it doesn’t.
To the extent it takes about the moral state of the Roman Empire it doesn’t go beyond the dichotomy of: Rome ruled by evil war-like emperors (who are inevitably mad) is bad, but republican Rome is good. Which aligns well with modern morality that despises autocracy and likes democracy, but doesn’t at all fit with the historical reality that most emperors weren’t mad and they waged a hell of a lot less war of conquest than the republic did. Which is a shame, because there are genuine themes that could have been explored: Is warfare justified if it enforces a long term peace? Is an Imperial system better than anarchy? To what extent does might make right? Did those living on Rome’s border resent their oppressor, or were they jealous of their success? These would have even risen naturally had the film taken place during a period of the civil wars (ie, post Caracalla). Instead we get the clichés of “reluctant general just following orders” and “it’s not evil if you feel sad about it” and “better a noble emperor than a sadistic one”.
Of course it doesn’t help that Mescal’s and Pedro’s characters are so shallow, with their opinions turning on a dime, that it’s hard to buy that they have any justification for their actions. Things happen because the script says so, and if that involves a character deciding to switch sides rather than kill his mortal enemy, then he will. He’ll also forget about his dead wife pretty quickly.
Seconding the request to see more about first Punic War naval combat – I listened to the video where you talked about that on Drachinifel’s youtube channel, and it was fascinating. I’d love to learn more!
Ironically, on the patreon polls to decide on the previous articles this year (the one that decided on Afterlife of Roman Republic and problem with Sci-fi body armor), this was the least chosen option. 🙂 (And one I requested, to make it even more fun). But looks like it will be sneaking in anyway.
(It was least chosen narrowly, though. Guessing most people involved liked everything on the list.)
There HAS been a contested sea assault from literal landing ships in premodern times, and by -technically-Romans, though admittedly much later than the era of Gladiator II: The landing of Nikephoros Phokas on Crete, 13 July 960AD. According to some sources he landed on the beach of Almyros, west of Handakas (modern day Herakleion) where he was awaited by numerous arab infantry. His Kataphraktoi cavallery jumped in full armour into the water, from their ships, from wooden ramps and then engaged in battle with the Arab infantry that was waiting for them on the beach. I first read abou this on Twitter and could hardly believe it myself, but there is a postgraduate thesis on the subject in Modern Greek, you can find it online here: https://ikee.lib.auth.gr/record/113686/files/Binder1.pdf
I wish Scott and his ilk could take the trouble to read some history, they would come up with plenty of stuff for all subjects for movies, sometimes even more incredible than fiction.
re: Agincourt (and irrelevant to the discussion of Gladiator) – the testing done in the last couple of years by Tod on Youtube seems to solidify that high-quality plate armor of the period was nigh-impervious to arrows from the front, barring an improbably lucky shot. However, it was less resistant from the sides, meaning that as the French knights pushed into the English center they would theoretically have become much more vulnerable to archers on the flanks. I also think – and I believe Tod suggested that it’s something they’d like to look at in the future – that there would be a serious toll to charging through that kind of barrage even if your armor did its job perfectly. The kinetic impact of the arrow strikes could be considerable, and they were loud. In particular getting shot in the helmet seems like there’s considerable risk of disorientation if not concussion.
In the event, the English archers at some point took up their melee weapons, and given that the English were able to take much of the flower of French chivalry captive, we know the onslaught of arrows had to be relatively survivable. But still!
Tod’s videos are a fairly optimistic scenario for the armor IMO, since the shooter was specifically trying to hit the plates to test them, not hit the mail to kill the man-at-arms. Much of a French man-at-arms’s protection was mail and thus vulnerable to short bodkins from heavy bows. Skirts of plates weren’t universal, so in that case you could aim below the navel and land a suitably lethal shot from the front through the mail, and likewise on the shoulders / underarms / inside the elbows. The throat would have two layers of mail, but it’s also the part of the body most vulnerable to blunt force. Moving to a flanking angle, backplates were also not universal, and the back half of the thigh was often completely unarmored , so an arrow there could be devastating. An individual archer’s chance of hitting any of these gaps with a single arrow would be small, but with thousands of archers loosing tens of thousands of arrows, the lucky hits will quickly add up.
The other side of that is that all of the tests are against an immobile target. So they are quite optimistic for the weapon as well.
For me the most interesting and relevant thing about the tests was just how hard it was for Joe to hit precise target points, despite _everything_ about the situation being perfect: static target, short range, perfect vision, good health and fitness. Made it extremely clear how finding those weak points wasn’t a Robin Hood thing, it was a volume of fire + luck thing.
We know from historic evidence, medical evidence, and other lines of evidence that arrows were effective. The mere fact that they were used at all is proof that these tests are not telling the full story. Bows weren’t machine guns mowing down enemies as they try to cross No Man’s Land, but they weren’t ineffective or no one would have used them. Further, we have historic evidence of them killing people, including some high-ranking folks (who would have had the best armor). So the question is, how can we reconcile these two ideas? And if you’ve ever worn armor it’s not terribly hard.
You don’t need to pierce armor to put someone out of the fight. Nearly broke my nose once without the helm even noticing the hit, and got my arm temporarily shut off thanks to a blow to the shoulder that didn’t damage the armor at all (it hit a nerve or something; didn’t hurt, it just…turned off). The force from the arrow(s) has to go SOMEWHERE, and the only available option is you. Even just being pushed (in a tight-packed formation, in mud, or off a horse) can be catastrophic. If the force of the arrows knocks you off your feet and you break your leg you’re out of the fight (and quite possibly dead) just the same as if the arrow killed you.
Plus armor doesn’t sit perfectly on you, there are bits that touch and bits that don’t. If one of those bits that touch is the edge (which is fairly frequently the case), it can be quite painful even if it’s not incapacitating. There are precautions you can take, but at the end of the day the human body did not evolve osteoderms and we’re not built to have them. Lamellar and similar get around this by having a LOT of edges, creating a bed-of-nails effect, but while I’ve never been hit in lamellar, I HAVE been hit in maille, and you still get neat waffle patterns (bruises, in a few cases blood, and we weren’t actually trying to murder each other).
You also have to consider the fact that plate armor is going to flex. That matters, because there are places where you really, really, really don’t want metal to flex into. Sure, gambesons and the like can help with some of this, but again, depending on where you get hit it may not be sufficient. (Note that I’m talking elastic deformation; dents are much worse.) These sorts of tests always under-estimate the amount of damage you can do without immediate and dramatic visual effects.
Armor is curved as well. This means that things like swords and arrows are going to slide along them. Armor-makers knew this, which is why they had rolled edges, but that only helps, it doesn’t make you impervious. Sure, it’s a lucky shot, but we’re talking a one-in-a-thousand not one-in-ten-thousand. As dandan correctly notes, in battlefield conditions these odds aren’t nearly as low as you’d imagine.
Strategy also matters here. The guys in heavy plate are probably worth a lot of money, and ransom was a thing back then. You don’t WANT to murder the duke in combat. You want to capture him and sell him back. It could pay for a good chunk of the campaign, or even turn it into a profitable activity! As your value goes down, your armor goes down. Guys in plate could reasonably expect to walk through arrow fire. Guys in lamellar were probably okay. Guys in gambesons and maybe a helm? They’re going to take casualties. Not “machine gun mowing down guys going through No Man’s Land” levels, but you’re not all getting through alive. So the arrow/armor arms race creates a situation where you don’t need to worry too much about killing high-value targets (though it did happen).
Plus on a tactical level it creates a lot of friction. It’s not fun to walk through situations where your enemy can kill, disable, or even just HIT you and you can’t do squat. Remember, fundamentally the goal isn’t to KILL you, it’s to BREAK you. As long as you’re in good order my arrows, spears, horses, and the like won’t do much damage. I want to disrupt your order, which means putting you under unmanageable mental stress. Arrows may not kill you, but they’re going to scare you. And if I can scare you enough, you’ll break ranks and THEN I’ll kill you.
> So the question is, how can we reconcile these two ideas?
Really very simply: the chance of any individual arrow causing a serious wound to a fully armoured opponent may be low; but if you shoot enough arrows then those unlikely events still happen.
Archers would still be able to have useful impact on a battle even if it was literally impossible for them to injure a fully armoured opponent: if nothing else, forcing people to keep their visors down and their shields up while trudging through mud impacts breathing, visibility, coordination and morale. And since some of those arrows will be injuring or killing people, you get good old Clauswitzian friction.
I don’t think friction alone is sufficient to explain the use of bows. Not non-lethal friction, anyway. Most things that are primarily there to cause non-lethal friction are also fairly cheap. A trench is just a hole, and having the soldiers dig them would be useful anyway (for keeping them occupied). Barbed wire was pretty cheap, it’s just wire (about the cheapest stuff in an industrialized culture) plus some barbs. Razor wire is cheaper once you get the machinery set up, it’s just wire with some bits flattened. Terrain is the cheapest thing on a battlefield, it’s there whether you fight or not. Even modern things are cheap–dragon’s teeth are basically pre-formed concrete, and while the mixture may be different from, say, bridge components, the components won’t be and are pretty cheap.
To be clear, I’m not saying that arrows don’t cause friction. They obviously do. What I’m saying is that I don’t believe this is the primary justification for them. There are FAR cheaper ways to make the enemy keep their shields up and keep their visors down.
Plus, we have plenty of archaeological evidence indicating arrows injured, maimed, and killed. Perimortem injuries and legs, for example. I’m most familiar with the Medieval stuff (which, to be fair, isn’t saying much; this isn’t my area of expertise), but I can’t imagine the Romans had less effective bows–one can assume anything on a battlefield was effective, as war tends to eliminate ineffective equipment quite quickly. The injuries I’ve seen tend to cluster around the head and legs, indicating that either the torso was better-protected, or that osteological data can’t show soft tissue damage (bit of self-deprecating humor there; squishy bits don’t tend to survive fossilization). I imagine both contribute here.
I think a big part of the issue here is that, as I said, higher-value targets have more armor. Arrows would naturally do greater damage to lower-ranking people, who naturally have less armor. And who cares if a few hundred peasants get slaughtered? Goes back to the whole thing about modern people feeling more kinship with nobility than with peasants, despite the fact that most of us would in fact have been peasants. And the cost ratios still favor the arrows in this scenario. An arrow is expensive, but still less expensive than training, kitting out, feeding, and housing even a low-ranking soldier. I’ll grant that they were not explicitly thinking in terms of cost per kill at the time (they wouldn’t even think of this in terms of money most likely), but folks have always understood that equipment is expensive.
I’m leaving sieges aside here. The existence of towers (and the resultant enfilade fire), as well as siege towers (which allowed the attackers to fire down at the walls) is sufficient proof of the efficacy of arrows. Of course, probably not a lot of knights or barons or dukes were on siege ladders, which goes back to my argument about arrows being primarily anti-peasant weapons (except for the occasional lucky shot).
I was particularly aggrieved by the Numidia geography and chronology. Perhaps … particularly because, as the movie was starting to be flogged in the press, I had recently visited the UNESCO archaeological site of Volubilis, the Mauritanian capital, founded in the 3rd century B.C. — as well as other notable sites from the days of the Phoenicians, Carthegenians, Visigoths, Iberians, etc. of North Africa. Very aware that by the time of these movie emperors, Iberia too, just barely across water, had long, long, long been integrated into the Roman Empire.
Would a fleet really need to rely on land forces for resupply? Or would it be as much the other way around? Seems like ships — supply ships, not necessarily troop transports or fighting ships — could carry a heap more things like food and weapons than land transport. Maybe the fleet needs to restock on water and certain foodstuffs, but shouldn’t it be well stocked on its own resources compared to soldiers living off the land or relying on wagons and animals?
Ancient warships were so cramped, and so lightly built, that they could not stay more than a few days at most at sea, and preferred to haul out each night. Fleets did have supply ships, but the transfer happened on land. Armies could also rely on supply ships but again they needed a good landing site. It was more amphibious than true naval warfare.
At sea resupply is something we don’t usually do even in the modern day. It tends to be somewhat dangerous, and has the serious risk of losing some of it overboard.
Supplies changing ships tends to be landed and then moved to the other ship.
Well, speaking as an old sailor, actually we DO resupply at sea, quite a lot. But it requires a massive infrastructure of specialized underway replenishment ships (an unsung “secret weapon” the USN had in WW2)
About Roman navy making a major landing in Africa: long after 200 BC. The landing of Caesar near Hadrumetum on 28th of December 47 BC. Where he famously fell flat and boasted of grabbing Africa.
It was against Numidia, too (plus the Republic!).
About Romans carrying out a prolonged siege of a fortified city on coast of (a branch of) Mediterranean and eventually storming the city, as late as 190s AD: Septimius´ siege of Byzantium.
To remind, Byzantium was a field headquarters of Emperor Pescennius the Black, and when in late 193, Septimius Severus managed to outflank Pescennius, he retreated leaving Byzantium under siege. Septimius managed to catch and kill Pescennius in May 194 and sent his head to Byzantium – Byzantium refused to surrender. The siege dragged out till late 195 when Byzantium was stormed.
Precisely how did Septimius Severus attack Byzantium? How much or little progress did the whole might of Rome make by end of 194?
The British tried to take New Orleans by land assault in the War of 1812. It was not until half a century later and steam ships that it was taken by naval assault.
For the chronology, I would suggest that in this alternative history Commodus didn’t reign for 15 years. The first Gladiator movie says that it starts in 180 CE. The second one says it starts in 200 CE, 16 years after the death of Commodus (did I get that right?), putting Commodus death around 184 CE.
In real history Commodus’ sister Lucilla was involved in a conspiracy to overthrow him in 182 CE and was executed as a result. In Gladiator I she is also involved in a conspiracy to overthrow him (there he survives), which happens towards the end of the movie and sets up the final fight. The movie also doesn’t imply the characters aging that much. While it is vague about how much time passes, to me it feels more like it is supposed to be somewhere between a few months and a few years.
So the chronology at the beginning of the movie is in my opinion internally consistent as the result of a conscious departure from history that the first movie took.
Ah, fannish explanations. Often much more credible than the movie. Sometimes than the book.
I listened to that episode yesterday and there was one part that really didn’t sit right with me. I’m a bit hesitant to write this comment, because it is a criticism about hat Sarah Bond says, but this isn’t her blog. But it is related to declining trust in the humanities that Bret has talked about on this blog in the past, so maybe it will be worthwhile. The relevant part is the section from 00:30:05 to 00:38:28.
The core argument of the section is that the film delivers a lot of quotes, mostly from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which it rips out of context and presents in isolation. While I haven’t watched the movie, that seems a worthwhile critique. Out of context quotes have given many people wrong impression about many things.
However, in the course of this argument, Sarah makes three claims that I have difficulty with:
One of the big philosophers within Stoicism is Epictetus, who was a former slave. And stoicism confirming the status quo is misleading, large chunks about it are about dealing with a status quo that one is unhappy with (including active suffering), by detaching oneself from one’s emotions. While I’m not sure how popular Stoicism was among slaves who had access to it, it wouldn’t surprise me if others besides Epictetus used it to better cope with the violence they experienced. And on the other end of society, it’s not like Roman emperors were protected from suffering by their status and wealth. Marcus Aurelius had a long illness which made him suffer chronic pain, exacerbated by his long military campaigns, which in his understanding he was forced into by the Marcomanni invasion 166. He campaigned until his death, so 14 years of his 20 year reign. So I think this statement of her’s is just not accurate.
Stoicism is a comparatively well known school of ancient philosophy. It has people studying its sources because they want to use it to improve their life and other people trying to get an overview understanding because they are interested in philosophy generally. Those people, if they were to listen to what she said on the podcast, would think “no, what she is saying is wrong”. A pattern that repeats itself with several things she says.
Her explicit examples for technocrats are “Mark Zuckerberg, but also Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos”. Now, I don’t know much about the reception of Stoicism among tech billionairs, but I am pretty certain that they don’t nefariously promote Stoicism to turn us into obedient subjects, for the simple reason that they don’t popularize it that much. They consume it mostly for themselves as far as I can tell. I read looked up a blog post by the author she recommends on the topic of “Broicism”, and his criticism is very different from hers: that consuming Stoicism in isolated quotes strips away the argument and hinders understanding it as school of philosophy in dialogue with other schools. With him I can see that he actually cares about Stoicism, about people developing an understanding that is correct. Sarah on the other hand doesn’t give that impression.
Which does also make me skeptical that her understanding of the motivation of tech billionairs is correct. Take, for example, Elon Musk. I don’t think he is as clever as he thinks he is and the total of his actions may very well be a net negative. But he doesn’t give the impression that all he cares about is money and power – he does genuinely believe that he is improving society, so he probably also genuinely beliefs the bites of Stoicism he consumes are positive for one’s character.
That is a common narrative about the Five Good Emperors. But a crucial detail is missing here: The previous four Good Emperors did not have biological sons. If they had had sons, these sons would have expected to succeed them. When Diocletian tries truly adoptive succession in the early Fourth Century it fails at the second succession. (Constantius succeeds Maximian adoptively when Diocletian and Maximian retire, but when he dies his soldiers acclaim his son Constantine emperor. So then Maximian’s son Maxentius thinks it’s unfair that he was passed over and declares himself emperor. Then Maximian thinks it was unfair that he had to retire on Diocletian’s command, so he re-declares himself emperor. At the end of the civil war there is a biological dynasty again.)
In addition, the adoptions among the Good Emperors were not a well established principle of picking the most fitting person regardless of relation. Nerva is the only one who picks outside of his family and we can suspect that he picked Trajan because while he didn’t have military backing, Trajan did. Domitian had been popular with the soldiers and directly before the adoption there had been a plot by the Praetorian Guard that forced Nerva to put the assassins of Domitian to death. Trajan’s adoption stabilized the situation. Trajan himself likely didn’t adopt anyone – Hadrian’s adoption was faked by Trajan’s wife shortly after his death (Hadrian was also related to Trajan). Hadrian wanted Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius to succeed him, but they were to young, so he picked Antoninus as an intermediate step. All three were also from his family. Antoninus Pius kept to Hadrian’s direction, but made Marcus Aurelius the main successor instead of, as Hadrian had planned, Lucius Verus. Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus both had other sons than Commodus, but they died years before Marcus’ death, as did Lucius Verus. The Five Good Emperors may have picked the most fitting candidate among those considered viable candidates, but that list was heavily constrained. And I am sure if any of them had had a son – except maaaaybe for Antoninus Pius – they would have picked that son as successor.
Well, that exposition ended up a bit longer than I would have liked, but here is the larger point: Imperial successions are one of the more common pieces of knowledge among Roman Empire fans without formal historical training. So one doesn’t need to be a specialist in Second Century succession principles to end up thinking: “Her assessement of Marcus Aurelius is unfair because it is based on the misconception of a norm of adoptive succession.”
There has been the observation that a number of Rome fans end up moving to the far right and a number of far righters end up becoming Rome fans. It is a mistake to think they have no historical knowledge – they often are somewhat well informed about the political history and may even have read some primary sources. Their misconceptions about Roman history often come from the fact that their knowledge base is to narrow and doesn’t take into account the understanding we have gained about Roman society, economics, and way of thinking. Historians have developed that knowledge from careful comparison of sources with each other and with archaeology, and from using less common sources, which does require historical expertise. But what would a Rome hobbyist hear when listening to Sarah Bond’s little rant about Marcus Aurelius and Broicism – they would hear and argument that contains several errors and has a strong ideological bent. Feeding into the conception that academia has been corrupted by [insert a movement they don’t like]. (I’m happy that Bret pushed back against her on Stoicism to some extend, which somewhat reduces the damage to Academia’s authority.)
Now, as I understand it, Sarah’s area of research are people who were marginalized in Roman society, like slaves, actors, etc. So she probably knows quite a bit about gladiators that the a Rome hobbyist doesn’t know, especially in how they fit into wider society. If she had talked about how that differs from what the movie shows, it would have been an opportunity to demonstrage her knowledge. Even if she had built an ideological argument from there, her greater knowledge would have given that argument credibility. So historians who engage with the public either need to play to their strength, or make sure that their knowledge of the mainstream parts of history (largely political history) is on the same or a better level as that of history hobbyist.
“But he doesn’t give the impression that all he cares about is money and power – he does genuinely believe that he is improving society, so he probably also genuinely beliefs the bites of Stoicism he consumes are positive for one’s character.”
…why would you ever think that? What has he ever done that indicates he earnestly believes anything? All he’s done has been negated at some point by hypocrisy except the accumulation of power.
Indication that Elon Musk truly believes what he claims: His projects. There are a lot of them and half of them are various levels of stupid, but almost all of them fall in the category of SciFi stuff. That is the behavior of a guy who thinks he can bring about tech utopia – hybris, not manipulation.
Let me add Zuckerberg: I believe his interest in Stoicism is genuine because he named his children after Roman emperors – it seems like a stretch to me that a modern day person would pick their children’s name in an attempt to manipulate the masses, naming one’s children in our culture is treated as an expression of individuality.
Now, of course every kind of behavior can be faked if you are dedicated enough. But in a “people generally believe their own religion” way, those two show behaviors that are more easily explainable if they are true believers than as some kind of social engineering.
“One of the big philosophers within Stoicism is Epictetus, who was a former slave…So I think this statement of her’s is just not accurate”
The structural core of your argument is “Stoicism can’t be a rich mans social movement because poor people believed in it”.
Leaving aside the argument, Epictetus was a well off slave. Such a thing is possible in a complex society like Rone; his master was a Freedman who had personal connection to the emperor and he was allowed to study philosophy. In a meaningful sense slavery was distinct from the institution we know from our history, but beyond that *his* slavery was distinct.
But even the argument is trivially flawed. Manipulative social movements very often find purchase in the people they are manipulating. People legitimately argued for feudalistic power structures during the land reform era of social upheaval in the late 18th to 20th centuries, they often *believed* in their local lords, even as changing social conditions made an already abusive system outright murderous.
It’s not easy to believe in these things, it causes significant cognitive dissonance, but if the institutions of power keep alternatives hidden it can act as a release valve for strife, strengthening the regime. That’s why major upheaval has followed the opening of media control-mass writing, the printing press, radio, tv, the Internet…the institutions of power lose control over communication, change follows.
That people believed in their philosophical ideologies doesn’t make them not manipulative. It makes them effective. We have no reason to suspect that the people of the past are any wiser on this point than us, and no reason to defer to their own perspectives on their idealogies. Part of science or history is believing things, and part of believing things is having the will to transgress and say that someone else is *wrong*.
“Feeding into the conception that academia has been corrupted by [insert a movement they don’t like].”
They don’t actually *care* Marvin. They aren’t arguing against Academia being left wing because they actually want some principled moderation or objective analysis, nor would those things make Academia less left wing. Academia has always had dominant ideologies, humanism, Rationalism, etc.
The key to effective popular action, including elections and public communication, isn’t to treat the demands of the right as real; it’s to find the core of emotion that makes those demands resonate. And for the past half century that’s been *hypocrisy*. The perceived and real hypocrisy of liberal establishments and politicians whom don’t seem to actually have an idealogical position-you can’t get to “we should ensure Academia is neutral” by believing something, you get there by manipulating the discourse so your arbitrary way of doing things is in the center.
All this to say that the problem isn’t that science or historical experts have opinions that trace back to assumptions that are wrong. People will forgive being wrong as long as you project sincerity and consistency, as long as you represent an emotive *thesis*. The reason liberal establishments seem to need to be right a hundred percent of the time is that they claim not to *have* an idealogical thesis, they claim to be above and beyond it like gods, and in so doing invite challenge on every possible inconsistency *because that’d make them hypocrites*.
People are so desperate for consistent beliefs from the institutions and people in power that it’s driving them to literal madness. They don’t care that academics have partisan positions and never had, they care that they have them but lie. They care that they aren’t honest enough to argue them, even if they’re wrong.
Ockham’s Razor, however, says that you have to establish that they are thus manipulated, since the simpler explanation is they actually agree.
Them agreeing doesn’t mean they aren’t manipulated. That’s what a successful manipulation looks like.
My point is that it’s immaterial if they earnestly believed everything they said-Stoicism can still have been primarily created and spread as a means of enforcing the status quo of society in a way that was easy for the powerful and extremely hard for the disenfranchised.
That’s also not a valid use of Ockham’s razor. In this circumstance we can observe that stoicism helped reinforce the status quo that hurt slaves. We can then observe that slaves believed in it. Is it simpler that slaves believed in something against their own self interest as a result of internal or external processes? That’s not something you can reduce to which is simpler-you need a heuristic about what is more likely.
In this case, people are manipulated by external information control *constantly*, the communication apparatus of society routinely and pervasively lies to people about everything for the good of the powerful throughout all eras of history, and yet people *independently* coming to ethical conclusions that are bad for them is extremely rare. We can reason that the existent of stoic slaves is a manipulation (or bad data) because that’s most consistent with human psychology.
Likewise, technocrats absolutely spread a form of pseudo-stoicism, a false stoicism that argues for public austerity for solely the poor, as a means of manipulating them. It’s been reinforced for 50 or so years by pervasive lies, well documented throughout all levels of society throughout all major world economies. We have *actual modern documents showing that*, confessions that clearly lay out the processes and methods.
But even without that, through simple understanding of human psychology one could reason out that it’s not in the self-interest of the public to believe the lies of technocrats, so if they do anyway some form of manipulation is involved.
It’s simpler still to believe that you are deluding yourself in your own self interest. There is, after all, only one deluded person in that hypothesis. Especially since you are assuming that you, millennia later and wildly ignorant of most of their lives and situations, can simply judge better than they can what is good and bad for them, and what their self-interest is.
Then I reject your comment as such; my conclusion is correct and you are deluded, your ignorance of events millenia later leading to you to incorrect beliefs. Your favored interpretation isn’t more valid than mine and you’ve presented no reason to assert otherwise.
Ockhams razor cannot be applied in this way, obviously. You’re trying to lead it to a place that negates any attempt at understanding or reason. Either present an argument or accept that the symmetry of yours is self destroying. You certainly can’t just quote a famous technique, incorrectly apply it, and claim I’m stupid.
In other words; kindly screw off with that ad hominem bullshit, we’re adults, grow up, learn some respect. It’s not clever and not subtle.
Says the person who started the ad hominem.
How thin skinned are you?
Also use some empathy. I saw this post with it’s thinly veiled and completely uncalled for passive aggression *first*. I didn’t even go to your less savory attributes until I had already been insulted, and I am not trying to use them to prove you wrong, just *wake you up*.
Also use some empathy. I saw this post with it’s thinly veiled and completely uncalled for passive aggression *first*.
What are you referring to? That I observed you might be deluded?
Either calling other people deluded is wrong, or it’s not. If it’s not, you have no grounds for complaint. If it is, you should be considering your own lack first. (If you think it’s different when you do it, you should really consider your own lack until you realize that your belief that you are right is no different from anyone else’s.)
Disagreed. Even arguments concerning slavery that fall short of arguing for abolition can lead to improvements for slaves compared to the status quo.
One is more indirect and more controversial (you will probably disagree, but here is my case): the Stoic understanding of internal freedom. Described, for example, in Epictetus Enchiridion, Chapter I: ” There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs. […] Remember, then, that if you attribute freedom to things by nature dependent and take what belongs to others for your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you take for your own only that which is your own and view what belongs to others just as it really is, then no one will ever compel you, no one will restrict you.” If a slave without a realistic option for emancipation develops a realistic understanding of what is their control and then uses this to increase their own happiness to some extend, that is a good thing and an improvement over the status quo. This part of stoicism could only be said to reinforce slavery if it prevented slaves from taking realistic opportunities for freedom. We cannot know this, because we know very little about Stoicism among slaves (Epictetus at least did take the opportunity of freedom, but he had as you say a very high status among slaves). It is however noteworthy that many of the senators who tried to take action against emperors they considered oppressive were Stoics – so it doesn’t seem that Stoicism made someone particularly accepting of the status quo – maybe also because it tries to lessen the fear of harm and death. Within the framework a Stoicism a Stoic slave likely wouldn’t have trouble justifying a slave rebellion, if there was a realistic chance of that rebellion to succeed.
But for the more direct way in which Stoicism can lead to improvements for slaves: Stoic texts argue for better treatment of slaves. Take, for example, Letter 47 by Seneca. To just quote a few bits (since the whole letter is about that): “11. I do not wish to involve myself in too large a question, and to discuss the treatment of slaves, towards whom we Romans are excessively haughty, cruel, and insulting. But this is the kernel of my advice: Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters. […] 18. Some may maintain that I am now offering the liberty-cap to slaves in general and toppling down lords from their high estate, because I bid slaves respect their masters instead of fearing them. They say: ‘This is what he plainly means: slaves are to pay respect as if they were clients or early-morning callers!’ Anyone who holds this opinion forgets that what is enough for a god cannot be too little for a master. Respect means love, and love and fear cannot be mingled. 19. So I hold that you are entirely right in not wishing to be feared by your slaves, and in lashing them merely with the tongue; only dumb animals need the thong.” If some slaveowners treated their slaves somewhat better because of their Stoic beliefs, that is an improvement over the status quo.
Arguments for better treatment of slaves can only be said to reinforce slavery if that position is taken instead of arguing for abolition. But arguments for better treatment of slaves can also lead to abolitionism down the line. The trajectory regarding slavery between 1500 and 1900 was: arguing for better treatment of slaves -> arguing for voluntary emancipation -> arguing for gradual abolition with compensation for slave owners -> arguing for immediate abolition without compensation. Someone who (honestly) argues for better treatment of slaves may notice that this isn’t enough because of the violence inherent in slavery, which in turn may lead to them moving towards abolitionist positions. In the long run, this moves the Overton window towards abolition, unless there are other forces counteracting this (like economic conditions make slavery easier).
And in the timeframe between 1 CE and 1000 CE there is in fact a trend towards abolition in Europe (maybe also the Islamic world, but I am less sure about that), similar to the one leading to abolition in the modern era. Slavery in antiquity was much more prevalent than in Medieval Europe. To focus on Marcus Aurelius in particular: There was a trend during the Principate towards more protections for slaves (from an abysmal starting point, but it matters when a law by Antoninus Pius forbids slave owners to kill their slaves), and also towards deciding legal edge cases around manumission in favor or freeing the slave. Marcus Aurelius’ decisions generally follow that trend – though admittedly, it is debated how much Stoicism contributed to that. (someone arguing broadly in favor, someone arguing broadly against)
Okay, if there are documents by technocrats along the line of “let’s promote Stoicism so that people will favor certain policies that are good for us”, then that may very well convince me of the problems with the modern reception of Stoicism. So feel free to link those documents or tell me how I can find them.
“Either calling other people deluded is wrong, or it’s not. If it’s not, you have no grounds for complaint. If it is, you should be considering your own lack first. (If you think it’s different when you do it, you should really consider your own lack until you realize that your belief that you are right is no different from anyone else’s.)”
I’m a human being in front of you. They’re dead. You might not understand morals, but that is an actual difference in how you’d treat people even if you were making a rational point. If you can’t treat me with that respect you don’t deserve it in turn.
Obviously if I was just saying they were deluded you’d have a rational point, but I did, in fact, say other things. You can read them if you can be bothered.
As you haven’t all you’ve actually communicated is that you refuse to treat with me fairly. Hence my refusal to take you seriously.
You refuse to take me seriously because it would break your bubble.
Furthermore, you advocate for such abuse against the living, and therefore are a hypocrite.
No, Mary. Only you are that empty.
See?
I forgive you your hypocrisy and projection.
See?
And here comes the projection
(Since I replied about Stoicism to another comment of yours, here only a response the the part about persuasion.)
I disagree. Arguments do matter, even if not in a straight forwards “the better argument wins”.
People generally want the beliefs they already have affirmed. If they hear something that goes against their beliefs, they will try to pick the argument apart – which leads to the argument sticking in their mind, especially if they fail to refute it. If they hear something that confirms their beliefs and it has a particularly good or well formulated argument (or the person can at least project the image of expertise in the subject), they will remember that argument for future use. Over time, they will accumulate arguments that affirm their positions and arguments that go against their positions. If the balance in their mind tilts towards their position, they will be open to en emotive call to action. If the balance in their mind tilts against their position, an emotive call may finally push the over the edge to change their position.
So if someone responds to a speaker’s emotive thesis on the basis of sincerity and consistency alone, in most cases they will have a collection of arguments in their mind already. They can forgive the speaker for being wrong – but forgiving themselves for arguments in their mind when they notice those are wrong is a lot harder.
(To give a concrete example: Trump is not the guy to deliver arguments. But he would not have been successful if Fox News and the like hadn’t given conservatives a lot of – to them – believable arguments that he could build on.)
I’m not actually sure that actually refutes my point, so I *may* be misunderstanding you. I think the point is that people’s internal arguments reinforce a worldview sufficiently that you have to say things consistent with their preconceptions.
I will say that most of the arguments that *can* be used to convince people to believe in the things Trumps and Republicans argue for are fundamentally flawed. The emotive thesis they are tapping into cannot actually be answered by their actions, because it’s core is economic insecurity and conservatives will *never* successfully address that. Because *reality* disagrees with conservatives it’s extremely easy to win by simply planting the right arguments and hammering them, always, until it’s obvious you were right. Beliefs can shift in cataclysmic, sudden ways, at least in the face of traumatic events.
The Trump presidency is either going to be so self-destructive, so utterly horrific on a moral, financial, and social level, or such a complete *failure* at enacting change, that it’ll *require* people to question their beliefs. Either Trump will destroy the country or do nothing to help them, there is absolutely no in between. Either is a complete betrayal of his promises, which is inevitable because his promises are impossible lies.
The worst case scenario for ever fixing anything is if he does basically nothing except go after leftists with violence, because the right has extremely vitriolic and misguided *hate* for their fellow man as a dominant emotion and it’s entirely in keeping with their worldview that things don’t ever get better. Even then there is a wedge to hammer at the populist sentiment that kept young men with Republicans, if we’re allowed to speak-and young men are extremely tolerant of forceful arguments and confrontation as rhetorical tactics. But I don’t think he’s actually capable of stopping. His political coalition is too fragile, he needs to try to do things, and they will be horrible.
If the left pushes either likely outcome of of Republican power as a betrayal to the right people, then they won’t hesitate to abandon previously held beliefs in favor of an emotive argument. In people’s internal world being betrayed and lied to is the ultimate excuse for being wrong, because *it is*.
I think there is a misunderstanding going on somewhere, because I am now not sure to what extend you think the quality of arguments matters and to what extend it doesn’t. Maybe it helps if I go back to the starting point and rephrase my position, and then we can see if you disagree.
I criticized Sarah Bond’s argument against Stoicism for the combination of three reasons:
a) her argument is weak (it contains errors, neglects important facts, etc.)
b) she criticizes things that people like (Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism)
c) she signals a left-leaning political alignment (by attacking tech billionairs and by giving special importance to slavery)
My claim is that those three things in combination – if they become a pattern among public-facing academics – erode trust in the humanities and cause people to move politically rightwards. If it was just a and b, people would lose trust in academics but remain politically unaffected. If it was a and c, people wouldn’t care. Crucially, if it was b and c, but the arguments were strong, they would push people towards changing their opinions, both on things they are personally invested in and their political positions.
And I would further claim that this – a combination of a, b, and c causing people to lose trust in the humanities and moving right politically – has in fact happened in the last one or two decades. Left-leaning academics from the humanities have attacked things people like with weak arguments, which has moved a significant amount of people towards the right and made them disdain academia.
Now, my understanding of your reply reply to my original comment was that you think I am overestimating the role the strength of the arguments plays in this process. Did I get that right? If yes, could you maybe rephrase why you think the strength of arguments isn’t that important? Maybe then I will understand better.
Ah, that helped. I think the disconnect is that I’m saying the *strength* of the argument isn’t always related to the *truth* of the argument.
To elaborate:
1. If you make an argument people don’t immediately agree with they will file away not the entire argument, but the bottom line-you believed X, X occurred. If it happens either enough/in an important way, they’ll mentally grant you “quality of being right”.
It doesn’t matter if your argument was valid, if you were loud and simple and your final line was understood and you were *right*.
This is a societal problem because of immediacy bias and media capture, as it’s an expression of the fundamental attribution error and not rational, but that’s not really relevant to if the argument works.
2. Academics have lost touch because of factors involving liberalism, media capture, and inequality. Also, they don’t spend their time arguing for the public. The reverence for academics was a symptom of a functioning society, one that helped reinforce it but which isn’t primarily a function of anything about academics or their arguments.
3. The right is engaging with criticism of leftism and academia disingenuously. They aren’t finding arguments uncompelling, they don’t care about the arguments to begin with. This means that factual errors aren’t what they’re actually arguing about, they’re arguing about other things and using factual errors to hide this because they know academics can’t resist correcting perceived errors.
======================================
Internalizing their rhetoric that liberals need to be correct about all details plays their game. They’ll always win because their audience knows the joke-that they don’t care, but they can make these wanna-be superiors look like fools scrambling to fix tiny flaws while they speak to an emotion.
But as a practical point when it comes to things people can *experience* it doesn’t matter what argument you used or if it were valid. What matters is that it can be understood, simply, can’t be simply refuted, and has a valid prediction. It’s best if your argument is a simplification and not a mistake, but that really isn’t important.
The solution is to not be liberals, because the ideological flaws with neo-liberalism are poison, and to not overvalue the details. Yeah, she’s wrong about details, but contrary to the assertion that they’re important in her context *they aren’t*. More important actually is that she successfully linked tech bros, slavery, and a critique of both to leftism.
I originally put this as a long aside, but it works better as a different post.
This is why techniques like the Gish Gallop work-Academic sees errors, lights up at chance to teach, fails to realize it’s not a lecture. The correct response is to not give someone a chance to get into a Gallop, by hitting them with a repeated, simple, contradictory assertions and slamming their deflections as deflections.
For an example, young earth creationists will go through dozens of false assertions and misunderstandings of evolution and geologic time in a single five minute span.
The solution is not to fixate on any of that, but hit them with the Heat Problem. If they deflect call it a deflection and hit them with the Heat Problem, if they give a weak answer to the Heat Problem talk about it for the rest of the debate nonstop, if they try to assert the rules of a debate format *don’t be in that debate format* but also just interrupt them, restate the Heat Problem for the audience, and leave.
The argument isn’t correct in an academic context, but it’s absolutely argumentative in a public one and is actually valid here-young earth creationism can’t answer the Heat Problem, nothing else they say matters.
(Reply to Dan’s comments from December 15)
We probably won’t be able to determine how important exactly truth is in persuasion in the comment section of a blog. Communication skill and reach (and thus media capture) are certainly also very important. But there are two points I want to give for consideration:
After reading your aside about creationism and the Heat Problem, I looked up a thread on reddit where people described why they stopped being creationists, and no one there mentioned the Heat Problem. I had never heard about it before either, and I was quite interested in the creationism debate in the late 2000s (the Heat Problem seems to be a refutation of a few particular creationist models of the Great flood – maybe those didn’t exist back then). Most people in the thread describe a slow process of accumulating evidence in favor of and old earth and evolution, with “distant star light” being the one mentioned most often. That was accompanied by changes in their theological views that made room for evolution. In that thread it was mostly people moving away from a literalist reading of the bible, but I presume people leaving Christianity entirely also played a role (but didn’t post in that thread, because it is on r/Christianity). So it seems to me that the people who patiently laid out the various pieces evidence in favor of evolution and for the age of the earth contributed more to people moving away from young earth creationism than hammering on one killer argument against a specific creationist model did. Creationism is slowly loosing popularity as well-outlined evidence for evolution spreads to more and more people.
And that leads me to my second point: I think it is a mistake to assume that right-wingers don’t care about truth. They, like anyone else, don’t care about all truths equally. But if beliefs close to the core of a persons worldview are challenged, there is an incentive to take them seriously. And for this reason I don’t think how we evaluate Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism are details that are unimportant compared to the ambitions of modern day technocrats. They feed into the larger questions “What makes a good ruler?” and “What philosophy should I live by?”. Those questions are crucial for modern political debates, because people judge political actors of the present against the images of what makes a good or bad political actor that exist in their mind. And, as with the creationism, I think it is more convincing if those images are shaped by a wide variety of pieces of evidence that line up. To get the evidence to accumulate in that way – since no one has complete control over what information people receive – truth is probably the best available way. Distorting Marcus Aurelius to make Elon Musk look bad is, in the long run, less valuable than going into detail about what was good and bad about Marcus Aurelius’ reign to add him as an example that shapes people’s views about what makes a good or bad ruler.
(I hope I phrased it in an understandable way.)
Slow and steady accumulation of facts is too slow, and also…no, it’s not why people stop being creationists. It also won’t work anymore.
The problem with that data point is age. The people posting there are likely to have been convinced in a much different media environment, to get to the point they’re at.
The actual effect is that as people from a small group expand into the larger world they encounter more inconsistencies, sure, but they also escape the oppressive social networks that reinforce their views. The steady accumulation of evidence is actually secondary to the fact that to accumulate that evidence they need to be deraciated.
I had a lot of experience with this as a student in an extremely conservative state at a liberal university in a geology program. The main effect that broke my peers bad beliefs was hitting the wider social ecosystem of college and finding interesting people who weren’t in on the story. Hell, nothing the professors said really mattered that much, it was realizing that a bunch of smart peers thought creationism was crazy. Of course college is only one system, and in a lot of other ways media, including social media and online media, mattered too.
But things change. Social media is now comprehensively compromised, echo chambers are the norm, and right wing media manipulation will reinforce anything the state finds it useful for people to believe. The right is also much more open to using state force to either destroy colleges or force them to conform.
People aren’t escaping their social networks and steady accumulation of facts is overwhelmed by steady accumulation of lies.
Which leaves us to make the best, most forceful point in the quickest amount of time then repeat it. This has the same effect as a steady accumulation because people accumulate their own sides *bullshit arguments*. They keep hearing bad reasons to believe what they believe and a good reason not to, and it feels like a bunch of good reasons not to. It’s also much, much harder to misquote.
In other words, we need to acknowledge that the media environment has become much more hostile to us in an incredibly short amount of time and treat this like idealogical guerilla warfare.
I do agree with the notion that truth is useful to keep us as presenters grounded, and don’t think intentionally lying is a good idea even if it makes a better story. You’ve presented a strong argument.
But I also don’t think we need to really worry about small errors. And despite our shared interest in this particular history, I truly don’t think errors on this level matter in context. People are already conflating centuries.
“In other words, we need to acknowledge that the media environment has become much more hostile to us in an incredibly short amount of time and treat this like idealogical guerilla warfare.”
We?
To you. You stand alone here, or didn’t you notice?
It also confirms that your theories about convincing people quickly are bunk.
I’m not as alone as you. I know it’s hard to accept, but some of us aren’t filled with hate and hated in turn.
counts noses Nope, actually, you’re alone, and I’m not.
Screaming abuse at people for not being convinced when you scream abuse at them is not a good way to convince people that you aren’t filled with hatred, but it is a good way to make them hate you.
I forgive you your fallacies and hate.
And I forgive you for lying
Meh, I doubt that academics giving ‘arguments containing several errors and with a strong ideological bent’ is an important reason for such people to have moved to the far-right.
Because if they would have cared that much about ‘arguments not being filled with many errors and not having strong ideological bents’, I would have expected that Jordan Peterson*, other people like him, and their fans in the far-right would have made them woke progressives instead.
And I say that as somebody who has himself been annoyed with ‘woke’ academics spreading nonsense because of the ‘Culture War’.
* Jordan Peterson has spread absurd nonsense about an extraordinary array of fields. I recall:
Jordan Peterson being ridiculed in r/BadMath for claiming that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is evidence for the existence of God;
being attacked in r/BadEconomics for making the absurd claim that ‘women joining the workforce halved the wages of men’;
being a laughing stock on r/BadHistory and r/BadPhilosphy for doing such things as complaining about ‘Post Modern Neo-Marxists;
and finally, from TalesOfTimesForgotten I know he also misrepresent mythology.
Yet despite making so many demonstratively false claims many on the far-right love him.
Being ridiculed on Reddit will have the exact opposite effect from what you expect, and for good reason: Reddit is exceptionally famous for producing echochambers where dissenting opinions are purged, regardless of topic or political direction, or lack of it as it’s also a problem in non-political subreddits.
That’s not to say JP isn’t bullshitting plenty of times, but that information needs to not come under an implicit or (see Dan’s post above for example) explicit address of “you’re evil” or “you’re stupid” in order to actually reach anyone who follows him. Polarisation is self-reinforcing this way.
Re your general topic, I agree that such factual accuracy isn’t going to particularly affect people’s political leaning as most don’t care (this is why grifters are plenty popular, rhetoric moves people, not dialectic) and those who care should be able to figure out not to automatically trust things because they’ve been said by experts, crossref to find mistakes and also accept that mistakes happen and don’t automatically mean everything else should be disregarded. Such failures at retaining readers/listeners are failures of rhetoric, not dialectic.
“That’s not to say JP isn’t bullshitting plenty of times, but that information needs to not come under an implicit or (see Dan’s post above for example) explicit address of “you’re evil” or “you’re stupid” in order to actually reach anyone who follows him. Polarisation is self-reinforcing this way.”
Kindly, fuck that, you’re being lied to, manipulated, and deceived is absolutely effective rhetorical language as is swearing, challenging, attacking, belittling, and abusing the enemy. Pointing out that JP is a drug addled abusive failed father who by his own rhetoric should shut up and then cussing him out of the room as a hypocrit *works*. It’s also fully and completely true. Polarization isn’t bad for winning, because people *will* flip 180 degrees as long as your rhetoric gives them an out (“The evil and stupid ones are lying to you”). It’s bad for playing the center.
Any points gained by civility are lost because, if you believe your opponent is that wrong, that deceptive, you *hate them*. If you can’t muster up the emotional impetus to hate fascists you either don’t deserve power or don’t believe they’re fascists. It *is* just a word. Liberals will use it, but there is such a disconnect between their use of the word and their actions that they appear disingenuous-which is when people *actually* stop listening.
In other words, if your enemy is a fascist and you calmly call them a fascist you appear to be disingenuous. If you don’t call them a fascist you *also* appear disingenuous. And disingenuity is the death kneel of low trust media environments. Lying isn’t-it’s not a problem to gleefully lie-but people need to believe you have a story that you believe in. If you can convince them of that any inconsistencies are part of the story, a *tactic*, something Vance and Trump *have admitted*.
Fascists will gleefully call their opponents pedophiles and threaten to kill or arrest them. They also comprehensively lie. The rules are different because they have a story, and stick to it even if they tell untruths to further it.
Democrats didn’t lose because they had a story that their enemies were evil or stupid.
They lost because they didn’t.
And because, being such technocratic morons so deeply in bed with the establishment, an establishment that is obviously inhuman, they couldn’t have sold it if they tried-not with Biden, and not with someone associated with him at the helm. Remember-a whole lot of leftist politicians won commandingly in local races, in places Biden lost. The country didn’t move right, it moved away from *establishment liberalism*.
A final aside-this is true everywhere. America is a clear example I’m using because of personal experience, but France had a similar sequence of events that toppled their government, Germany is struggling with it, Britain and Canada face the same pressures, and even South Korea just faced a failed fascist coup. Liberalism cannot survive the inconsistencies of corporate power leading to media and regulatory capture, and attempts to stick to it doom the country it’s rooted in. Progressive leftism is the only ideology that offers a view of the future that is capable of stopping fascism, and compatible with human rights.
Democrats ranted and raved and frothed at the mouth with their claims that their opponents were fascist, exactly as you prescribed.
Every single county in the United States voted more Republican than it did in the last presidential election.
So much for effective.
Didn’t happen. Get out of your echo chamber, Democrats were incredibly tame. Literally every second of ads could have been targeted at showing Republicans arguing for raping kids and killing minorities, and they *didn’t do it*. They tried to argue for bipartisanship.
And they lost. Horribly. At least for the presidency. Again, local races with more radical rhetoric went *for them*. It was *just* a national failing rooted in a failure to motivate working class people.
Yeah, they used the word fascist after intense pressure, after months of watching a doddering old fool prance about. Yeah, they made overtures towards universal healthcare. Then the corporate donors got their hands on the campaign and populist rhetoric *died*, in the week before election Kamela said something that aligns with left populism zero times, compared to hundreds of incidents after Biden dropped out. I have goddamn charts. Populism dies, liberal civility rises, *support evaporates*.
And no, not every county. As I said. We also don’t need to pretend the Democrats are the only liberals in the world, we have alternative strategies in nearly identical political systems that worked because they were left populist.
But we’re in the find out phase, you’ll get to see the terrible truth soon enough. If you have an ounce of honesty beneath your partisan hate and bigotry make a list of things that a fascist Trump would do, now. Define to word to yourself, figure out what it’d look like, make a prediction. You don’t believe something until you open it up to being wrong.
In other words, your claim is that it’s not enough to froth at the mouth, you have to froth at the mouth every second or you’re incredibly tame.
You don’t even believe that yourself, since you do not evaluate opposition to you by your own standards.
You remember that this is his second presidency?
You clearly don’t care to understand my points, which makes this all an insult. I’m fine with being insulted, but it makes you look like you don’t know what *your own position is* when you just ineffectually ignore me or dismiss me.
Write your list of what a fascist Trump looks like if you’re so sure he isn’t one. Again, you got your way, *we get to know*. There’s no harm in the prediction. I don’t actually want validation, but I think it would honestly help you explain your thoughts to yourself.
Your last sentence explains a lot, Mary has it right, and the only one here that’s in an echo chamber is you.
“Your last sentence explains a lot, Mary has it right, and the only one here that’s in an echo chamber is you.”
Do you mean “Progressive leftism is the only ideology that offers a view of the future that is capable of stopping fascism, and compatible with human rights.”?
That’s an extraordinarily *unpopular* opinion, one that media and liberals will go to extraordinary lengths to refute. I’m not saying it because it’s a popular sentiment, I’m saying it because it’s a coherent explanation of why fascism *always* rises in liberal societies.
The social circles I run in disagree with me, but no one can provide an explanation for current events. Liberal frameworks can’t even address them except to ineffectually blame people for being evil and conservatives simply parrot corporate propogandists, meaning their arguments are easily refuted.
Believing things because you feel social validation among an in group is an echo chamber. Believing things strong enough to make prescriptive and predictive statements is just honesty. Hence why I am trying to encourage people to *make a prediction*, because if they do *they can be convinced by events*. If you never define the failure condition for your beliefs *you never had them*. They aren’t real until they can be tested.
You might want to ignore me because I am a leftist, but that’s partisan hate. It’s weakness.
@Dan: I don’t want to ignore you because you’re a leftist. I want to ignore you because you’ve made it clear that your problem with liberal society is that it allows the expression of views that you don’t like, which, given your comments regarding “the right” and why you don’t like them, displays an impressive lack of self-awareness. In reality, you should approve of liberal society–it allows for the expression of your views when other people don’t like them, and tends to allow people who tell the truth, even when it goes against the desires of those in power, to at least live. But, then again, maybe you’re not into that as long as you’re the one with the power.
And yes, I do think you’re in an echo chamber–even minority opinions can find a bubble these days, thanks to the rise of the Internet. I see it with both rightists and leftists, and the symptoms are pretty easy to spot. The most obvious one, generally, is when someone speaks disparagingly of “the right” or “the left” and acts like there is such a singular entity, when in reality each is composed of myriad factions, many of whom dislike each other and are motivated by entirely different things.
“I don’t want to ignore you because you’re a leftist. I want to ignore you because you’ve made it clear that your problem with liberal society is that it allows the expression of views that you don’t like, which, given your comments regarding “the right” and why you don’t like them, displays an impressive lack of self-awareness.”
Where did I say that?
For the record my problem with liberal society is that liberalism cannot implement systemic change and cannot accept the fundamental coercion of economic inequality nor in any way address accelerating inequality. All attempts otherwise have failed.
My problem with liberal media is that it’s owned by the corporations that wield unequal amounts of wealth and therefore act as mouthpieces of that wealth.
At no point does that imply I dislike that alternative opinions exist. I see no reason to pretend all opinions have merit, but I don’t advocate for policy that would prevent them from existing.
You’ve created a position I don’t have to justify hating me.
“And yes, I do think you’re in an echo chamber–even minority opinions can find a bubble these days, thanks to the rise of the Internet. I see it with both rightists and leftists, and the symptoms are pretty easy to spot. The most obvious one, generally, is when someone speaks disparagingly of “the right” or “the left” and acts like there is such a singular entity, when in reality each is composed of myriad factions, many of whom dislike each other and are motivated by entirely different things.”
You’re misunderstanding my use of broad language as an inability to discern subtly. The right broadly believes certain things or acts in certain ways, as does the left. But if the specific distinctions matter I will use appropriate language, hence why I’m separating liberals from progressives.
This is an example of the fundamental attribution error, by the by. You see my behavior and think it indicates characteristics while I see it and think it indicates circumstances. It’s a reasonable miscommunication.
Echo chambers absolutely exist but I am not exhibiting the behavior of someone who is deeply lost in one. I am both willing and able to understand alternative opinions and integrate them along with new information. The best indication of an echo chamber is the dogmatic use of slogans without an ability to describe their meaning or entertain challenges to them, plus an unwillingness to understand other’s opinions.
I just haven’t seen a convincing argument from Mary, and every time I explain that *they* exhibit echo chamber behavior, asserting untrue beliefs and making no attempt to understand others. I have seen nothing to indicate they’re even reading my replies. They’re just picking something to fixate on.
“You’ve created a position I don’t have to justify hating me.”
You’re the one whose complaint about liberal society is based purely on its supposed inefficacy against fascism because “fascism always rises in liberal societies”, when in reality it has been those societies who are the most liberal that have been best able to resist it without replacing it with some other ideology that turns out to have a similar regard for human rights.
If you look at where fascism came to power in the 1930s, it was not in Britain, the Commonwealth countries, the Netherlands, the Nordics, or the US, where liberalism was strong. It was in places where the liberal order was either nonexistent or had shallow roots, like Spain, Germany, and Italy.
Now, despite the fact that liberal society has actually been pretty good about avoiding succumbing to fascism, it does allow for the *expression* of fascist ideas in a way that an illiberal leftist society would not (e.g., allowing white supremacist organizations whose nationwide conventions are outnumbered by the local My Little Pony fancon), but given where illiberal leftism tends to lead I think the cure is worse than the disease.
So, yeah. Knowing that history, your insistence that the solution is pitching liberalism in favor of progressive leftism causes me to conclude that your problem with liberalism is that it allows people to express views you don’t like.
“So, yeah. Knowing that history, your insistence that the solution is pitching liberalism in favor of progressive leftism causes me to conclude that your problem with liberalism is that it allows people to express views you don’t like.”
Then accept some part of your assumptions or assertions are wrong, because I, a human being who isn’t an idealogical strawman, tells you I don’t.
Look guilders, here’s the fundamental issue here; when is someone allowed to be a leftist? What I described is pretty foundational to leftism, so if your reason for hating me is that you believe a convoluted series of propositions that end with “and that’s why you hate freedom” because I said I think leftism *preserves* freedom, then you will find a way to hate any leftist.
Which, again, is just *complicated* partisan bigotry motivated by hate.
I’ll try to address your flawed definition of both liberalism and leftism in those paragraphs as well as my understanding of the historical events of the early 20th century, but I’m more concerned with trying to get you to confront that you’re being reflexively intolerant. That is, to address the other theme we’re discussing, echo chamber shit.
With all due respect, your automatic jump to accusing people of hatred when they don’t buy into your priors makes me extremely disinclined to acquiesce to your request to believe you rather than my own lying eyes.
I mean, come on man. If I told you that in order to preserve human rights and freedom we needed to pitch the liberal order in favor of some kind of illiberal rightist scheme because communism always rises in liberal societies (when the truth is that communism, like fascism, is always strongest in societies where liberalism is weak or nonexistent) I would hope that you would have the brains to at least wonder if I was telling the truth about my motives.
“With all due respect, your automatic jump to accusing people of hatred when they don’t buy into your priors makes me extremely disinclined to acquiesce to your request to believe you rather than my own lying eyes.
I mean, come on man. If I told you that in order to preserve human rights and freedom we needed to pitch the liberal order in favor of some kind of illiberal rightist scheme because communism always rises in liberal societies (when the truth is that communism, like fascism, is always strongest in societies where liberalism is weak or nonexistent) I would hope that you would have the brains to at least wonder if I was telling the truth about my motives.”
Uh huh. No, guilders, im accusing you of hatred when you *repeatedly* jump to creating strawman to compare me to. It’s not an automatic jump, you entered this conversation in a fighting mode like id punched your kid, and pointed to me saying *I was a leftist* as the reason.
You haven’t even asked what the hell I mean when I say (basically) liberal order or what I’m suggesting. I’ve repeatedly said leftism is the only idealogy that preserves human rights, and if I believe free expression is a human right then doesn’t that mean I’ve directly said the opposite of what you believe I’ve said?
I said I want to preserve human rights with leftism, you’re saying I’m a danger to them because of leftism, and your justification for ignoring me is I said I want to impede human rights.
The only way to square that is if you believe me being a leftist is all you need to know about me…which is hate of leftists speaking. *When are people allowed to be leftists?* When do you respond to them with anything *other* than anger?
And detest for the establishment is mainstream. I’m trying to present an idealogy that preserves the core of the liberal tradition, but the idea that things can continue as now is already dead.
“what the hell I mean when I say (basically) liberal order ”
People who use terms and do not define them are using them with the common meaning of them.
To claim now that you were using some special, esoteric meaning that you didn’t bother to provide or even hint at is further evidence of bad faith.
If you wanted people to know what you meant, you would have given your meaning without anyone’s asking.
“and pointed to me saying *I was a leftist* as the reason.”
So, at this point we know that either you’re terrible at reading comprehension or you’re a liar, because that is a direct contradiction of what I actually said, which was: “I don’t want to ignore you because you’re a leftist. I want to ignore you because you’ve made it clear that your problem with liberal society is that it allows the expression of views that you don’t like.” (This, of course, leaves aside the question of whether wanting to ignore someone means that you hate them.)
IOTW, congratulations, you have now given me and everyone else who reads this thread even more reasons to not believe you when you say that you’re in favor of human rights.
“People who use terms and do not define them are using them with the common meaning of them.
To claim now that you were using some special, esoteric meaning that you didn’t bother to provide or even hint at is further evidence of bad faith.
If you wanted people to know what you meant, you would have given your meaning without anyone’s asking.”
I wrote a thousand fucking words. And you have made effort to understand none of them.
No, you don’t get to tell me that your understanding of my words is correct over what I said in your ignorance and hate.
Your words mean what they say regardless of what you claim to have meant by them, and anyone who understands English gets to say what they mean.
Guilders, you’re doing precisely the same thing you’ve just accused me of doing. If that’s wrong you’re fucked, the entire argument you’ve made is hypocrisy.
What you’re not fucking getting is that the criteria you’re using to decide I’m not worth listening to describes literally anyone who’d call themselves a leftist. How did this start? I said leftism is the only way to stop fascism. That’ belief is extremely, even universally, common among leftists.
If you would ignore every leftist it’s just hate. You can continue to deny this, but that’s entirely consistent with you hating us and refusing to listen.
Answer my question; when are people allowed to be leftists? What are acceptable statements you’ll *try to understand*? Are there *any*?
Yes, I will answer your bad-faith question: as far as I’m concerned, people can be leftists as long as they do not attempt to impose their vision of the future upon other people by violence, which is the same stance that I take towards any other political position, including mine.
Because, you know, I have principles beyond who/whom.
“Yes, I will answer your bad-faith question: as far as I’m concerned, people can be leftists as long as they do not attempt to impose their vision of the future upon other people by violence, which is the same stance that I take towards any other political position, including mine.
Because, you know, I have principles beyond who/whom.”
It’s not a bad faith question. If that’s your answer, what is your problem with me? I’ve never said anything that suggests using violence against my opposition.
“Your words mean what they say regardless of what you claim to have meant by them, and anyone who understands English gets to say what they mean.”
That’s literally a child’s understanding of linguistic semantics. I’m pretty sure kids outgrow it by ten.
What should be outgrown by the age of ten is blaming other people for what, by your own admission, was saying things you didn’t mean.
@Dan
@60guilders
I have been following this discussion from my email inbox. So excuse me, if I am wrong.
However, I started to wonder whether, your disagreement possibly might maybe be based on some misunderstanding.
The impression I had was that Dan had political opinions which could be described as ‘social-democratic*’ and implicitly supported, what I would term, political ‘liberalism’ but explicitly opposed, what I would term, economic ‘liberalism’.
And that 60guilders had taken Dan’s attacks on ‘liberalism’ to refer to political ‘liberalism’ when Dan had actually only referred to economic ‘liberalism’.
Or have I misunderstood any of your two’s position.
* Or at least that was what I had deduced from Dan claiming ‘leftist’ positions; it can also be that Dan’s opinions are closer to ‘democratic socialist’ or even something else in reality.
@Tus 3: You’ve summed up my position accurately, with the caveat that I would include economic and social liberalism (in the sense of the emphasis on the rights of the individual, etc.) in there as well.
@Dan: I already explained my problem with you. If you want to be a leftist, be a leftist. Just don’t expect me to take what you have to say about the solutions to problems seriously. (Seriously, where do you come up with the notion that “I want to ignore you” is anywhere close to “I want to kill you.”)
“What should be outgrown by the age of ten is blaming other people for what, by your own admission, was saying things you didn’t mean.”
Lol.
Guilders, that’s not terribly consistent, though. If your problem with me is I want to suppress my opposition, based on an assertion that applies to all leftists, yet people are allowed to be leftists if they’re nonviolent, either we don’t have a problem or you have a problem with all leftists.
“Seriously, where do you come up with the notion that “I want to ignore you” is anywhere close to “I want to kill you.””
To explain, the reason I keep on this are three fold.
First, the aforementioned inconsistencies. Either I’m missing something and *I* want to understand, or I don’t think you’re applying your values rationally.
Second, in the liberal tradition rational discussion of ideas is the foundation to Democracy. The basis for statements like “all men are created equal” is that they all possess the same capacity for reason, which unifies us. This capacity to reason is expressed through discussion and understanding, to reach a consensus. If you’re unwilling to understand or entertain my position it suggests a rather severe gap in your liberalism.
Three, as a synthesis of the above points with history, a lack of willingness to listen to or understand others tends to be the first step *before shooting them*. Even if your indifference is genuine, people tend not to be willing to *help* those they choose to ignore, neither entertaining their warnings nor believing their accusations of abuse. And public indifference to minority opinions is often used to launder genuine hate, help it hide in the crowd or win elections until it can enact policy.
That’s why I keep confronting you over this in such stark language. I’m trying to both probe and force you to confront how an unwillingness to understand others is illiberal.
a lack of willingness to listen to or understand others tends to be the first step *before shooting them*.
A briefest familiarity with history shows that a lack of of willingness to listen to or understand others — particularly when the “lack” is defined by the others disgruntled at the response — is, on the contrary, very rarely so.
No, Dan. I do understand you.
I just fundamentally disagree with you and am pretty sure that you would be just fine with suppressing me if you got half a shot at it.
May I ask on what that certainty is based?
As I cannot recall encountering a statement from Dan in this discussion which would indicate that is very likely. And supporting very ‘left-wing’ economic policies alone also is insufficient to indicate somebody is fine with ‘suppressing’ opposition; to pick one example out of many, the post-WWII British Labour Party nationalized a large share of the economy and introduces highest marginal tax rates clearly far above the revenue maximizing rates yet had not engaged in any suppression of the Conservative Party.
“No, Dan. I do understand you”
No, Guilders, you do not. In your own words you don’t want to even *listen*, it is absurd to claim that you simultaneously want to ignore me and already *understand* me. How arrogant are you?
This is precisely why your illiberalism is so dangerous.You accuse others of your sins, then pat yourself and the other bigots in your echo chamber on the back for failing to understand. It’s a self reinforcing tide of hate.
I have no idea what can push through this to force actual self reflection, and suspect nothing will. But it’s incredibly obvious that you’re not part of the liberal tradition when you say shit like that, so it neatly contradicts any *logical* arguement you’re making.
“A briefest familiarity with history shows that a lack of of willingness to listen to or understand others — particularly when the “lack” is defined by the others disgruntled at the response — is, on the contrary, very rarely so.”
Lol what? The Nazis-famous for a willingness to study other perspectives! The Crusades-an exercise in listening!
I do hope you’re apeing the fool, the idea you actually believe that is legitimately chilling.
I rest my case.
Dan cites the irrelevant, because while a counter-example can disprove a rule, he needs actual statistics to prove that they are the bulk of the cases.
@Tus 3: I base this assumption on the fact that he has stated that he does not like liberalism because “fascism always rises in liberal societies,” when, as I pointed out, this is actually untrue. He has instead advocated for progressive leftism. Which is fine. That is his right. But given that he has stated that he does not like liberalism, I believe that his ideal society will not respect individual rights if they come into conflict with the perceived interests of those running the show, and will simply be another flavor of authoritarianism. Note, too, that he doesn’t seem concerned about, say, communism, though that may be because the topic hasn’t come up yet, or because he subscribes to the Kerensky fallacy.
@Dan: I’m impressed by the lack of self-awareness required to maintain the apparent belief that I’m supposed to take your supposed devotion to individual rights as gospel truth, despite your stated antipathy to liberalism in general due to the fact that it allows people to express bad ideas, while you are allowed to call into question my devotion to liberalism because I don’t want to listen to you, specifically. Sorry dude, I read lefties on a regular basis, including a few outright Marxists, and I’m willing to listen to them because their opposition to liberalism isn’t based on the fact that in liberal society people aren’t required to get their ideas pre-screened before they can express them.
“I base this assumption on the fact that he has stated that he does not like liberalism because “fascism always rises in liberal societies,” when, as I pointed out, this is actually untrue. He has instead advocated for progressive leftism. Which is fine. That is his right. But given that he has stated that he does not like liberalism, I believe that his ideal society will not respect individual rights if they come into conflict with the perceived interests of those running the show, and will simply be another flavor of authoritarianism. Note, too, that he doesn’t seem concerned about, say, communism, though that may be because the topic hasn’t come up yet, or because he subscribes to the Kerensky fallacy.”
I haven’t changed my position, I’ve avoided debating your biases until you’ve expressed willingness to sit down and listen to a challenge. If you’re *openly not listening* the only thing to debate is that, no number of facts can ever convince someone acting like you are. Namely, a child.
And I haven’t talked about communism because it’s not the topic, although I will say-Trumps more a communist than any other politician currently active in America. His imminent centralization of state power has done more to replicate the Soviets than any progressive policy ever could. Communism had very little to do with economics and everything to do with the power of the state.
“I’m impressed by the lack of self-awareness required to maintain the apparent belief that I’m supposed to take your supposed devotion to individual rights as gospel truth, despite your stated antipathy to liberalism in general due to the fact that it allows people to express bad ideas, while you are allowed to call into question my devotion to liberalism because I don’t want to listen to you, specifically. Sorry dude, I read lefties on a regular basis, including a few outright Marxists, and I’m willing to listen to them because their opposition to liberalism isn’t based on the fact that in liberal society people aren’t required to get their ideas pre-screened before they can express them.”
And again, nothing you’ve said here relates in the slightest to my actual posts or beliefs. Seriously, what are you *talking about*? No really, what the actual fuck?
My clear and stated antipathy with liberalism is that capital accumulation is a fundamental contradiction of liberalism. I’ve never said jack shit that supports what *you’r*e saying. Continuing to ignore me on that basis is just further evidence you’re not a liberal, not a statement as to my beliefs.
Stop boxing a strawman filled with your own shit, it just makes you a freak and me shitty for participating in this farce.
@Dan: I have literally quoted you. Meanwhile, you have yet to demonstrate that anything you have said regarding my positions bears any resemblance to reality.
However, we finally agree on something, this is a farcical argument. Where we disagree, of course, is on *why.*
And I do not take being called a child by you as an insult. After all, it was a child who was willing to say that the emperor had no clothes.
Meanwhile, as to your last paragraph, I am curious: are you accustomed to people shutting down when you start making scatological comparisons? Because if you are, that explains a lot.
Hard to tell with this guy. Notice he talks of how persuasive abusive language is, but as soon as it doesn’t work, he accuses us of being wrong as people.
Guilders, you haven’t quoted a single word I’ve said that supports your argument you lying cunt.
So of course I’m ending this by pointing out you’re beating a strawman of your own bullshit. If you don’t understand, bullshit means unbelievable lies in American parlance. You don’t expect me to believe it and I don’t believe it. So stop saying it?
Stop lying and we can talk. Continue and there’s no point.
Mary, I forgive you in the spirit of Christmas for your many sins.
Okay, so you are apparently accustomed to people shutting down when you start throwing scatological and abusive language towards them. Much is explained, now.
Sorry Dan. I grew up on the Internet, and I’ve been insulted by people who were much more artful at it than you. You are simply a vulgarian, and a sanctimonious and hypocritical one to boot.
No, guilders, I *legitimately* made an effort until you started lying. You’re acting like a cry bullying cunt, I’ll call you one. I don’t expect you to shut down, I just also grew up on the Internet and have been insulted by people who were much more artful than you. But I *tried*. I really did, and that makes me much better than you two, at the end of the day.
No, actually, you didn’t.
You should really not start with the claim that people are being manipulated and evidence is needed that they are not, when you want to claim you dealt with people in good faith afterward.
I know you want to be hated Mary, so you make yourself odious. I forgive you, and give you silence now.
Guilders, I took the opportunity to view your linked blog. I should have just done my research. You are definitionally part of an echo chamber, one you created to echo your own beliefs, including no small part of hate-hatred of the left in particular, I mean rejecting Jesus because you realize he asked you to not hate people and you find that *problematic*? Shameful! You are a heretic of your own faith and know it! You admit it, seeking reassurance by your peers for it!
You’ve been lying from the first word, projecting those lies in a way that can be revealed by evidence. And for what? To discredit my attempts to get you to self reflect? Are you that threatened that you need to lie to avoid self engagement? Are you that sure of your own weakness?
It’s revelatory. You haven’t believed a single word you’ve said.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
I” rest my case.
Dan cites the irrelevant, because while a counter-example can disprove a rule, he needs actual statistics to prove that they are the bulk of the cases.”
Mary, you idiot, 2 is infinitely greater than 0. My argument wins over your assertion because you didn’t *present a case*, probably because it’s indefensible. No wonder you never actually contribute anything with your posts, you don’t have anything to say.
Dan, if you have not personally noticed many, many, many cases IN YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE where a refusal to listen does not lead to shooting people, you have not been paying attention to what happens before your eyes.
I forgive you your ad hominem attacks.
And I forgive you for lying.
I forgive you your projection.
And again.
(Whistle) Flag on the play, improper use of the term “ad hominem.”
For this bit – ‘arguments containing several errors and with a strong ideological bent’ – to push people politically they need to be knowledgeable enough to notice the errors and ideologically a bit in the opposite direction relative to the one making the argument. So Peterson’s bad arguments wouldn’t push everyone leftwards, but there are some groups that they might have this impact on.
For example, the people I’d call hobbyist atheists. That is, atheists who are somewhat invested in thinking about and discussing arguments for and against God’s existence. Those would find Peterson’s arguments for God particularly weak and often identify as liberal, classical liberal, or libertarian, so a bit to the left of Peterson. Those I would expect to be pushed towards the left by him. And I do indeed get the impression that hobbyist atheists were a much stronger voice in the “anti-SJW sphere” around 2015 than they are in the online right of 2024. Peterson’s influence on alienating atheists from the right was probably minor, the modern far-right is mostly even more right-wing than him and many of them are more explicitly Christian than he is, so they probably played a larger role than Peterson in that process. But I have seen comments along the line “I liked Jordan Peterson when he was in favor of free speech, but not anymore now that he talks about God in such a stupid way”.
So when I wrote that things like Sarah Bond’s rant against Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius may be pushing some people towards the far right, I am thinking about a particular type of person (people with an interest in Roman history who aren’t professional historians). Which happens to be the type of person who would listen to a podcast about historians’ take on Gladiator II.
What did the sailors on a liburnian do when it rained?
Get wet.
More seriously, these are littoral vessels and will basically always be operating in sight of land and some sort of mooring. If there’s a storm the simplest thing to do is “not put to sea today”, and the pirates you’re hunting are probably not at sea either because the merchants _they’re_ hunting are probably also not at sea either.
The merchant ships can keep on in weather that would sink an ancient warship. They have stronger, deeper hulls and are sail-powered. But ancient wrecks litter the Med, because before the compass routes were point to point between known landmarks. One exception were the big ships hauling grain from Alexandria to Rome, which took a direct route – but they did not sail in winter.
Landmark navigation in the Med works exceptionally well. It’s a inland sea surrounded by high mountains on all sides (except Egypt), which means that there are very few places where you’re out of sight of a mountain peak. I once actually did the math, and made me realize just how crazy complete the coverage of sight lines over the Med actually is.
It also explains why the lighthouse of Alexandria was such a big deal back in the day – it provided the tall visible landmark on the horizon on the one bit of flat coast that could be an issue to that kind of navigation.
“tiaraartiger helm”
Wait what, a tiara-like helmet? Are you sure about that?
Remember that “tiara” was originally a cloth-cap used by the ancient Persians. For an example see the riders on the Alexander Mosaic
Septimius Severus did launch a war of conquest against the Garamantes, who lived on the Southern fringe of proconsular Africa. So maybe the writers of Gladiator II knew some garbled version of that war. And mistakenly or purposely moced the action fro the desert to the coast.
“opposed landings were exceptionally, fantastically, incredibly rare before the modern period”
I don’t disagree, but, though rare, opposed landings did still happen on occasion. The Iliad itself is in a sense an account of an opposed landing (much of the fighting is about the ships). The Peloponnesian War gives a smattering of examples – notably the attempted Spartan landing at Pylos (Thuc. 4.9-12) where the ships beached themselves (on rocks!) to allow the marines to (try to) get ashore. Polyaenus credits Iphicrates with a specific drill for achieving an opposed landing in formation. Alexander’s siege of Tyre ended with a shipborne assault on the walls.
That’s just Greeks, I expect there are Roman examples too – of which Caesar’s first invasion of Britain is the obvious one.
It’s been a long time since I saw it, but my recollection is that (though somewhat unhistorical and irresponsible, like anything produced in Hollywood), the 1981 miniseries MASADA contained a fairly reasonable depiction of Roman siege warfare.
>“Oh, it’s just a [movie/show/game].” Sure, and this is just a blog.
Eloquently put!
>the Roman fleet, under the command of Marcus Acacius attacks the ‘town’ of Numidia, which were told, somewhat fantastically, is the ‘last free city in Africa Nova.’
Maybe they’re that one village that held out against the Romans, thanks to a locally brewed magic potion?
The last known instance of that happening was in 50BC, 250 years before this movie is ostensibly set. Also, just because they’re both “foreigners”, this movie really shouldn’t mix up Bryttonic and North African military technologies like invincibility potions.
The villagers in question were famous for their travels, though…as for the time issue: my father once told me of a depiction he had seen, of a North American voyage, wherein the villagers rode atop motorcycles as one does. How could such a thing be if the ‘last known instance’ was before the common era? I call for more research!
Since you mentioned Lindybeige, do you think the Roman legions would have preferred the Spandau or the Bren gun?
Thank you for writing this! When the film is streamable, could you please include some screenshots of relevant scenes?