I was an explorer like you, until I took a flaming arrow to the knee…

It was a glorious observation, but just to nitpick even further, I think the real problem might be that you have an arrow sticking into you.

@@Justin_Rose 😆😆well said, good sir.

And once that arrow was in you, chances are the metal barbs are designed to stay in there, and worse yet, cause MORE damage should you try and pull it out. One way I've heard to truly rid of an embedded arrow is to ram it RIGHT THROUGH and out the opposite end of your body! Yet, that also depends on the direction of the arrow barbs, and the infection you'll probably get afterwards will be the thing that does you in ☹

"If you disable his hand with an arrow he will not be able to use it." "Medic!" Centurion Zimperis

Funny because Dr. Roel actually got super excited when this video dropped and endorsed it on Twitter, lol

And yeah they dug ditches around their camps, when on a march in enemy territory

As a matter of fact, they do, and not only that they build walls too.

And did they throw stones instead of pouting hot oil 😂

The Roman army were literally a bunch of engineers so... yes :)

I think of the Roman Empire every time the KZfaq algorithm tells me I should, which seems to be at least once a day.

Hahaha, I told my wife when she asked, every two days easy. And she couldn't believe it.

ha

😂😂

He forgot the basics! Digging ditches after having dug ditches. The only path to victory!

I had the same thoughts.

Yeah, but not necessarily a bad thing.

It's probably easy to get an A in his classes.

This guy: *rips a scene apart* Also this guy to the scene he ripped apart: 8/10 😊

@@Unknown-jt1joyes but no 😪 he’s a great prof

MVP comment

As a Roman reenactor, we have even ready command in the sources MVTA LOCVM...

Is it possible to do? Sure. Is it possible to do with a large army in an actual battle (and not just reenactment)? Probably not as easily.

@@felurfalas4427we rotate frontlines, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Iulios f. kenedios. A Roman Sensator 70 BC.

Also, he is wrong about the Navy Piracy. There was at least one Pirate Navy Fleet, under the command of the powerful Queen Teuta of Illyria. In 229 BC, Teuta’s reign of terror forced the Romans to intervene on behalf of their own merchants as well as their Greek allies. After inheriting her husband, King Agron's confederation of Illyrian kingdoms and city-states, she used the powerful navy he’d assembled and offered letters of the marque to local privateers in order to terrorize Greek & Roman shipping across the Adriatic, raiding as far south as Sicily. Her captains outmaneuvered the navies of Rome, Syracuse, and Corinth. A spectacular history, written in Polybius’s Histories Book 2, chapters 3-12. The Roman commerce badly suffered from piracy on the Adriatic, which was also facilitated by the natural conditions of Illyria: a winding coastline with numerous islands & convenient bays, which allowed local residents to raid the shores of the Balkan Peninsula & Italy, moving across the Adriatic & Ionian seas. On the basis of this, the local tribes began to unite into a single state that flourished under King Agron 230 B.C. captured part of Epirus, Epidamn, the islands of Far & Corfu and sought further north.

This and the total lack of Germanic cavalry. Or the total lack of armor and sword on the chieftain(s). And why all the trenches and barricades in a pitched battle ? If this was a Roman camp, where are the watch towers ? And why do the protagonists always loose their helmets ? And German sheperds weren't a thing back then either ... and why does Marcus Aurelius have long hair ? And I still consider Gladiator a top movie. 🙂

well, did not Arminius attacked in Teutoburg forest also with cavalry? But maybe they had better ground there, some trees deny bushes near them so there is more chance of horses able to run throught that forest.

@@richardgalbavy7103 Cavalry are shock troops. They are used to smash an enemy with force. No Cavalry unit can maintain cohesion through a forest and it cannot provide a shock. Not to mention a large percentage of those horses would have fractured their legs. Arminius did not use cavalry to attack the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest. He trapped the Romans and used ground troops armed with javelins and swords to annihilate them.

@@richardgalbavy7103 Indeed he did. But being Germanics, they were used to that terrain. And they mostly used mixed cavalry/infantry formations, where one rider "dragged" two infantymen along (they held onto the horse but were running on their own feet 🙂) Roman imperial cavalry INITIALLY also came from Germanic and Gallic tribes for most parts. Mix in some Thracians and Hispanics. In theory, they were also used to this kind of terrain. Arminius was able to get some of the Germanic auxiliary units on his side. You don't see many Germanic calvalry units in the Roman army after Teutoburger Wald, and they certainly were not stationed anywhere near the Rhein frontier.

Cavalry has always been the weak point of a roman army. Roman cavalry doing unsanctioned stupid sh*t is not unheard of. Part of the reason why Rome lost against Goths in Adrianople.

Same could be said of the film, 'Waterloo"

Same ballistas used in game of thrones

Yes it is.

all internet clicks lead you to Rome?

@@whoeveriam0iam14222 Ave Caesar!🦅

@@whoeveriam0iam14222 All clicks lead to Chrome.

@@whoeveriam0iam14222 🤣🤣🤣

The chariot race in the movie Ben Hur took a full year to film just that race sequence.

And after over half a century it's still superior to that CGI monstrosity that bombed at the box office a few years ago.

Oh right, they were really in ancient rome.

@@markthervguy It took a year to build the set and prepare the track surface; the actual filming of the race took about 5 weeks over the course of 3 months.

@@richardcanedo1614 Well I certainly wasn't implying they filmed it for an entire year. It took an entire year of work just for that scene.

I love how gritty it is, especially that last sequence when Marcus is wounded and he's trying to pull himself up and keep moving forward as Esca rushes to get help. I watch that scene and it's like I'm there with him, willing myself to survive in spite of the cold and the pain. It really sticks with me when I think back on the movie.

It was totally mid

Thank you for this, I was just about to post a comment asking them to at least list the chapters and timestamps!

@@Maazzzo No problem! Saw people were wondering for timestamps, so wrote them down for others.

@@nerdysniper6194 Very kind, cheers!

There's.... time travel in Indiana Jones now...?

@@hockeygrrlmuse After the absurd Crystal Skull fiasco I haven't seen the new one. This makes me far less likely to.

Heilung? ~ cure

"Varus give me back my legions"

"Ioannes, they are in the trees!"

Heilung, we have a man of class here!

🎶I'm in the trees🎶 🎶I'm in the breeze🎶 🎶No footsteps on the ground🎶 🎶You can pray🎶 🎶You can fight🎶 🎶But you'll not leave us now🎶

"Comprehensive" is a bit much. He makes a few remarks on every video.

You mean the Gun Jesus?

@@markthervguy No, different guy. Though Gun Jesus might be more qualified to talk about Risen.

I suspect Jonathan Ferguson, the keeper of firearms and artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in the UK, which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history thinks about the Romans primarily in terms of the weapons and tactics they used in war, and less so about their social, political, and economic makeup. After all, Jonathan Ferguson, the keeper of firearms and artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in the UK, which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history, is the keeper of firearms and artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in the UK, which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history.

"Their crossbows only shot 50 meters, catapults do rock though."

Beat me to it.

"You've got to dig a ditch!"

We're still digging it😊

You have to dig a ditch and when you finish that one, dig another one.... fraggin love the ditch guy

TBH he is a professor in HISTORY not in English 😉

Pronouncing the C in words with a K sound is valid and is how you pronounce those words in Latin

@@Nihoolious idk where you got that from. Very much depends on the word mate. Plus, scythe doesn't come from Latin.

@@Nihoolious If he really wanted to use latin words instead of English then he probably shouldn't say "Mark Antony" and "Ocavian" instead of Marcus Aurelius and Octavianus either.

Partly because they show pitched battles already in progress. The Ditch Guy was commenting on sieges, pre-battle preparations, etc.

You mean, football, soccer, and other team sports, right?

@@jyotirvakyananda He means warfare, it is frequently quite beloved by the people.

@@TheIfifi All team sports are derived from the tactics used in warfare. All. And to put a finer point on it all modern team sport viewed by millions every weekend are the equivalent of gladiatorial games. Polo, to use just one example, was a game that originated to teach people how to use a Calvary sword from a horse. Now what do you think is beloved by the public? Oh yeah, one more example: what kinds of games do soldiers play during basic training? Where do you think the “games” capture the flag and “flag football” come from? Just sayin’.

THIRTEEN!

Given the real Titus Pullo turned coat and died fighting for Magnus against Caesar at Pharsalus... you sure about that?

'Turned coat' is a strong word. Caesar's campaign against Pompey was a civil war that ended with Caesar declaring himself dictator. So technically speaking, Gaius Antonius from whom he mutinied and Caesar were the traitors since they were marching against the Roman Republic.

@@jarrodbright5231 I'm pretty sure he's talking about how the actor, Ray Stephenson, died this past year.

​@@viclange3826really???

Mandible switches would be very tough in battle given how, the man behind the legionnaire in combat has to come forward while the man in front has to rotate in the back at the same time. If a legionnaire died during that, or the legion got pushed back, that would disrupt the formation. If I could guess I’d probably say that if the Romans did switch then it was probably when they weren’t fighting maybe if the enemy pulled back to regroup, then the tired legionnaires would move to the back to recover

I'm not familiar with the term 'mandible' switches but if you are referring to maniples, as far we know, they did indeed switch out during combat. The later cohorts (what we saw see in "Rome") would have also likely done this, as Taylor alludes to when he talks about it. What he's criticizing is not the idea of switching out, it's the individual switching out inside a century itself. The unit could switch out as a whole but organizing a complicated rotating system that everyone has to pay attention to while also fighting the enemy would have been difficult to pull off and opened up weaknesses in the line to be exploited. So the unit can switch out as a whole or they stay in formation. It's also not quite clear how long an individual engagement would last but it's probably safe to say that with the heavy emphasis on mobility in the Roman army, they would have engaged and disengaged in waves rather than protracted combat for each individual. Note that this is all conjecture.

I made a comment somewhere in this section about that. As a reenactor we did that switching/rotation system when training as Norman infantry for the Hastings 2006 event. We had large blocks of Dutch/Belgian/German reenactors and after only several days of training we were able to perform this rotating a several rows deep every time. It was a great help the German instructors yelled and kicked everyone hard in the butt when making mistakes. During the Hastings event itself we made a great impression with your skills, being the only massive block of about 500 men doing this trick.

*Maniple. Mandibles are your jaws.

That episode was pretty good ! My pet theory is that the modern story is based on a historical rumor. Like the Syracusans probably used both mirrors (to blind roman artillery crews for instance) and incendiary weapons at the same time and some roman soldiers/observers must have thought the mirrors caused the fire. After all, it's not like many Syracusans survived the siege to correct the record. In fact, even Archimedes was killed during the sack.

@@WBtimhawkbruh, you probably just nailed it right on the head👌

Yes, I was confused by that statement, as well.

@@Mesozoic_mammal why

I haven't seen the movie, but many historians talk about how Britons so admired the Roman way of... well, everything, that minor nobles and local warlords copied them to the best of their abilities for decades, if not centuries.

No, heard that too. Pretty illiterate thing to do for someone who teaches at a university.

He definitely is mangling that one word. Odd

And he says "scythed" as "skythed" What.

It's a widespread variant, metathesis is a common and legitimate linguistic process

​@@hrotha Yes, I guess it's pure coincidence that all the thousands of times I've seen the word cavalry written in history books and academic articles (inclduing the one I write myself), it's always spelled cavalry, even though for laid-back linguists calvary would be equally legit. It's also undoubtedly immaterial that 'calvary' is already a different word, or that those naive people who go to study at university level (and who have to pay atrocious amounts of money for it in your country) will childishly assume that they can rely on their teachers using the correct form of technical terms.

Not sure if I should watch this outright or just wait for the reaction video.

if he can ever stop complaining about inane culture war bullshit and go back to talking about interesting history

Why? Dr Taylor is one of the authorities of Roman history. Metatron is... some guy

@@EAfirstlast Mostly because for being just a guy, he tends to know a lot about the subject at hand. Dr. Taylor was really good. There have been some awesome experts and a few, frankly, less informed, more pop history oriented (pretty rare fortunately). The more problematic ones are people who are not really experts in the subject the movie clips are from. One of the more recent ones involved Game of Thrones and they had a couple of experts on 17-19th century history reviewing clips from a show that's a weird hodgepodge of ancient to early renaissance, and their commentary was barely fitting, or in one case, pretty wrong.

@@EAfirstlast some guy with a PhD, supported by Dr Gioal Canestrelli, who's an expert in ancient European history. Dr. Taylor was good, but some of the other "experts" on this channel were pushing an agenda instead of portraying the truth.

It's very much not only you! and all the more so since it is clearly not just a slip of a tongue but something he does each time he says that word.

No. It was supposed to be Scipio Africanus defeating Hannibal at Zama. Maximus and his men were supposed to lose. They were cast as the Carthaginians.

@@TesterAnimal1 You're right! I knew one side was Carthage but I thought it was them for some reason.

@@HankCarver Regardless, the chariots are still wrong. The Carthaginians didn't use them either. The Romans mostly faced chariots when they fought in the Hellenistic east (famously against Mithridates VI). They also faced them during Caesar's invasion of Britain.

Illyrian pirates (and Pompey's campaign) were contemporary with the Roman Republic. Story in Ben-Hur takes place well into the Imperial period, when the Roman Empire surrounded the Mediterranean and piracy almost disappeared.

@@marchordie21 Yes, exactly. The Roman empire lasted a *long* time. A lot of things changed throughout.

They are handy to protect from enemy missiles. Like approaching walls and yet to reach the ladders and siege towers laid there by their compatriots.

Legionaries were also trained in construction and infrastructure. Every soldier in the Roman army knew how to lay bricks, build roads, build fortifications, etc.

In Italy still today many roads carry the name given to them at the time of the Roman Empire (consular roads), and are largely in the same place. Roman roads were perfectly straight for dozens of km, if you look at Google map (satellite images) you can easily spot them. And sometimes you can see "strange" alignments going on for 50 or so km even if there is no more a road, because once there was! And, as everybody knows, all the roads lead to Rome!

@@marcobassini3576 Indeed. There is a a very old road that was built by Romans which is still used today (the same alignment). It has been hypothesized that a lot of crashes that are plaguing that road was was attributed to the original alignment, which does not meet the current design standards.

I've read about it, and it makes sense too. In heavy combat how long before a given legionnaire would gas out? What other purpose would a maniple serve if the men behind the 2nd line did nothing but stand there?? Of course they rotated, and I also recall they did use whistles.

First of all, it's important to note that we do not know how the romans fought. We only have theories and guesses based on an interpretation of sources. Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn't know what they are talking about or is lying to you. With that established, the issue with rotating like what you see here is that you create a source of disturbance in the cohesion of the unit and battle line, one that your enemies *will* exploit. In order to individually switch out, you need to withdraw your shield to a certain degree and that's a prime spot for a very pointy stick to penetrate through. It also destabilizes your posture and you tripping and falling while trying to move backwards will be a far bigger issue to everyone around you than you being exhausted. It's not that it's completely impossible to switch out, it's just that it is unlikely to be this kind of dance like affair. It's an unnecessary risk. When you're in a battle line, you want everything to be dead simple and easy to execute instead of people being distracted. What you can however do is to have your cohort split into multiple tiered lines that advance with a gap through which you can retreat and switch out as coordinated groups. That way an exhausted front line (or section) can be switched out for a fresh and more experienced second group in one go rather than trying to mix and match in a chaotic mess and you also retain the flexibility of responding to battlefield developments. It also allows for an increased forward pressure because you are essentially hitting the enemy line with wave after wave of renewed charges. That being said, not every battle will be the same. In fact most won't. What made the Roman armies stand out over the many centuries was the flexibility and willingness to adapt. If the battle called for it, the would form a solid line. If it called for something else, they could do that. That's what the major advantage of having centuries and cohorts allowed for.

PS:. Note how this is also what he says. What he is criticizing is not the switching out of units, it's the switching out of men inside a single century or cohort in some extremely complicated and coordinated movement. Either the whole unit retreats or none of them do.

@@Salted_Fysh Formations weren't totally closed. It's likely that the standard Roman formation had about 1m between each man, leaving enough space to retreat or advance. Greeks equally had 1, 2 or 3 cubits.

@@Salted_Fysh So the ranks behind the first line in a maniple just stand there until the guy in front dies? How utterly useless would the maniple be then? Whats the purpose of a maniple in contact with the enemy if the majority of your manpower is idle? Makes absolutely no tactile sense. He has nothing to base that upon other than lack of specific writings. He’s a general military history academic so I’ll wait for an academic who is specific to Roman history.

🤣

Also, for his lack of knowledge about the Piracy back then... There was at least one Pirate Navy Fleet, under the command of the powerful Queen Teuta of Illyria. In 229 BC, Teuta’s reign of terror forced the Romans to intervene on behalf of their own merchants as well as their Greek allies. After inheriting her husband, King Agron's confederation of Illyrian kingdoms and city-states, she used the powerful navy he’d assembled and offered letters of the marque to local privateers in order to terrorize Greek & Roman shipping across the Adriatic, raiding as far south as Sicily. Her captains outmaneuvered the navies of Rome, Syracuse, and Corinth. A spectacular history, written in Polybius’s Histories Book 2, chapters 3-12. The Roman commerce badly suffered from piracy on the Adriatic, which was also facilitated by the natural conditions of Illyria: a winding coastline with numerous islands & convenient bays, which allowed local residents to raid the shores of the Balkan Peninsula & Italy, moving across the Adriatic & Ionian seas. On the basis of this, the local tribes began to unite into a single state that flourished under King Agron 230 B.C. captured part of Epirus, Epidamn, the islands of Far & Corfu and sought further north. King Agron died at the beginning of the First Illyrian War, 229 B.C.

@@jennydany ​ I'm afraid you're the one lacking in knowledge. "Ben-Hur" takes place during the Empire, 250 years after the events you mention. By that time, Rome had long since suppressed the major pirate enclaves of the Mediterranean, most famously under Pompey's expedition in 67 BC. The Dr. Taylor is exactly right in his comments.