Ben-Hur: The Chariot Race

Tags

Ancient Judea, Ancient Rome, Ben Hur, Graeco-Roman Sports, Jack Huston, Jerusalem, Morgan Freeman, Toby Kebbell

All the many iterations of Ben Hur, up to and including the most recent one (2016, dir. Timur Bekmambetov) have placed a heavy emphasis on the climactic chariot-racing scene. Indeed the first cinematic version, the 1907 silent film, was nothing but the chariot race. Because of this, the scene has had a strong effect on how racing is presented in Hollywood films. So let’s take a look at Roman chariot racing.

 

Chariot Racing

The ancient Mediterranean world loved chariot racing. Originally the chariot was a weapon of war, providing a mobile platform from which an archer or spearman could make attacks. Chariot racing probably evolved out of practicing for warfare. The first literary depiction of a chariot race comes from the last book of the Iliad, in which the Greeks conduct a chariot race at the funeral games of Patroclus, the fallen lover of Achilles, and the sport is mentioned in later Greek myths as well.

In 680 BC, chariot racing (both two-horse and four-horse teams) was added to the list of Olympic events. A special race-track, the hippodrome, was built to accommodate them. Noteworthy features of the Olympic hippodrome included mechanical starting gates and a series of bronze dolphins that were used to indicate how many laps had been done and how many remained. Whereas most competitors in the Olympics were the athletes involved, so that the man who won the footrace, for example, was the runner himself, the chariot races were different. The competitor was the owner of the horses, and the victory went to him, not to the chariot-driver, who might be a slave of the owner. Since Spartan women were allowed to own property, this became the only Olympic event that a woman could compete in.

It’s clear already in the Iliad that chariot-racing was a dangerous sport; Menelaus crashes his chariot during the race. The teams traveled at a high rate of speed and the chariots themselves were not very heavy vehicles, basically just an axle and wheels with a light frame. The driver essentially balanced on the axle. When the chariots came to the turns at the ends of the tracks, it was easy for the chariot to throw the driver, tip over, or crash into other. The chariots bringing up the rear might collide with or run straight over a crashed chariot, thrown driver, or tripped horse. Injuries and fatalities to both drivers and horses were a common feature of these events.

A modern recreation of a Graeco-Roman racing chariot

Eventually the Romans acquired the sport from the Greeks (as well as the Etruscans, although we know less about Etruscan racing). They began building circuses as race-tracks; like the hippodrome, the circus was an oblong track with a turning point at each end, but unlike the hippodrome, there was a median strip, the spina, that came to be decorated with statues and columns.

The racing itself was much like Greek racing, but there were differences. Although two-horse teams were still raced, the most important races were four-horse teams (and occasionally much larger—10-horse teams are mentioned, but were probably just for demonstrations of skill). Greek races were traditionally 12 laps, but the Romans shortened the race to 7 and later to 5 laps, because they wanted to get more races in during a single day. Instead of holding the reins in their hands, the driver tied the reins to his waist, which meant that if he was thrown from the chariot, he would dragged along unless he could manage to cut himself loose; as a result, drivers carried a knife. The drivers were the competitors (even if they were slaves), so if they won the race, they received the prize money; winning prize money because a way for a driver to purchase his freedom.

A reconstruction of the Circus Maximus, with the spina down the middle

By the start of the 2nd century BC, Roman chariot racing was divided into factions: Red, White, Blue, and Green, with the Blues and Greens being the most important. Charioteers of the same faction raced as a team, so that if any chariot of a faction won, the faction itself won (perhaps a little like the Tour de France today). The job of the lesser drivers was the help the star charioteer win. That opened up a realm of tactics in which lesser drivers supported the lead driver by, for example, blocking other teams from advancing or trying to crash rival chariots. Spectators tended to organize themselves according to the factions, so that they would sit together, cheer for their faction, and occasionally riot if their faction lost. In that sense, they have a lot in common with modern sports fans, who typically have a favorite team that they root for.

Chariot drivers were considered entertainers, just like actors and musicians. Many, though not all were slaves; the cash prizes they won could help buy themselves out of slavery. It is clear that they were very far down the social hierarchy, and they were considered infames, “disgraceful people”; other infames included prostitutes, pimps, gladiators, and soldiers who had been dishonorably discharged. Infames were excluded from many of the legal rights of Roman citizens; for example, they could not give testimony in court, and could suffer corporal punishment for crimes.

A winning charioteer receiving his token of victory

However, although they were socially disreputable people, successful charioteers could still be celebrities and move in very high social circles. Roman society had a rather ambivalent attitude toward entertainers of all types. It accorded them low status and treated them as morally suspect, but it celebrated them for their unusual accomplishments. The rich enjoyed socializing with them and some became romantically involved with extremely powerful people. This somewhat contrary attitude is perhaps paralleled by modern Americans’ fascination with both the glamour of celebrities and the occasionally tawdry scandals they get involved in. The Emperor Nero scandalized Roman society by competing in an Olympic chariot race; he ‘won’ the race, even though he fell out of his chariot and had to be helped back in. The spectacle of the most honored man in the Empire acting as an infamis surely disgusted many conservative Romans.

 

Chariot Racing in Ben-Hur

When I saw the movie, I was initially skeptical that Jerusalem would have had a hippodrome for formal chariot racing, but in fact it did. The movie exaggerates reality a bit, since Jerusalem’s hippodrome wasn’t carved out of a mountainside, and it wasn’t located just below Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, but those details are just dramatic embellishments. Ben-Hur’s race could have taken place in Jerusalem.

A reconstruction of the Jerusalem hippodrome

But that’s not to say there aren’t problems with it. It’s highly unlikely that the Roman soldier Messala (Toby Kebbell) would have been a champion charioteer. As I noted, charioteers were infames, and most scholars seem to agree that infames were excluded from the Roman army (although surviving law codes don’t actually explicitly say that, so there’s a bit of wiggle room). This version of Messala is struggling to make up for the fact that his grandfather was one of Julius’ Caesar’s assassins, so acting as an infamis is exactly the sort of thing he would have avoided in his quest for respectability. So the whole premise of the original novel is flawed; if Messala isn’t a chariot-driver, there’s no story at all, and if he’s not a soldier, there’s no dramatic confrontation between Roman culture and proto-Christianity. In order for there to be any story at all here, we have to overlook this legal detail.

The film gets the basics of chariot racing right; the chariots used are comparatively light. The one Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) trains in is clearly made of wicker, although the one Messala uses in the race is rather over-decorated and probably too heavy to successfully compete. The film conveys a sense that the drivers are balancing on their chariots rather than firmly rooted. But they hold the reins in their hands, perhaps because tying the reins around their waists would look weird to modern audiences. The race-track has a substantial spina down the middle, complete with dolphins to track the laps.

Messala (Toby Kebbell) and Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) in their chariots

The racers are not, however, organized into factions. There are no Blues or Greens, just eight individual teams all competing against each other. Each driver represents a different ethnic group, so there’s a Persian driver and an Egyptian driver, for example. Judah is the Jewish driver and Messala is the Roman driver, the favorite to win. The race as it’s presented is essentially a way for the Romans to demonstrate their military and cultural superiority over the rest of the world. While that’s untrue to actual Roman chariot racing, it’s not entirely alien to the way Romans thought. Gladiatorial contests were sometimes staged to convey that sense of cultural superiority.

The movie treats chariot racing the same way that movies treat gladiatorial combat, as if killing most of the drivers was a fundamental element of the sport. Throughout the racing scene, the emphasis is on how violent the race is. The six drivers who are not Ben-Hur or Messala all appear to get killed or severely injured during the race, and Messala ultimately loses a leg. When stretcher-bearers are carrying a body off the track, one of them gets hit and presumably killed as well. Many of the horses seem likely to die in the accidents, and one of them gets thrown into the stands, where it immediately starts injuring spectators.

This is surely an exaggeration. Chariot racing was a risky sport, but it wasn’t Death Race 2000. Just like gladiator films, Ben-Hur is presenting an image of Roman sport as being an inherently bloody slaughter as if what the Romans care about is the spectacle of violence and death rather than the competition between skilled athletes.

As Donald Kyle has pointed out in his Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, people have traditionally viewed Greek and Roman attitudes toward athletics in contrasting fashion. The Greeks are viewed as caring about sport (with an emphasis on skill, athleticism, and ideals) while the Romans are presented as interested only in spectacle (dramatic shows, violence, and bloodshed). This is despite the fact that both cultures practiced most of the same forms of athletics. The fact that Greek athletics could be extremely harsh is downplayed. Pankration, Greek all-out wrestling, is one of the most brutal versions of wrestling ever practiced; smashing joints, breaking fingers and toes, outright strangulation, and biting were all legal moves. Chariot racing was just as brutal when the Greeks practiced it as when the Romans did, and yet we associate Greek chariot racing with the Olympic ideal and Roman chariot racing with disregard for human life. In this film, the brutality of chariot racing is a metaphor for Roman brutality toward conquered peoples.

And yet, right at the end of the film, Pontius Pilate (Pilou Asbaek) makes a rather telling observation to Ilderim (Morgan Freeman). After Ilderim has won the race, Pilate takes note of the way the Jews are celebrating Ben-Hur and essentially says that the race has served its actual purpose of acculturating Jews to the Empire, by teaching them how to love racing the way the Romans do.

While I don’t know of any scholarship on this specific point, it’s a broadly accurate statement. The Roman Empire succeeded in part because the Romans were very good at developing institutions and practices that encouraged conquered peoples to absorb Romanness. This taught conquered peoples to see themselves as Romans as well as whatever ethnic group they belonged to. It gave the Empire a shared set of practices and values that helped hold it together for so long. A passion for chariot racing was certainly something held on long after the Roman Empire had broken up. It was perhaps the favorite sport of the Byzantine Empire for centuries.

I was able to see Ben-Hur because some people very kindly donated to support my blog. If you liked this post and want to help me continue reviewing films, please consider making a small donation.

 

Want to Know More?

The movie isn’t available on Amazon yet, since it’s still in the theaters, but the 1959 Charleton Heston version of Ben Hur is.

Donald Kyle’s Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World looks primarily at Graeco-Roman athletics  and tries to understand them as as sport, rather than just cataloging facts about the various games. It’s a really good discussion of what Greeks and Romans understood sport to be about. Alison Futrell’s The Roman Games: A Sourcebook is a collection of primary sources related to Roman sports, including chariot racing.

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Ben-Hur: A Long History

Tags

Ancient Judea, Ancient Rome, Ben Hur, Charleton Heston, Gore Vidal, Jesus of Nazareth, Karl Tunberg, Lew Wallace, Mark Burnett, Messala Severus, Ramon Navarro, Rodrigo Santoro, Roma Downey, Toby Kebbell, William Wyler

The new Ben-Hur (2016, dir. Timur Bekmambetov) is constantly talked about as a remake of the 1959 version starring Charleton Heston as the title character. But that’s not really true. The reality is that Ben-Hur is a complex enough body of material that it’s almost its own minor genre.

The origins of the film lie more than a century ago, in 1880 when Lew Wallace published his novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It’s a sprawling novel of more than 500 page that interweaves the lives of Judah Ben-Hur and Jesus’.Iin fact Judah only makes his first appearance in Part 2 (out of 8); Part 1 is devoted entirely to a retelling of Jesus’ birth. So basically, Wallace took the Biblical account of the life of Christ and used it as a background to the life of his hero, with Judah periodically running into Jesus or meeting his followers.

Wallace himself was an interesting character. Trained as a lawyer, he served as a Union general during the American Civil War and served on the military commission that tried the conspirators involved in Lincoln’s assassination. He supported Rutherford B Hayes in one of the most controversial elections in American history, and was rewarded in 1878 after Hayes’ victory by being appointed Governor of New Mexico Territory. It was during his time in that office that he wrote Ben-Hur (having already written a novel and a play). He also found time to arrange for Billy the Kid to testify in exchange for immunity for his crimes. In 1881 he was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Lew Wallace

Sales of the novel were slow at first, but within a few years the novel took off, and by 1900 it had becomes the best-selling novel of the 19^th century. It remained at the top of the charts until 1936, when it was knocked off by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Wallace initially resisted allowing the novel to be turned into a play, out of a concern that no one could properly portray Jesus, but in 1889, he agreed to an adaptation in which Jesus was represented by a beam of light. That production was a run-away success, drawing an audience of religious men and women who had previously been uncomfortable with theater for moral reasons. It became a touring show and only ceased to be performed in 1921. The production used a system of horses running on treadmills with a moving background.

Ben-Hur in Films

Given the story’s intense popularity at the start of the 20^th century, it was a fairly natural choice for movie-makers. In 1907, Sidney Olcott made a 15-minute silent movie that focused entirely on the chariot race, using New Jersey firemen as the charioteers and horses that normally pulled fire wagons. However, Olcott never bothered to get permission from the Wallace estate, triggering a landmark lawsuit that established that film makers were legally obligated to obtain the rights to any previously published work that was still under copyright. If you’re interested in this version, you can watch it on Youtube.

In 1922, Goldwyn Studios secured the rights to Ben-Hur and made an epic silent movie staring Ramon Navarro in the title role. Filmed in Italy, this version told the whole of Ben-Hur’s story, but stripped out most of the material about Jesus and his followers. It was the most expensive silent movie ever made and when it was released late in 1925, it managed to lose money even though it was a blockbuster (in part because the licensing deal gave the Wallace estate 50% of the profits). The film made Navarro one of the leader Hollywood actors. Its version of the chariot race was highly influential, and provided the template for racing scenes in the 1959 version of the film, as well as the 1998 Prince of Egypt animated movie and the pod-racing scene in The Phantom Menace.

The production was extremely troubled; among other catastrophes, May McAvoy, who was playing Esther, dislocated both her wrists; it was rumored that several extras died during the naval battle scene because they couldn’t swim; and the racing scene involved the death of quite a number of horses. The chariot race drew the whole pantheon of Hollywood royalty to watch it, and if you looked closely, you can see  Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, John and Lionel Barrymore, Lilian and Dorothy Gish, Sid Grauman, Samuel Goldwyn, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Fay Wray in the stands. If you’re a fan of cinema history, it’s worth reading about the production.

The film is also quite explicit about its pro-Christian stance. It opens with the Nativity. Jesus cures Judah’s mother and sister of leprosy, while Judah attempts to lead an anti-Roman rebellion in the name of Jesus. It ends with the whole Hur family converting to Christianity. Like the stage play, Jesus is never show full-on, and is sometimes represented by a shaft of light.

In 1959, the story got its most famous cinematic treatment when it was directed by William Wyler, with Charleton Heston playing the lead. Like the 1925 version, it was a huge hit, winning 11 Academy Awards (a feat not equaled until 1997’s Titanic). It is widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made.

But getting the script written was a challenge; it went through 12 different drafts. Karl Tunberg got the script after numerous re-writes and stripped out a good deal of material that had been in the novel, including a substantial chunk of material that follows the fate of the characters after the Crucifixion.

Wyler intensely disliked Tunberg’s dialog, which he felt was too modern, and so he hired Gore Vidal to re-do the dialog. In 1995, Vidal famously claimed that he felt that the dynamic between Judah and Messala only made sense if the two men had once been lovers and that Messala was hoping to get back together with Judah but felt rejected after Judah spurned his advances. According to Vidal, he persuaded Wyler to accept his reading, and told Stephen Boyd, who was playing Messala, to play the scenes that way, but did not tell Heston. When the notoriously conservative Heston learned about Vidal’s claim, he vehemently denied it, but if Vidal’s story is true, Heston wouldn’t have known about it.

Decide for yourself if you believe Vidal’s story.

Regardless of whether Vidal added a homoerotic subtext or not, the film made other changes to the novel. Wallace’s novel is unabashed in its treatment of Christianity being superior to Judaism; the major Jewish characters mostly wind up converting to Christianity after all. Wyler’s version, which was made about a decade after the establishment of the modern state of Israel, was more respectful to Judaism. Jesus’ face is not shown and the actor who played him was not given any lines. Although the ending strongly hints at Ben-Hur’s conversion, it doesn’t make it explicit.

In 2003, Charleton Heston reprised his role in an animated version of the story, produced by his own production company. This version returns to Wallace’ approach to the religious issue. Jesus (voiced by Scott McNeill) is seen and given dialog. Ben-Hur’s sister and mother are both miraculously healed of leprosy, and Messala is miraculously cured of the injured leg he received in the chariot race. Mary Magdalene witnesses Jesus’ resurrection and ascent into Heaven, and the film closes with Judah teaching his children to be Christians.

There was also a 2010 Canadian miniseries of the story, with a cast that included Hugh Bonneville, Alex Kingston, Ray Winstone, and Ben Cross in supporting roles, but I haven’t been able to find enough about it to know how closely it adheres to the original material.

 

The 2016 Ben-Hur

I think it’s important to see the 2016 film in this light. Many people who’ve commented on the film seem unaware of any version other than the 1959 one, and consequently assume that the Heston version represents a sort of baseline from which the 2016 version has deviated. In fact, the Heston version is really the outlier. With the exception of the 1907 silent version, which is just the chariot race, most of the other versions have been explicitly Christian in their sympathies, and it’s the Christian element of the story that really attracted its executive producers, Roma “Touched By an Angel” Downey and Mark Burnett. Downey and Burnett have been nicknamed “Hollywood’s Noisest Christians” for their unabashed interest in pursuit of the evangelical film market. They produced the History Channel miniseries The Bible, and they have said they viewed the film as “a story of forgiveness with an underlying story of Jesus”.

Downey and Burnett are Christians, in case you were at all unclear

So the film’s decision to cast Rodrigo Santoro as Jesus and to give him several scenes beyond just the Crucifixion is in fact quite true to the source novel. It represents a movement away from Classic Hollywood’s desire to avoid directly showing Jesus on screen, but that’s a convention that no longer has much force.

Given the explicitly Christian background of this version, it’s perhaps surprising that the script isn’t even more Christian than it is. Until the Crucifixion scene, none of Jesus’ dialog comes from the Gospels, and you might be forgiven for not figuring out that this anonymous carpenter is supposed to be Jesus instead of some New Age political thinker. The film even has a clever twist. Dismas (Moises Arias) is an angry anti-Roman zealot whose attempt to assassinate Pontius Pilate causes the ruination of the Hur family, but at the end of the film he’s one of the two criminals crucified with Jesus, the one who declares that Jesus has does nothing to deserve this punishment.

Santoro as Jesus

Unfortunately, the film’s treatment of its Jewish characters is rather awkward. Given the anti-Semitism that was so common in American culture in the late 19^th and early 20^th century it’s not surprising that the novel and the earlier cinematic versions were so explicitly pro-Christian. The 1959 version, as I noted, downplayed that. But in 2016, having literally all the Jewish characters convert feels rather culturally insensitive.

At no point does the film make any real effort to establish what Judaism involved in this period, except that it doesn’t involve the worship of multiple gods. There are a few minor details in the sets; for example, the individual graves in the Jewish cemetery have small stones placed on them in keeping with the modern Jewish custom of doing just that. But that’s about it. None of the Jewish characters ever does anything that seems distinctly Jewish in either a cultural or a religious sense. For example, there are no shots of the Second Temple or depictions of any Jewish religious rituals, no references to Jewish dietary rules, or anything like that. Combined with the conversions at the end of the film, it seems clear that Judah and the rest of the Hur clan aren’t really Jews so much as proto-Christians.

And perhaps the expanded Christian elements of the film are part of the reason that it did so poorly at the box office. The story isn’t Christian enough to draw a large evangelical audience, but it’s Christian enough that its tenor feels out of step with what contemporary film-goers are looking for. It’s a bit like Toby Kebbell’s Messala, too Roman to fit in with his Jewish adoptive family and not Roman enough to please the Romans he serves. In the end, both Messala and the film failed to win out.

This post was written with the help of generous donations to my blog. If you like it, please think about sending a few dollars my way.

 

Want to Know More?

The 2016 movie isn’t available on Amazon yet, since it’s still in the theaters, but the 1925 silent version and 1959 Charleton Heston version of Ben Hur are. The 2010 miniseries is also available.

Or think about reading the original novel, which was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. It’s still one of the 20 best-selling novels of all time.

 

Ben Hur: A Few Thoughts

Tags

Ancient Judea, Ancient Rome, Bad Clothing, Ben Hur, Jack Huston, Jerusalem, Messala Severus, Morgan Freeman, Toby Kebbell

Yesterday, thanks to generous donations via Paypal, I went to see the new Ben Hur (2016, dir. Timur Bekmambetov, based on the novel by Lew Wallace). I’ll get around to writing a longer post soon, but today I’m just going to post a few random thoughts that aren’t enough for an individual post.

Warning: Spoilers ahead! If you intend to see the movie, you may want to do so before reading this. But if you’re like most people and don’t intend to see it, read on!

1. It’s not a good movie. At 2 1/2 hours, it still manages to be too short. The backstory between Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) and Messala Severus (Toby Kebbell) needs more time than it’s given. The performances are unexceptional; Morgan Freeman delivers his lines as if he’s narrating March of the Jewish Resistance Fighters. 
2. Apparently 1st century Jewish men dress like 21st century fashion models. In one scene, Ben-Hur appears to be wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt that he just bought from Abercrombie. It’s such a jarring look that I honest-to-God thought that somehow the film had veered into meta-theater by shooting the scene in contemporary clothing. Note to the costume designer: the only Middle Eastern people who wore pants in this period were Persian women.
   

   See what I mean?

3. The film continues the Hollywood tradition of having trouble with Roman names. Messala Severus has no praenomen (no private ‘first’ name) for his adoptive family to use; they all just call him Messala. It’s no wonder he never feels like he’s really part of the family; they’re calling him by his last name. And one of the supporting characters is named Druses instead of Drusus. But I suppose we can forgive it, since the characters’ names were lifted from a 19th century novel.
4. The film also continues the Hollywood tradition of depicting Rome as an evil, oppressive empire that the world would be better off without. The characters spend so much time complaining about how horrible the Romans are, I wanted to shout “but what about the aqueducts?” (Given that the theater was virtually empty, I could have done so with impunity.)
5. I’ve already commented a little about the naval combat scene. And the full scene holds up pretty well. It does a fairly good job of capturing the realities of trireme combat from the rower’s point of view, and it’s quite an effective scene: claustrophobic, chaotic, and frightening. As I pointed out before, however, by 33 AD, there was no naval combat in the Mediterranean, because the Romans ruled the whole Mediterranean basin. The ‘Greek rebels’ the Romans are fighting in this film never existed, and are invented entirely to provide an action scene in a film that really only gets three of them, as well as to provide a way for Ben-Hur to escape captivity.
6. Since I’ve complained before about films whitewashing, I feel obligated to say that this film did things better. The performers who play Judah Ben-Hur’s household are actually mostly Jewish or at least Middle Eastern, even if Jack Huston is British. Jesus (Rodrigo Santoro) is played by a Italian-Portuguese Brazilian actor though. Has Hollywood ever cast a Jewish actor to play Jesus?
7. Freeman’s Ilderim has literally no motive whatsoever. He decides to bet Pontius Pilate a massive sum of money to allow Ben-Hur to race Messala even though Messala is an undefeated champion and Ben-Hur has never been in a chariot race before, and he agrees to cover all bets on the races because the climactic chariot race won’t happen unless he does, but he never explains why he’s doing this, except for a throw-away line that he used to hate the Romans for killing his son, but he’s over that now.

And thank you to those who donated to my Paypal account so I could go see this! If you want me tackling more first-run films, donating is a good way to make sure I do.

Want to Know More? 

The movie isn’t available on Amazon yet, since it’s still in the theaters, but the 1959 Charleton Heston version of Ben Hur is

Or think about reading the original novel, which was the best-selling novel of the 19th century.

Ben Hur: The Trailer

Tags

Ancient Rome, Ben Hur, Military Stuff, Quinqueremes

The remake of Ben Hur (2016, dir. Timur Bekmambetov) is opening this weekend, and I haven’t said anything about it on this blog yet. Let’s take a look at the trailer.

 

The first part of the trailer features a naval battle, and judging from what we see in the trailer, it looks like the film gets the basic facts right. Ancient Mediterranean naval combat relied on galleys that could sail for transport but were rowed during combat. The basic tactic used first by the Greeks and later by the Carthaginians and Romans was to row their ship as fast as possible into the side of the enemy ship and punch a hole in the hull using the bronze prow, which acted as a battering ram. If successful, the enemy ship would start to take on water and sink.

(An alternate tactic was to maneuver alongside the opposing ship and smash through its oars, leaving it crippled and vulnerable to a subsequent direct hit or being boarded by marines.)

A modern reconstruction of a Greek trireme

As a result, speed and maneuverability were the critical traits for Graeco-Roman ships. That’s why the emphasized rowers rather than sails. Large numbers of rowers working in unison could propel the ship faster and more reliably than the wind. But at some point making the ship wider to accommodate more rowers would have made the ship slower in the water. Instead, the Greeks pioneered a technique of stacking decks of rowers one above the other, with the oars being slightly off-set so they wouldn’t get tangled. At first these galleys were biremes (having two decks of rowers), and then triremes (with three decks). The Romans eventually embraced the quinquereme. Scholars argue about exactly how the oars were arranged on a ship like this, but the most common theory was that a quinquereme was not a ship with five banks of oars, but rather a type of trireme with three banks of oars, two of which were manned two to an oar with one bank manned by a single rower. Thus these were ‘five rower’ ships, not ‘five-oar’ ships.

A diagram of how the oars were placed

Rowing a complex ship like this took a great deal of practice, because all the oars had to be moved at the same time; otherwise they would foul each other. The need for complete coordination is the reason that these ships employed a drummer, to help the rowers keep the proper rhythm. A quiquereme is thought to have required 300 rowers, and the Romans found the easiest way to ensure the crews of their ships was to use slave rowers. So criminals could be sentenced to serve as rowers, which is what happens to Ben Hur in the novel and the film.

And that’s exactly what we see in the film (although I suspect the detail of the man tied to the prow of the ship is just made up). So props to Bekmanbetov for getting the tactical details right. (300: 2, I’m looking at you. You were supposed to be using exactly this system, although with free citizen rowers.)

However, there’s a problem. I’m unclear when this version of Ben Hur is set, but the novel and the 1959 version are set in 28 AD and the years just after, since Ben Hur’s life is synchronous with the life of Jesus. However, after 31 BC, the Romans ruled the entire Mediterranean basin, and from that point on down to the late 4^th century AD, the only major naval battle in the Mediterranean was during the civil war between Constantine and Licinius in 324 AD. In the late 20s or 30s AD, the Empire was firmly under the control of Tiberius, so there was no one to fight. The Romans continued to maintain galleys throughout the Imperial period, but there simply weren’t any naval battles happening. So I have no idea who Ben Hur’s ship is going up against.

Still, at least it looks like the battle is plausible.

Once I’ve had a chance to see the film in the theater, I’ll have more to say about it.