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.

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Salem: Where to Start?

Tags

Bad Clothing, Mary Sibley, Puritans, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, WGN, Witchcraft

In 2014, WGN debuted a new television show, Salem, based, predictably enough, on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. When I say “based on”, I mean “faintly suggested by”, because the series bares hardly any relationship to the actual events, people, or places. There’s so much wrong with the series, and the historical Salem Witch Trials (and the scholarship on them) are so complex that it’s going to take a number of posts to unpack everything.

The basic premise of the series is that there actually were witches at Salem, and that they intentionally caused the witch panic for their own reasons. (I’ll comment on that in a later post.) But the coven is rife with interpersonal conflicts in good night-time soap opera fashion. John Alden, Cotton Mather, and his father Increase are all hunting the witches, but the head witch, Mary Sibley, is in love with Alden, which seriously complicates her evil plans.

The series has lots of problems, chief among them the lurid and erratic writing. Characters regularly contradict themselves. Early on, John Alden becomes a selectman, but that gets forgotten almost immediately after he’s done it. Increase Mather can’t decide whether trials are important or if summary justice is ok. Mary Sibley gets upset because one of her fellow witches arranges for an occult artifact to be delivered to Salem, but the next episode she says the artifact is critical to the plan she’s been pursuing all along. Early on, Mercy is terrified of Mary and has a perfect opportunity to denounce her in public as a witch, but chooses not to for no apparent reason. Cotton Mather is trying to find the witches of Salem, but when he questions an actual witch in a situation where she can’t lie, it never occurs to him to ask her who the other witches are. The witches have whatever random collection of powers the script calls for them to have; sometimes their magic requires chants and ingredients, but other times it can be performed silently. Cotton veers from religious fanatic to lust-driven emotional cripple and alcoholic. The whole community is supposed to be deeply religious, and yet no one ever seems shocked by immoral actions like fornication and adultery. But that’s script stuff, and this blog is about history stuff, so let’s start looking into the details.

The Physical Setting

In 1692, Salem was about 60 years old, a prosperous town on the Naumkeag River. But Salem at the time was really two communities, Salem Town and Salem Village. Salem Town was on the river and was the larger, more prosperous region, with a comparatively developed economy based on fishing, shipbuilding, and maritime commerce, with a population of around 2000. It had a thriving system of taverns and inns for travelers, merchants were able to borrow money on credit, and it was quite wealthy; residents of the town seem to have owned roughly 10x the wealth that residents of Salem Village did. Salem Village (today known as Danvers) was located on the northwest side of Salem Town, about 7 miles west. It was smaller and more rural, with its economy focused more on farming, and a population of perhaps 600.

The House of Seven Gables at Salem

Modern scholars agree that this division was fundamental to understanding the dynamics that produced the Witch Trials. Salem Village was a rather contentious place, with numerous internal quarrels over property rights, as well as disputes with Salem Town; the tensions with Salem Town primarily took the form of disagreements about taxation and church governance. Salem Town had already lost three outlying regions to political independence, and its leaders worried about its declining tax base, so they were reluctant to permit Salem Village to separate completely. In particular, the residents of Salem Village had voted in 1672 to establish a separate church from that of Salem Town. This allowed them to allocate their local church taxes to their own church and select a minister who was more to their liking. It also greatly reduced the distance they had to travel for church. But the Town had refused to allow them to establish a full church; sermons could be preached there, but communion could not be offered in the Salem Village church, and new members could only be admitted through the Salem Town church.

The Salem Town Square from the series; note how rural it seems

The series can’t seem to decide how large Salem is. The woods seem to be just beyond every house we see, and the set looks a lot like the colonial version of a Renaissance Faire where the whole cast dresses in black instead of chainmail and doesn’t sing and dance at the drop of a hat. So the town is shown to be quite small and rather rural. But the town has a large brothel with at least a half-dozen women working there. (Highly unlikely.) It has a public orphanage where unwed girls regularly give birth. (Wrong. Orphans were routinely taken in by private families as an act of Christian charity; most were employed as servants rather than adopted.) There is a nearby ravine filled with the dozens of corpses of everyone who is not a good Christian when they die. (This last disgusting detail is absurd; the colonists knew that unburied bodies were a health risk. Even the executed witches were buried, just not in Christian cemeteries.) It has considerable numbers of very ugly or physically deformed men and women who somehow avoid attracting notice despite having no eyes, or being covered with boils, and people can be kidnapped off the street with no risk of anyone seeing it. All this suggests a much larger community.

Just the local brothel at the Renaissance Faire Salem

The series also has no understanding of the geographic division between the Town and the Village. All the major characters seem to live very close to the river, placing them all in Salem Town. There’s no sign that any of the characters are farmers. Most of the characters have no discernible source of income, although George and Mary Sibley’s wealth is based on maritime commerce. Salem appears to have only one church attended by everyone, with Cotton Mather as the minister. The church also seems to serve as the courthouse, which is roughly correct; the trials became too crowded to meet in their original venue and so were moved to the Salem Village church

 

The Political Situation

Massachusetts was a Crown colony, meaning that its government was based on a charter issued by the English monarch. Its governor was appointed by the Crown. In 1685, King James II voided the original charter, issued an unpopular new one, and appointed a new governor, but in 1688, James was deposed during the Glorious Revolution, which led to the ouster of his appointee and the return to office of the previous governor, whose legal authority was uncertain, because there was no charter in force until the new king, William III, issued a new one. As a result, the courts had no authority to deal with major crimes. A new governor, William Phips, arrived with a new charter early in 1692. Phips immediately established county justices of the peace, sheriffs, and a Court of Oyer and Terminer (Law French for “To hear and determine” [legal accusations]) that had authority to deal with the backlog of cases that had occurred since James II’s charter had been voided. But the series never mentions the colonial government at all. Salem seems to be entirely autonomous.

Under the charter, the colony had a bicameral legislature; the lower house was representative, although only those colonists who qualified as “freemen” could vote in elections, and the franchise seems to have been rather restricted; among other things, only full church members were permitted to vote and churches restricted membership. Town government was based on open town meetings in which anyone could speak and all males (including non-church members) could vote. The community was administered by a committee of elected ‘selectmen’. In other words, the towns and Massachusetts colony as a whole enjoyed a substantial degree of democracy, although, as with all democracies, there were limits to who was includde and there were problems in how government was administered in practice; over the course of the 17^th century the system drifted toward oligarchy.

In the series, the town government is based on a committee of 14 selectmen, who seem to hold their office by hereditary right, because John Alden claims what he says is the “Alden seat” among the selectmen, and no one challenges his right to do this, nor is there an election. George Sibley has been incapacitated by sorcery, so his wife Mary exercises his authority for him and no one seems to object to this. George Sibley appears to outrank the other selectmen, because Mary is described as controlling the town. The selectmen of the series seem to have complete authority. In the pilot, George Sibley has the power to impose punishment on fornicators, and at various points later in the series the selectmen have the authority to quarantine ships, order people arrested, decide who will be charged with crimes, and more. There is no clear division between the political system and the legal system.

Magistrate Hale and Mary Sibley, the town’s major leaders

So as usual with historical films and shows, there’s a sense that colonial Salem was undemocratic, governed by officials of almost absolute authority who were not in any clear fashion responsible to their communities or limited either by law or by higher authorities such as the colonial governor, the English Parliament, or the English king. There’s no notion that American democracy began its evolution during the colonial period. In part, the choice to gloss over the complexities of town government and law is surely to allow easier storytelling; the more vague the political and legal details, the more freedom the writers have to plot their stories.

But this also fits into the American tendency to both represent the past as less free than the present and to allow bad guys to demonstrate their villainy through their autocratic tendencies. George and Mary Sibley and Magistrate Hale all show their evil side by imposing arbitrary punishments, refusing to show mercy or kindness, and giving orders, whereas John Alden demonstrates his heroic status by speaking out boldly in different situations, by interrupting Cotton Mather’s sermons and the trial proceedings, and generally displaying the independent streak that good guys usually have in film and television.

A Word about Clothing

In the first half of the season, nearly all the characters and extras dress in black, although Alden is normally clothed in brown leather, and a few extras are shown in dark green or burlap brown. Mary Sibley occasionally wears red dresses, but usually in private. The women sometimes wear white or tan shifts under their dresses.

This plays into the widespread notion that the Puritans only dressed in black with white ruffs or aprons. This overlooks two things. First, not all of the residents of Salem were Puritans, since many were Anglicans or even Quakers, and in some cases no specific Christian creed at all.

Second, and more importantly, the Puritans did not dress all in black. That’s simply a myth. Black was actually a fairly expensive color for clothing and tended to be restricted to those wealthy enough to afford it. Puritan clothing favored modesty over expense and fashion, and dressing all in black would have struck many Puritans as being immodest because it represented a claim to wealth and high status. One 16^th century Puritan author, William Perkins, maintained that clothing ought to reflect the social hierarchy so that the wealthy could be distinguished from the workers, artisans, and other lower classes. Thus George and Mary Sibley and Magistrate Hale could have dressed in black as a status symbol. Black or grey would also have been suitable for church, since one wanted to look somber and respectable.

Instead, Puritans dressed in a wide range of colors: blue, brown, tawny, green, murrey (a reddish purple), and burgundy being very common. The dyes were generally vegetable dyes, so the color tones would have been softer rather than brighter.

A wealthy Puritan woman and her baby; note the number of different colors in the clothing

Late 17^th century fashion called for lots of lace on both men and women’s clothing, wide collars, and for women, off-the shoulder styles with low necklines that allowed some cleavage. Puritans found such clothing immodest, so they favored narrow collars, high necklines, and only small amounts of lace if at all. Shiny fabrics were avoided in favor of wool or linen. If a woman’s dress had a lower neckline, she wore a shift underneath with a high neckline; exposing the sternum or cleavage was unacceptable. Jewelry was small and modest when it was worn at all, although on special occasions pearls were acceptable, especially in the hair. Women tended to wear a white apron over their dress.

Look at all the slutty Puritans

Men’s hair was longer than is fashionable today, and women’s hair was expected to be shoulder-length. But it was unacceptable for Puritan women to have their heads uncovered, so hair was worn under a simple cap.

Fortunately, at the start, the show avoids another cliché, the false idea that everyone wear enormous buckles on their shoes and hats. Buckles were an expensive accessory, and so only the wealthiest people would have worn them on hats or shoes, and even then probably only on fancy occasions, sort of the way that American men wear tuxedos.

So the series generally gets the clothing wrong. In addition to way too much black, the women nearly always have exposed cleavage and exposed hair. Most of the women wear jewelry. John Alden wears entirely too much leather, just like the guys in Reign.

I’m a little conflicted about Mary Sibley’s clothing. She is the wife of a Puritan and so ought to follow Puritan dress codes, but she’s also apparently the richest person in town and the wife of a selectman. In public she typically dresses in black with some cleavage showing, her hair uncovered, and adorned with a necklace and dangly ear-rings. Sometimes she wears rather silly hats with ostrich feathers on them. By Puritan standards she is dressing very immodestly, calling attention to her social status, which is acceptable, but also exposing her breasts, throat, and hair in an inappropriate way. So the Puritans ought to be offended by her clothing. However, an argument could be made that by dressing her this way, the show is subtly revealing her immorality to the viewer. But that would require the show to actually understand how men and women in the period actually dressed, and there’s no sign the show knows this. Instead, they’re just trying to make her look fashionable in an olde timey way.

In the second half of the series, however, a shipment of colored fabric must have arrived, because the extras and lower class characters start wearing greens, dark blues, and browns. But the ship that brought all the colored fabric also apparently had a big crate full of buckles, because suddenly everyone’s got buckles on their hats. One step forward, one step back, I guess.

Tituba and Mary Sibley, after the colored fabric arrived

And One More Thing

The Sibleys have Botticelli’s Primavera over their bedroom fireplace.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1 is available through Amazon.

Reign: Attack of the 16th Century Millennials

Tags

16th century Europe, 16th century France, Adelaide Kane, Bad Clothing, Catherine de Medici, Kings and Queens, Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, Reign, The CW

So I was on Netflix the other night and it suggested that I watch Reign, the CW show about Mary Queen of Scots. And I thought, “Ok. Let’s give it a try. How bad can it be?” The answer is, it can be pretty darn bad.

The Historical Queen Mary of Scotland

Marie Stuart (which is the French spelling of her name) was born in December of 1542, the only surviving child of King James V of Scotland and his French wife Mary of Guise. The Scots and the French had for centuries maintained a traditional political alliance based on mutual hostility to England. Starting in the 14^th century, it had been very convenient for France to be allied with Scotland, because whenever the English invaded France during the Hundred Years’ War, the French could count on the Scots invading England. For that reason, the two countries maintained what the Scots termed ‘the Auld Alliance’.

Marie’s father died of a fever less than a week after Marie was born, and as his only legitimate child, she then became queen. Henry VIII of England, seeing an opportunity to break the Auld Alliance, proposed that Marie wed his son Edward when she turned six. The Scottish regent initially accepted the offer, but by July of 1543, the deal had broken down and the Scots renewed the Auld Alliance. In response, Henry’s forces invaded Scotland, hoping to seize the young queen. This invasion, which was nicknamed the ‘Rough Wooing’, failed, but made clear to the Scots that it was quite risky for them to keep Mary where the English might grab her.

Eventually, after moving Marie further northward for several years, in 1548, the Scots accepted a French proposal, quite literally. King Henry II suggested that Marie should wed his three year old son, Francis. As a result, Marie was sent to live at the French royal court; it was typical of such arranged royal marriages that the young bride would be raised along her future husband, and the French royal court would be a much safer place for her. She was accompanied by her two illegitimate half-brothers and four Scottish ladies-in-waiting, the ‘Four Marys’ (since all four of them were named Mary).

Marie and Francis as king and queen

In April of 1558, when she was 16, Marie signed a treaty making the French king her heir if she died without heirs. Less than a month later, she married Francis. In November of 1558, when Mary I of England died and was succeeded by Elizabeth I, Marie became the heir to the English throne, since she and Elizabeth were cousins. In July of 1559, when Henry II died, Francis became King Francis II and Marie became his queen. Unfortunately for her, however, Francis died less than 18 months later from some sort of ailment centered on his ear. His 10 year old brother became King Charles IX, and Henry II’s widow, Catherine de Medici, became regent. Catherine disliked Marie and since there was nothing to keep her in France and she had a kingdom in Scotland, she soon returned back to Scotland.

Marie’s Scottish subjects greeted her with some suspicion. She had been raised in France and spoke French as her main language, speaking English only with a heavy French accent. She also chose to spell her first and last name in the French fashion (which is why I’ve chosen to use that spelling here, as well as to keep her separate from the various other Marys of the period). More seriously, having been raised in Catholic France, Marie was a devout Catholic, whereas Scotland was by 1560 torn between Catholics and Protestants. Her reign in Scotland proved to be extremely turbulent. But I’m going to break off her story here and turn instead to Reign.

 

The adult Marie. Note her red hair

Are You Mary Queen of Scots?

Reign opens in 1557, with Mary Stuart (Adelaide Kane) 15 years old and living at a French convent. She and the young nuns play soccer until it’s time to have lunch outdoors. One of the nuns begins bleeding out of her mouth and ears and drops dead in her porridge; it’s revealed that she was Mary’s food taster, and so clearly there is a plot afoot to poison Mary. The Mother Superior decides that it’s time to send Mary back to the French royal court because the convent is unsafe.

Adelaide Kane as Mary. Note the distinct lack of red hair.

None of that actually happened. Mary was raised at the French court. However, the idea that a young Catholic noblewoman could have been raised in a convent is entirely reasonable, and the opening gives the series a chance to show her return to court as a way to introduce the cast and the setting to the audience, so I suppose we can forgive this particular historical liberty.

However, once Mary leaves the convent, the show also substantially leaves the realm of history and quickly finds itself in the realm not of France but of the contemporary teen romance. The pilot offers Mary three potential boyfriends, Prince Francis (Toby Regbo); Sebastian, Francis’ illegitimate half-brother (Torrance Coombs), and Colin (Ashley Charles), a Scottish boy she evidently knew from back home who has come to France to serve her because he’s obviously into her even though he’s technically the boyfriend of one of her ladies in waiting. Suffice to say, of the three, only Francis actually existed.

Mary also learns that the Franco-Scottish alliance is not a guaranteed thing, for reasons that aren’t actually explained (at least not in the episodes I managed to get through). The political arrangements in the series are very simple. The English are bad, and because they’re bad, they want to assassinate Mary. They’re Protestant, whatever that means, while the French and apparently the Scots are Catholic, which means they occasionally carry a rosary. The Auld Alliance, France’s powerful position in 16^th century Europe, and the historic reasons that the French want Mary aren’t relevant, because what matters is that the uncertainty about the alliance means that Mary and Francis can be on-again, off-again as the network’s need to generate suspense requires. And when they’re off again, Mary can be interested in Sebastian, who even gets a cute nickname, Bash, or courted by whatever nobleman happens to be visiting the French court in that particular episode.

Oh, and Francis’ mother, Catherine (Megan Follows) hates Mary, which is accurate, but the series has Nostradamus predict that Mary will be the death of Francis, so Catherine naturally wants to stop the marriage. In the pilot, Catherine either bribes or pressures Colin into attempting to drug Mary so he can rape her and thus render her not a virgin and therefore not a fit wife for the king. Unfortunately it all goes wrong because a mysterious girl who hides somewhere in the palace and wears a bag over her head warns Mary not to drink the wine and so she avoids being raped. Colin gets arrested and has his head chopped off, only it turns out that the executioners accidentally executed the wrong guy and Bag Girl helps Colin escape, which causes Catherine no end of worry.

As the series goes on, it occasionally brushes up against actual events. Mary’s status as a potential heir to the English throne is introduced, although she refuses to claim the throne because that would be political, I guess. At the end of the season, King Henry dies as a result of a jousting injury, which happened (but not while jousting his own son) and Francis becomes king.

But the series wouldn’t be complete without Mary’s cadre of high school frenemies ladies in waiting, who are all lovely young Scottish women without the faintest trace of Scottishness among them (but in all fairness, both the Scots and the French are played as Americans, so at least the series is consistent). Their names are Amy, Greer, Kenna, and Lola, which the scriptwriters presumably got out of a recent high school year book. At least Greer gets a Scottish loconym, ‘of Kinross’.

Mary and her besties. Note the distinct lack of sleeves or anything else to suggest the 16th century

In other words, the series is interested in historical accuracy about as much as 300 2: Rise of an Empire is. The faintest outline of the historical Mary Stuart can be seen through the rather tawdry clothing they’ve put on her.

Speaking of clothing…

Look at All the Prom Dresses!

The costuming in this series is ghastly, about as historically accurate as the typical high school play. The young women in the series all generally wear 21^st century fashions (except for Bag Girl, unless there’s a hot new trend in burlap that I’m not aware of). While many of the dresses are moderately full-length, that’s about as close as they get to period clothing. They are variously off-the-shoulder, sleeveless, low-cut, short skirted, gauzy, glittery, lacey, feathery, and so on. More or less, the young women at the French court dress like they’re going to a 21^st century prom. And they wear high heels. Catherine de Medici gets a more mature, reserved, and slightly more accurate take on those fashions, as befits a queen of France. (Tyranny of Style offer a short, but intelligent discussion of the show’s fashions.)

How are these not prom dresses?

The men spend most of their time running around in fitted leather or velvet pants with dark-colored, often unlaced doublets, with the occasional slashed-and-puffed sleeve here and there. In the first regular episode, Simon, the evil English ambassador, wears an 18^th century frock coat because apparently after this he’s going to the Caribbean to hunt Johnny Depp and the rest of the crew of the Black Pearl. The men generally artfully muss their hair, except for King Henry, who has opted for the shaved-head and beard scruff that was so popular a few days ago.

The French court is based in what appears to be an early 20^th century estate somewhere, with lots of furniture and drapery and rugs and nothing that looks particularly 16^th century.

Except that chair. That chair wandered in from some other, more historically-minded show.

In the pilot, the court gathers to marry off some unnamed somebody-or-others, which gives the cast a chance to do some dancing. The adults briefly do a little vaguely medievalish-looking dancing, and then Mary and the girls decide to take over and run into the center of the room and start twirling around to symbolize that they’re free spirits. Apparently the rest of the women of the court are also free spirits in waiting, because they run onto the floor, the band obligingly breaks into some vaguely Celtic folk-rock and everyone joins hands and does a circle dance. In 16^th century Europe, the technical term for this is a branle, and for about two seconds the show accidentally gets something almost historically accurate. But then confetti begins raining down on the dancers and they’re saved from having to pretend to be 16^th century.

The Real Problem with Reign

The real problem with the series is the characters are consistently written as 21^st century millennials, rather than as anyone who might have lived in the 16^th century. They spend lots of time emoting and very little time acting like actual nobles who’ve been taught their whole lives that their marriages are a matter of politics and not personal desire. Despite the plot detail that turns on Mary’s virginity, the rest of Mary’s cohort seem eager to lose theirs, with one of the girls doing the nasty with King Henry in the main stairwell and another slutting it up with Francis. At one point Colin sneaks into Mary’s bathroom, where she’s bathing (in a beautiful 19th century claw-foot tub), and no one seems particularly perturbed that he was able to get in there.

The show does at least have the good sense to recognize that 16^th century princes were expected to have have sexual conquests before and during marriage, but in Francis’ case, he’s treated as a jerk for doing it. So rather than trying to understand the 16^th century, the show simply embraces the sexual ethos of contemporary upper-class New Yorkers.

Francis, in between bouts of being interested in Mary, moans that “Every man, even a king, should have some kind of skill…One that I didn’t inherit.” So he’s decided to take up sword-smithing, in the palace attic. That sound you’re hearing is my forehead hitting the table.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the series comes immediately after that, when Francis comments that his parents are so afraid of anything happening to him that they’re afraid to let him live, unlike his bastard half-brother Sebastian. The line is clearly intended as a critique of modern helicopter parents. In contrast, Mary is a free spirit because she knows how to milk a goat and likes the feeling of mud between her toes.

Rather than seriously exploring how 16^th century teen royals might actually have felt about their lives, the series is content to project modern teen sentiments back on the 16^th century as a way to encourage viewer identification with the main characters. Our heroine is plucky, free-spirited, unpretentious, determined to stand up for herself despite having not real support, and wants to experience real love, just like the intended audience. The good characters aren’t interested in social class, while Catherine is clearly bad because she cares about things like that.

Now, I suppose you might be thinking, “Well, duh! It’s not like the CW is seriously going to attempt an accurate period drama.” Ok. Fair point. But here’s the thing about being a historian watching these sorts of things: I can’t help but think about how much better the series could have been if they had made more of an effort to be accurate. The 16^th century is one of the most fascinating periods in all of history. The political and religious conflicts and the intellectual currents of the period produced an enormously complex set of events that dramatically changed Western culture. And there’s no reason a good scriptwriter couldn’t use that setting to tell stories that modern teens would find compelling while still being a little more true to the period than this series is. The problem isn’t that Reign is targeting a millennial audience; the problem is the Reign is lazily written. It has no ambitions beyond being a 16^th century Gossip Girl, and modern audiences tend to accept it because they’ve been trained to accept bland mediocrity as the best they can get.

Remember, Shakespeare’s plays were 16^th century popular entertainment, not the high-brow fare we think of them as today. Titus Andronicus is a trashy revenge drama that would be right at home on the CW. Sure, it’s unfair to compare modern network tv to Shakespeare, but when you think of the comparison, it’s clear that Reign isn’t even trying to be good. It’s just trying to be watched. The first clue is casting a brunette in the role of a woman who was famous for her red hair.

Oh, and Another Thing

There are pagans living in the woods right outside the royal palace, practicing human sacrifice, because why not?

Want to Know More?

There are a lot of not very good biographies of Mary Stuart. John Guy’s biography on Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuartis probably definitive for scholarly works. But if you’re not up for 600+ pages, try Rosalind K. Marshall’s much shorter Mary Queen of Scots: Truth or Lies(Kindle edition), which focuses on answering the key questions about this famous but somewhat misunderstood woman.

I don’t know of any books on Francis II; his short reign hasn’t attracted a lot of English-language scholarship, so far as I know. But you could read Catherine de’Medici  by R.J. Knecht. Her time in power in France began before Francis was king and continued long after he had died.

Braveheart: How Not to Dress Like a Medieval Scotsman

Tags

Bad Clothing, Braveheart, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scotland, Mel Gibson, Movies I Hate, Picts

If you google “Braveheart”, among the first couple images that come up are this:

Mel Gibson as Wallace in a great kilt

and this:

Gibson as Wallace in face paint

These images are some of the most immediately recognizable ones from the film. And, sadly, they’re complete crap in terms of historical accuracy.

What Medieval Scots Wore 13th century Scotsmen wore clothing that resembled what most northern and western Europeans wore in that period. Both men and women wore tunics (in Gaelic, a leine), a long, loose-fitting shirt that reached down to about the knee for men and about the ankle for women. A man might have worn an undertunic, while women typically wore a kirtle, a simple underdress like a loose slip; in both cases the undergarment would have extended slightly farther than the overgarment, showing below the hemline and the cuff. Men (and women in some circumstances) also wore ‘braies’, a rather baggy pair of shorts that generally reached to the knees or a bit lower. Men and women might also wear hose, footless leggings to keep the legs warm. (See Update.)

The man on the right is wearing braies, the one on the left wears hosen

These would typically have been of wool, and in general they would have been plain rather than patterned. For many they would have been undyed, and so would have been shades of off-white to brown. A very simple form of tartan may have existed in medieval Scotland (a very early example survives from the 3rd century AD, making it pre-medieval, but there’s no surviving evidence from the medieval period itself), but if tartan was worn in this period, it would have been a very simple checker pattern created with light and dark brown wool. So the fabric Wallace wears in the first picture is possible, although there is no evidence that such a fabric was actually produced or worn in medieval Scotland. What we think of today as ‘clan tartans’ were an invention of the 18th century; if medieval Scotmen wore any sort of tartan fabric, it would not have signified membership in a particular clan or family.

More importantly, however, kilts did not exist in the Middle Ages, in Scotland or anywhere else in Europe. The earliest kilts, known as ‘belted plaid’ or ‘great kilts’, evolved out of cloaks worn over tunics. In other words, like the toga, the great kilt is a form of outer garment, worn outside to help keep one warm in cold, wet weather. It was not worn into battle; when early modern Scotsmen prepared for combat, they took off the great kilt and charged into the fight wearing just their leine. Also, they did not belt their kilts in anything remotely like the way kilts are worn in the film.

Any halfway knowledgable costume designer working on a film about medieval Scotland would know that kilts aren’t medieval, and if he or she didn’t know, it would be an easy fact to look up. In this case, the costume designer was Charles Knode, a highly experienced costumer (one of his first major jobs was 1979’s Life of Brian). And yet, despite this, a majority of the Celts (both Scots and Irish) in this film are shown wearing tartan great kilts. So, just to make sure we’re clear about what’s wrong with this, imagine a film set during the American War of Independence. All the American rebels are shown dressed in 20th century business suits, and they’ve put the belts of their pants on over the coats of their suits. How in God’s name did an experienced costume designer make such as massive set of errors?

In order to understand films, it’s critical to realize that virtually everything that appears on screen is the result of active choices that someone made. With the exception of goofs like a catching a boom mike in the shot, what you see on the screen is the product of conscious choices. Set designers, set decorators, costume designers, hair and make-up designers, directors, screenwriters, and actors all make decisions about what they are going to put on screen. So at some point Charles Knode made a decision to produce clothing that he almost certainly knew was completely incorrect. Why?

As the author of Threat Quality Press points out, the answer is not history but historicity. The people making the film didn’t want to make an historically accurate film about medieval Scotland; they wanted to make a film that fits people’s ideas of what medieval Scotland looked like. What they wanted was not actual history, but the impression of history. The one thing that most people know about the Scots is that they used to wear kilts. So Charles Knode decided (or perhaps was told by Gibson) to clothe his medieval Scots in kilts. And he did it well enough that most casual viewers will assume that what they are seeing is correct. Those American revolutionaries might be wearing mis-belted 20th century business suits, but they look plausible.

Can I be in your movie, Mr Gibson? I look sort of generically medieval too

The Infamous Scottish Mullets But it’s not just the clothing that’s completely wrong. Take another look at that second pic, the close-up of Gibson as Wallace. He’s wearing an unkempt 20th century mullet with a couple braids in it. This is fairly typical of how the Scots and Irish are styled in this film. Some of the men have feathers in their hair. There’s absolutely no evidence that medieval Scotmen wore their hair long (which would probably have struck contemporaries as a very feminine style), nor is there evidence that they braided their hair or tied things into it. And even if they did wear their hair long, they certainly would have combed it. Wallace isn’t wearing a traditional Scottish hairstyle; he’s wearing a late-20th century biker or stoner dude’s hairstyle.

Why? Because it makes him look masculine by contemporary standards, while at the same time conveying both untamed wildness and a premodern primitiveness. It enables male viewers of the film to feel a sense of kinship with Wallace and his band of plucky Scottish rebels. It makes him seem more contemporary and therefore accessible.

As a basic rule of thumb, assume that the hairstyles you see in historical films are wrong; the women are almost always styled to be attractive by modern tastes not to be accurate, and the men are just a little less likely to be styled that way.

So those American revolutionaries in their mis-belted business suits? They’re all wearing high-and-tights.

And Then We Get to the Make-up

Just for some variety, another picture of Gibson as Wallace

Of course the thing that stands out the most is that the men are wearing blue face paint. At this point in my analysis, part of me just wants to bang his head on the table and scream “WTF?” But, because I’m committed to helping you make sense of this historical train-wreck of a film, I will swallow my pain and soldier bravely into the lion’s den.

In case it needs saying, medieval Scotsmen did not wear face paint. The inspiration for this make-up choice probably came from some ideas about the Picts, one of the original, pre-Scottish indigenous peoples of Scotland. There’s a lot to be said about the Picts, but I’m not going to say it here; I’ll save it for The Eagle perhaps. But a very quick digression to the Roman period is necessary.

The Scots aren’t, in origin, Scottish. They’re Irish. They originally came over from Ireland to Dal Riata (western Scotland) in  the 6th and 7th centuries. Central Scotland, especially the highland region, was occupied by a people called the Picts, whose ethnic background is still a matter of some debate; some scholars have seen them as a branch of the Celtic peoples, while others feel they are the indigenous, non-Celtic peoples. The ancient Romans tended to use the term ‘Pict’ to refer to all the peoples north of Hadrian’s Wall, probably lumping together a couple of different ethnic groups and cultures. The term ‘Pict’ seems to have been coined in the 3nd century AD, and it means ‘Painted Ones’, at least assuming that the term means what it means in Latin; it’s possible that it’s a Latinization of their name for themselves, in which case we have no idea what it means.

Exactly why they referred to the Picts this way is unclear. One 1st century AD source says that the people of Briton (almost certainly referring to low-land Britons like the Iceni) painted themselves, but it’s not clear that the author actually knew anything about the group we’re calling the Picts. One or two later sources make reference to the Picts painting or tattooing themselves, but that might be because the term ‘Pict’ suggested a people who did these things. It’s important to understand that the Romans had deep contempt for people who voluntarily tattooed themselves; tattooing was a mark of barbarism and social inferiority, something Romans sometimes did to slaves and criminals. In other words, calling these people ‘Picts’ is essentially calling them ‘Savages’. Maybe it means that the Picts painted or more likely tattooed themselves, but maybe it just means that the Romans thought they were a barbaric people. Remembers that during World Wars I and II, the British liked to call the Germans ‘the Huns’, not because the Germans were of Hunnish descent, but because it connotes savagery.

So maybe the Picts liked to wear war paint, or had elaborate facial tattoos. We can’t prove it, but it’s not a wild historical error to show Roman-era Picts decorated that way. But guess what? We’re not dealing with Roman-era Picts in this film. We’re dealing with 13th century Scotsmen, who are descended from a people who displaced, conquered and completely absorbed the Picts. There is absolutely no evidence for Pictish influence on 13th century Scottish culture. By the 11th century the Picts had been completely assimilated to Scottish culture, and they left only archaeological remains and a few hard-to-understand documents. There is absolutely no historical evidence that 13th century Scotsmen painted their faces. But you know who does paint their faces? These guys:

Yup; American sports fans are pretty well-known for this sort of thing. Mel Gibson has given us 13th century Scots made up like 20th century sports fans. And he did it for the same reason that he gave himself a mullet. It makes his character more appealing and accessible to the target audience. He turned the battle of Stirling Bridge into a sports match and showed you which guys to cheer for by painting their faces like sports fans. So those American revolutionaries with their mis-belted business suits and their high-and-tights? They’re wearing Native American war paint.

And you know what’s even worse? The lead make-up artists for Braveheart, (Peter Frampton, Paul Pattison, and Lois Burwell) won an Oscar for their work on this film. Let’s be charitable to the Academy and propose that they gave the award for all of the blood the make-up team painted on Gibson’s face, or because they were just caught up in the excitement surrounding a high-grossing film, and not because they were too dumb or coked-up to notice that the most visible make-up in the film was a thousand years out of place and on the wrong guys.

In all fairness, that’s good blood

I’m just going to curl up in a fetal ball now and quietly weep.

Update: A friend who read this argued to me that Gibson had almost certainly ordered Charles Knode to dress the Scots in kilts. He said that this is a common problem for costume designers, who often know what clothing would be correct but are then over-ridden by directors for reasons of historicity.

I agree that there is a very strong possibility that this is true (and I even suggest it at one point). However, Knode was the man who got the credit for the costuming, and he got an Oscar nomination (although, in what might be a surprising fit of historical clarity on the Academy’s part, he didn’t win), so I think he deserves his share of the blame on this point. While Gibson made a stinker of a film, it wasn’t entirely his fault; he needed a lot of help. As Halle Berry once said about Catwoman, “you don’t win a Razzie without a lot of help from a lot of people…In order to give a really bad performance like I did, you need a lot of bad actors around you.” (By the way, give her speech a look; it’s quite funny. After Braveheart, I needed a good laugh.)

Update: After a comment I received, I did a little more digging and found that 13th and early 14th century hosen were more likely to be footed than footless.

300 2: Let’s Talk about Artemisia

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300 2, Ancient Greece, Artemisia, Bad Clothing, Eva Green, Sullivan Stapleton, Themistokles

A couple weeks ago, I took a look at 300 2: Rise of an Empire (2014, dir. Noam Murro). That post was mainly focused on the overall plot and the military details of the film, so I didn’t get much chance to talk about the main bad guy, Artemisia (Eva Green). So today, I’m going to look at this intriguing historical figure and consider how the film portrays her.

Spoiler Alert and Trigger Warning: If you plan on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to do so before you read this post, since I talk about major plot points, including the film’s conclusion. Also, this post discusses rape.

Oh, and let me get one issue out of the way right at the start. The cinematic Artemisia gets to wear lots of awesome sexy clothes that cling to her body and look absolutely nothing like anything any ancient Greek woman ever wore. During the Greek Archaic period, Greek women, even queens, were expected to cover most of their body in a tubular dress known as a peplos. It rose up from the ankles, was pinned at the shoulders, and then folded back down to just past the waist, where it was usually belted. It was a loose dress that covered the body but left the face and the arms bare. Alternately, she could wear a chiton, a dress that was sewn more than pinned. This usually had half-sleeves. Over this garment was often worn a type of cloak called a himation.

Women, or at least elite women, generally wore their hair up in a hairnet. Braids, pins, tiaras, and veils or other wraps were also common. Lacking straight-irons, they rarely just let their hair hang down.

So in public, Artemisia probably looked like this:

Greek women in chitons; the two on the right are wearing himations as well

and not like this:

In fact, when a relative died, Greek women enacted mourning by pulling the decorations out of their hair and ripping their clothes. So, to the extent that the outfit in the above shot of Artemisia would have signified anything to the ancient Greeks, they probably would have read it as mourning garb. So maybe Artemisia is an early version of a Goth chick.

As a rule of thumb, remember that Hollywood generally dresses women in clothing and hairstyles that reflect contemporary fashions rather than historical ones. In movies that are more interested in historical accuracy, the clothing might make an attempt at accuracy, but the hairstyles almost never do (although The Advocate is something of an exception to this principle.)

The Historical Artemisia

Artemisia ruled Caria, in the southwestern corner of modern Turkey, from its capital of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum). In 545, a couple generations before, Caria was incorporated into the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, as one of its satrapies (essentially a province with semi-independent government). So in keeping with Achaemenid practices, Caria was a kingdom administered by a monarch on behalf of the Persian shahanshan (literally, ‘the king of kings’, or emperor).

Halicarnassus

As is often the case with ancient history, a lot of Artemesia’s life is lost to us. Her father was king of Caria, and so she seems to have inherited the office for him, although her husband was the actual ruler down until his death. When he died, he left behind a young son, so Artemisia acted as the regent for her son. We don’t have clear dates for these events; we only know that she was ruling by 480 BC.

When Xerxes went to war against the Greek city-states, Artemisia contributed five ships and acted as their commander. Most of what we know about her participation in this war derives from the pages of Herodotus, who is known for including a lot of wild stories in his History. Thus, we have to take what he tells us with a grain of salt.

According to Herodotus, before the battle of Salamis, Xerxes gathered all his generals, including Artemisia, and asked if he should commit to a naval battle (since his navy’s main purpose was to provide supplies for his massive army, which was too large to live off the land). All his generals, apparently being yes-men, agreed that he should, but Artemisia pointed out that the Greeks were better seamen than the Persians. She also argued that Xerxes had already conquered Athens and that the other city-states could not hold out very long individually. In other words, Xerxes was already winning on land and didn’t need a naval victory. Xerxes reportedly praised her advice, but then ignored it and decided to engage the Athenian navy at what became the battle of Salamis.

Salamis, of course, turned out to be a trap, and Themistokles crushed Xerxes’ navy. When Artemisia realized that the Persians were losing, she tried to retreat, but was unable to do so because there were other Persian ships in the way, and a Greek trireme was bearing down on her. To fool the Greek ship, she ordered her ship to ram another Persian ship. This made an opening for her, and it tricked the Greek trireme into assuming she was on their side. As a result, she was able to get away in good order. This story of Artemisia ramming the Persian ship was rather famous; it’s reported in several other sources. Two sources claim that when Xerxes saw the ramming, without realize that she was hitting a Persian ship, he remarked that his men had become women and his women had become men.

After the defeat at Salamis, Herodotus tells us that Xerxes again asked her for advice. He wanted to know if he should lead his army into the Peloponnesus personally, or withdraw to Persia and allow his general Mardonus to handle the campaign. She advised him to withdraw, because if Mardonus won, the glory would still go to Xerxes, while if he lost, Xerxes would not be at risk. Xerxes listened to her and withdrew to Persia.

Herodotus bookends his description of Salamis with these two scenes of Xerxes getting advice from Artemisia. The first time Xerxes ignores the advice and regrets it, while the second time he listens and benefits (since Mardonus was disastrously defeated later in the campaign). This symmetry makes Herodotus’ story a little suspect, and that calls attention to some of the inconsistencies in the account. If Xerxes liked Artemisia’s advice well enough to praise it, why did he ignore it? If he really didn’t know his navy well enough to know that Artemisia had attacked his ship, how did he know it well enough to know that she was commanding the ship? Also, since Greeks generally considered women inferior to men, this story has the unstated point that Xerxes is a fool, because he needs a woman to tell him how to make good choices. So this story, while famous, is a little suspect.

These stories all emphasize that Artemisia survived the battle of Salamis, but that’s pretty much the last solid information we have about her. Presumably she returned home at some point, but we do not know what became of her, how long she ruled, or when she died. Her grandson was king of Halicarnassus when Herodotus spent time there, so perhaps his stories are essentially family legends about Artemisia.

The Cinematic Artemisia

The movie’s version of Artemisia is quite a different creature than the historical Artemisia; in fact, about the only similarities are her name and the fact that she’s associated with ships. She’s not a queen; rather she’s the daughter of an average family whose city is sacked. Her family is killed and she is enslaved and raped repeatedly before being discarded as a teenager (a rather odd point, since teenagers were ideal slaves in many regards, with years of service ahead of them and breeding potential if the master wanted it). One of Xerxes’ men (Peter Mensah) finds her and trains her to become a ruthless warrior who murders her way to the top of the Persian political and military hierarchy; she becomes the most trusted general of first Darius and then Xerxes. In fact, in contrast to Xerxes’ depiction in the first film, in this film, Artemisia is virtually his puppet-master, pulling his strings and at one point flat-out insulting him and defying him.

There are a couple of notable things about this version of her story. First, it falls into a trend in contemporary film of having strong female characters. In contrast, for example, to most female leads of, say, 80s or 90s action films, Artemisia is not a defenseless maiden who needs rescuing by the hero, nor is she a femme fatale who needs to manipulate men to get her way. She has a great deal of agency, is a forceful personality, and is fully capable of both leading troops and fighting in person. In that sense, she’s fun to watch, even if the idea of female warriors in ancient Greece is complete fiction.

However, she’s also an example of another trend in recent film and television, the trend to equate strong women with women who have been raped. In the past year or two, the ‘raped strong woman’ trope has become so common in film and tv that it’s attracted a fair amount of commentary, and may be in danger of becoming just another cliché. Rape is certainly an important issue, and it can be argued that it is healthy for entertainment to expose viewers to this ugly problem. But it’s unfortunate that Hollywood seems to have become fixated on the idea that rape can somehow explain why a woman is strong, as if a woman cannot be strong without having been raped. Putting a rape in a woman’s back story can serve to make her a more complex character, but it can also become a lazy and brutal crutch for scriptwriters who can’t imagine more nuanced ways to develop a female character; surely there are more stories to tell about women than just this one. There’s a fine line between acknowledging an all-too-common problem for women (especially for women who are victims of war) and using rape as a cheap way to add some ‘grittiness’ to a story while suggesting that rape is simply a universal fact of life and therefore nothing to be shocked by.

Another problem with the film is that it completely ignores the one probably genuine story we have about Artemisia. Her escape from Salamis demonstrates that Artemisia was a cunning and ruthless woman, and it would have fit perfectly well into her character as the film presented it. But instead, the screenwriters dropped the real story and just made up nonsense about an iron oil-tanker and guards sent on suicide missions with exploding backpacks (which is how this film got its obligatory Stuff Blows Up scene). It demonstrates that the screenwriters weren’t in the least bit interested in the actual history, and really just wanted to make up cool stuff for the fan-boys, even when that cool stuff makes no sense whatsoever. At least the first 300 tried to get the basic narrative facts right even as it was getting everything else wrong.

Nothing says ‘strong’ like some spine ridges

A third problem with her character is the way her sexuality is handled. This mostly gets explored in the two encounters Artemisia has with Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton). The first real meeting happens about half way through the film, when Themistokles is taken by boat to meet with Artemisia. Historically, Themistokles sent Xerxes’s fleet a message that he wished to defect, and this was how he lured the Persians into the trap at Salamis. When Themistokles went to meet Artemisia, I initially thought that this would be the film’s way of handling this detail; certainly replacing a message with a face-to-face meeting would be a reasonable bit of dramatic liberty.

We hate each other, but let’s have sex!

Unfortunately, the scene’s actual purpose is just to give our two main characters a chance to have some sexytime. We get to see the actors mostly naked having rough sex. The whole scene is essentially pointless, except from the standpoint of satisfying the audience’s voyeuristic urges. (And, as an aside, why doesn’t Artemisia try to kill Themistokles in this scene? Why does she let him sail back to his fleet? She’s evil, and not even remotely honorable, so logically she wouldn’t scruple to not kill him if she has the chance. Crappy plotting, if you ask me.) The scene doesn’t advance the plot at all, nor is Themistokles’ offer to betray the Greek fleet even mentioned in the film. The scene does mean that when the two of them meet up again at the end of the film, the whole scene feels very Freudian, so that when Themistokles stabs her with his sword, he’s essentially killing her with his penis.

If we put all of these made-up details together, the whole narrative arc takes on a rather ugly overtone. Artemisia’s ‘strength’ is basically driven by the fact of her rape, which provides literally the only motive she seems to have in the film, namely to punish all men for what has happened to her. Her murders of various Persian leaders and her manipulation and defiance of Xerxes demonstrate that she is a destructive force that turns the world upside-down, overturning male authority and destabilizing her society (she’s actually the one who kills Darius). Her enjoyment of rough sex becomes a symptom of her rape. And her death at the end of Themistokles’ penis-sword becomes a symbolic re-assertion of the proper order of society, an order grounded on male sexual domination of women. While Artemisia has agency, she has no clear motives or desires; her villainy is not due to personal ambition or some twisted moral cause, but simply a clichéd hatred of men, and her defeat at the end is not due to a specific mistake or character flaw, but rather to the fact that she is incapable of dominating Themistokles for the simple reason that he refuses to live as a slave.

If the first 300 is a story about how straight white men overcome the ugly, sexually deviant non-whites of the world, 300 2 is a story about how straight men overcome the threat posed by an uncontrollable woman. In both cases the enemy represents servitude and the heterosexual male hero represents liberty.

While rape can, in the right hands, be a powerful device for telling a story about women’s experiences, in this case, the rape is just cheap, lazy storytelling that serves to demonize its female character. This script victimizes Artemisia twice, once when it makes her the victim of rape, and once when it replaces what was apparently a strong, clever real historical women with a cheap male fantasy of a dangerous woman who needs to be defeated to preserve male sexual authority.

Want to Know More?

300: Rise of an Empireis available on Amazon.

Our best source for the Persian Wars and for Artemisia is Herodotus’ The Histories, Revised (Penguin Classics).There’s also a version, Herodotus: The Persian War (Translations from Greek and Roman Authors), that’s only the sections about the Persian Wars with scholarly explanations added.