The Eagle: The Interview

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Lindsay Allason-Jones, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Roman Scotland, The Eagle, The Eagle of the Ninth

As I promised previously, it’s time for an interview that I had the pleasure of doing by email with Lindsay Allason-Jones, who worked as the historical consultant on The Eagle (2011, dir. Kevin McDonald).

Lindsay Allason-Jones is the founder and former director of the Cluster for Interdisciplinary Artefact Studies at Newcastle University, as well as a Visiting Reader at Newcastle.  (For those not familiar with British universities, a ‘reader’ is the equivalent of a full professor at an American university.) She is a specialist in the archaeology of Roman Britain, and was thus a very good choice to consult on The Eagle, whose director was serious about trying to by historically accurate with the film.

Lindsay Allason-Jones

So let’s get to the interview (which has been edited for readability).

An Historian: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I’ve wanted for some time to interview someone who’s worked as a historical consultant, and The Eagle impressed me as demonstrating more attention to detail than a lot of films set in the Roman Empire. How did you wind up as the historical consultant for The Eagle?

Allason-Jones: The director, producer and script writer came up north to see if it was possible to film on Hadrian’s Wall – sadly it proved to have changed too much for this to be viable – and met me in the old Museum of Antiquities where I was director. We had a general chat and I thought no more about it until I was contacted a few months later and asked if I would be the formal advisor.

H: What did your actual work as the consultant look like? Were they calling you up with questions, or having you on-set to give advice?

A-J: I was first sent a typescript of the film and asked to check it out for inaccuracies. My blue pen became very blunt pretty quickly! This wasn’t the script writer’s fault but was due to the fact that Rosemary Sutcliffe’s novel was 50 years old and written by someone who wasn’t up to date even then with archaeological thought. Example: RS had her hero Marcus, a centurion, in charge of a fortress; a Roman fortress had 5,500 soldiers in it whilst a centurion would only have been in charge of 80 men. Also, at the time the action was supposed to be taking place, there would have been no fortresses in the south west. We got round this by inventing a (plausible) look-out post in the Severn estuary.

I had hoped I would get to visit the set but most of the filming was in Hungary and Newcastle University wasn’t keen to let me wander off in my busiest teaching period so I never got on set. The Director’s assistant, Ben, and I corresponded by e-mail and telephone and I would send what I hoped was useful bumf about what things would have looked like and how people would have behaved for the costumiers etc.

H: Is there a detail in the film that you feel particularly pleased about—something that you got them to include or that you felt that the film got just right?

A-J: I was particularly pleased with the milecastle on Hadrian’s Wall. When I worked out the approximate timescale when the action took place I realised that Hadrian’s Wall had been largely abandoned and the frontier was up on the Antonine Wall. Rosemary Sutcliff clearly hadn’t realise that and it would have been very confusing for the audience to introduce the idea of two walls but I persuaded them to make Hadrian’s Wall look really scruffy and any guards on duty obviously low grade troops and that they did very nicely.

H: Was there any thing you were disappointed about—something that they chose not to follow you recommendation on or that you wished they had done differently?

A-J: There were two things I said very firmly at the beginning – no togas and no stirrups (the Romans didn’t use stirrups) so I was a bit cross when togas were worn by some actors and the two lead actors had stirrups – although you had to look very carefully to see they did. When I told Jeremy off for these faults he said that re: togas, when early rushes of the film were shown to an American focus group they said they didn’t know who were the Romans and who the Brits if they all just wore tunics. Re: stirrups, apparently both the leads had to learn to ride for the film and the insurance company wouldn’t let them on a horse without stirrups, despite the fact that it almost impossible to fall out of a Roman saddle! I was very entertained by both these arguments.They are also examples of how practical matters often get in the way of historical accuracy in making a film.

Some of the armour was a bit odd as well but that was because it’s, apparently, not usual to invest in new armour for all the cast of a film as that is prohibitively expensive, so you have to use whatever is already at your preferred costumiers. I have since discovered that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and Sid James and Fenella Fielding in Carry On Cleo were wearing the same costumes!

Occasionally there were a few glitches – there is definitely a 4th century brooch being worn two centuries too soon but I suspect I’m the only person to have spotted that, whilst the tableware at the Governor’s palace at the end of the film is spot on.

H: Do you have any fun stories you’d like to share about your experience?

What I found fascinating was that when a film is finished it is handed over to another firm to sell it and promote it. At this stage I found I had to start all over again explaining the difference between a legionary and an auxiliary, etc. The distribution company wanted to produce a leaflet for schoolchildren, which I was asked to check. This included the wonderful line that ‘a Roman legionary carried a gladiolus’! I was very tempted to leave that in as the idea of Roman soldiers going into battle waving their gladdies in the air like Edna Everage appealed, but I did change it to gladius after a wrestle with my conscience.

People have since asked me why film people, having decided to make a film of a book because they like the book, then change it. In the case of The Eagle there were several details that had to be changed because they were completely wrong or would have disturbed a modern audience (Marcus’s relationship with the little girl would have seemed unsettling today) but other things I have no idea why they changed them. In particular, the beheading scene was not necessary and simply ensured that the age group the book had been written for couldn’t see the film, which struck me as ridiculous on so many levels.

I enjoyed the experience and it was lovely to see how my students enjoyed seeing the film with me – as one of them said, it is rare for a student to be able to be involved in a lecturer’s research in that way. They al stood up and cheered when my name appeared I the credits, which I was very touched by though it rather confused the rest of the audience.

H: How important do you think historical accuracy in film is? Did you work as a consultant influence the way you understand depicting the past on film?

A-J: I think it is imperative that films don’t try to change history as this misleads people. However, the odd detail being wrong probably doesn’t matter as much as long as it isn’t so obvious it detracts from the audience’s enjoyment because it is distracting.

I enjoyed myself and would do it again because, no matter how many books I write or lectures I give, I can’t reach as many people as a film, particularly one as popular as this one, and I believe that academics need to make their knowledge widely available.

H: Thank you so much for such detailed answers!

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The Eagle: Roman Scotland

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Channing Tatum, Jamie Bell, Roman Britain, Roman Scotland, Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle, The Eagle of the Ninth

My previous post on The Eagle (2011, dir. Kevin McDonald) took issue with the film’s terrible prologue text. So let’s look at the film itself and see what there is to say about it.

The Eagle’s plot focuses on Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum), and for once a Hollywood film gets the Roman names right. His father was the commander of the ill-fated 9^th Legion, lost in Scotland a generation before. Initially, he wants to make up his family’s dishonor through military service, but in a battle with the Celts he suffers a leg injury that leads to his honorable discharge. So he decides to travel into Scotland seeking the lost Eagle Standard of the 9^th Legion. He is accompanied only by Esca (Jamie Bell), a slave that he rescued from a gladiatorial fight.

Once they are north of Hadrian’s Wall, Marcus becomes heavily dependant on Esca, who can communicate with the Picts when Marcus can’t. Eventually they discover that the Seal People have the Eagle. The Seal People chieftain (Ned Dennehy) welcomes Esca, who claims that Marcus is his slave. Esca figures out where the Eagle is kept and they steal it, but in the process they slay the chieftain and must flee back toward the Wall, pursued by the Prince of the Seal People (Tahar Rahim) and their warriors.

Tatum as Marcus

When it looks like the will be overtaken, Esca manages to find the survivors of the 9^th Legion, who have been living among the Picts. He persuades them to stand and fight for their lost honor, and this motley army manages to deal with the Prince of the Seal People and the other warriors, thus enabling Marcus and Esca to return the Eagle Standard to the Roman authorities.

The film has a simple plot, and despite the somewhat improbable final battle, the film works as a modest story of a man recovering his family’s honor through a single brave deed. It doesn’t try to be more than it is, and it avoids the grandiosity that so many action films have these days. A particularly effective sub-plot is the relationship between Marcus and Esca, who begin as master and slave, then have that relationship literally inverted, before finally become friends. Esca’s loyalty to the man who saved his life is a familiar film trope, but it works here perhaps because the source material is a Young Adult novel; the earnestness of the moral point feels genuine, and Bell does an excellent job with his character’s evolution. Tatum’s modest acting skills actually work to his advantage here; he conveys the appropriate Roman Stoicism nicely.

What’s North of the Wall?

In the film, the people north of the Wall are referred to in passing as the Picts, but other than that, the film doesn’t identify them, and it’s clear that the Seal People are just one tribe in the region. The Seal People dress differently from the other peoples Marcus and Esca talk to; in particular their warriors coat their bodies with some sort of mud or brownish body paint.

Historically, as I’ve discussed before, the people living in what is today Scotland in the 2^nd century were not Picts, but rather Caledonians. The exact relationship between the Caledonians and the later Picts is unclear (since neither was a literate people, and the Romans wrote about them only in passing), but Pictish society may have emerged out of a collapsed Caledonian society. But the term Picti (Latin for ‘painted ones’) only occurs in the later 3^rd century. In the 2^nd century, soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall used the term Brittunculi (roughly, ‘nasty little Britons’).

The Seal Prince (Rahim) threatening Marcus while Esca watches

So the film is, like all films about Roman Scotland, simplifying by projecting Pictish society back in time a little bit. But at least these Picts aren’t painting themselves blue the way most cinematic Scottish people do.

Another problem with the film’s depiction of Caledonia/Pictland/Scotland (for convenience, I’ll just call it Scotland) is that once the characters pass Hadrian’s Wall, they are in a sparsely-inhabited wilderness where no one knows Latin at all, thus making Marcus rely on Esca’s knowledge of the Celtic language.

There are a couple issues here. First, the film finesses the language issue a bit. We don’t know what language the Picts spoke. Scholars have debated whether Pictish was a branch of the Celtic language or a totally unrelated indigenous language. Esca is a Brigantes, the Celtic tribe in northern England, so if Pictish was a branch of Gaelic it’s reasonable to assume that he could have muddled his way through simple conversations with people who spoke a related language. But if Pictish was unrelated to Gaelic, it’s less plausible. But the film does a decent job of trying to handle the language issue. The Seal People speak modern Scots and Irish Gaelic, and the film went to the trouble to casting actors who actually know those languages rather than just giving them a dialect coach.

As I’ve mentioned before, skin-tight leather wasn’t a thing back then

Another problem is that the film is set in the 140s, about 20 years after the 9^th Legion’s supposed destruction. But in the 140s and 150s, the Romans were attempting the occupation of southern Scotland, so that Hadrian’s Wall would not have been the Roman frontier at all, and it is likely that people north of the Antonine Wall (the new frontier) would have been more familiar with the Romans than this film suggests. And Scotland wouldn’t have been desolate and unoccupied as the film suggests.

But we can probably forgive these mistakes. Explaining that Britain had two Roman frontier walls would have been more complicated than it was worth. The film never directly explains the geography. It’s unclear just how far north Marcus and Esca go before they find the Seal People, although the geography suggests northern Scotland (and in fact the film used a location in northwestern Scotland for the Seal People village).

If you analyze it too closely, the geography doesn’t really work. The 9^th Legion marched into Scotland and got wiped out in an ambush by the tribes in the region. This seems likely to have happened somewhere in southern Scotland—how could they have marched all the way north without encountering resistance and only then get ambushed? But if they were ambushed in southern Scotland, why were the Seal People involved? The surviving Romans appear to be living 1-2 days south of where the Seal People live, suggesting that Marcus and Esca traveled the length of Scotland and barely ran into anyone on the way, but if Scotland is that depopulated, it seems unlikely that there were enough Picts to annihilate a whole legion of about 5,000 men. But that’s a small quibble. The film is compressing geography for the sake of story, and that’s entirely reasonable.

One very nice touch is that the film gets the difference between Roman and Celtic fighting systems correct in the two battle scenes it shows. The Romans are heavily armored and employ complex tactics like the testudo, whereas the Celts are essentially naked and rely on swarming the enemy and using raw fury to overpower their opponents. This explains why a small Roman force is able to prevail over a much larger group of enemies. Unlike in most historical action films, armor actually has protective value and brute force doesn’t win the day.

The Roman testudo

In my next post, I’m excited to be able to offer an interview with Lindsay Allason-Jones, the historical consultant on the film!

Want to Know More?

The Eagle  is available on Amazon. Sutcliff’s original novel (and its two sequels) is too.

If you’re interested in Roman-era Scotland, there are not a lot of books on the topic, but David Breeze has written a number of works on the subject, including the appropriately-titled Roman Scotland and The Antonine Wall. There’s David Shotter’s The Roman Frontier in Britain: Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall and Roman Policy in Scotland.

The Eagle: Worst Prologue Text Ever

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Bad Prologue Texts, Hadrian's Wall, Movies I Love, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Roman Scotland, Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Ninth Legion

The Eagle (2011, dir. Kevin McDonald, based on Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth is at least the third movie set in Roman Scotland (along with King Arthur and Centurion), and it’s by far the best of the three. There’s a lot of things to like about this film, but the prologue text is not one of them. It might, in fact, be the worst prologue text to a historical film I’ve ever seen, because virtually every element of it is problematic.

Here it is:

“In 120 AD, the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army marched into the unconquered territory of Northern Britain. They were never seen again. All 5,000 men vanished, along with their treasured standard…The Eagle. Shamed by this great loss, the Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a giant wall that cut off the North of Britain forever. Hadrian’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

Normally in historical films, a prologue text is used to provide important historical background for audiences unfamiliar with a particular historical setting. Some films also use them to set a mood or establish the film’s viewpoint on the setting, but they almost always provide a little basic fact to orient the viewer.

With that in mind, let’s take this prologue text an element at a time.

“In 120 AD, the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army marched into the unconquered territory of Northern Britain. They were never seen again. All 5,000 men vanished, along with their treasured standard…The Eagle.”

As I’ve discussed before when I looked at Centurion, this isn’t historical fact at all. It’s entirely the invention of British children’s author Rosemary Sutcliff. When she wrote The Eagle of the Ninth, she offered an interesting explanation for what happened to the 9^th Legion, which disappears from the historical record in the early 2^nd century AD after being stationed in Britain. Her theory that the Legion was sent into Scotland and subsequently destroyed is certainly a possibility, but there’s literally no evidence for it. It’s more likely that it was destroyed during a rebellion in Roman Britain. There’s a bit of weak evidence that it was redeployed to the Rhineland. Perhaps it was just disbanded for administrative reasons. But it’s important to realize that the film’s scenario is entirely made-up.

Rosemary Sutcliff

“Shamed by this great loss, the Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a giant wall”

If the Legion’s debacle in Scotland didn’t happen, it should be obvious that it wasn’t the reason Hadrian built his famous wall. We don’t actually know what Hadrian was thinking when he ordered the construction of the wall for the simple reason that we don’t have any documents about that decision. We can certainly make some reasonable inferences based on Roman policy toward its European frontier, but it’s not provable what the intention was.

Also, calling it a ‘giant wall’ is a bit misleading. It was a very long wall, but ‘giant’ suggests size more than length, and as far as we know, the wall probably wasn’t more than 10-12 feet tall. The surviving ruins don’t allow us to know much about its height or battlements, but what survives doesn’t really suggest that the wall was unusually tall, just very long.

One of the mile castles on Hadrian’s Wall

“that cut off the North of Britain forever. Hadrian’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

This is just nonsense. Hadrian’s Wall did no such thing. The Wall is the best surviving example of what the Romans called a limes, which as essentially a wall marking a frontier. But it’s not unique. Similar structures (at least in function) existed in North Africa and in Eastern Europe. Although it was garrisoned at small posts called ‘mile castles’ along its length, it probably was not primarily intended to repulse an invasion, for the simple reason that the small garrisons were a mile apart, and the individual garrisons were probably not staffed by more than a half-dozen men at a time. It would have been very easy for an invading force to simply climb the wall in between mile castles, and it would not have been too challenging for a decent force to overwhelm the garrison at a particular post. Furthermore, sailing around it wouldn’t have been too difficult. As a military structure, the Wall would simply have slowed down an invasion a little, giving the Roman forces stationed further south advanced warning of an attack.

Instead, a limes was much more like a customs station than a truly defensible position. Each mile castle had a gateway running through it (although some of the gateways opened onto such steep slopes that they can’t have been seriously intended to handle much traffic). Those gates (one of which the film shows) allowed regular passage between Roman Britain and what we’ll anachronistically call Scotland. It served to allow the Romans to control (and perhaps tax) trade with the tribes to the north of the Wall.

The Romans had no intention of cutting off all contact with the tribes of Scotland. Their first line of defense against those tribes was to maintain regular contact with them. It was standard for the Romans to reward a few tribes beyond a limes with the Roman version of ‘most favored trading status’. By singling out a couple of neighboring tribes to receive trade and periodic diplomatic gifts; this gave the rulers of those tribes privileged access to exotic goods from within the Empire, like wine, silk, and silver tableware. In exchange those tribes provided the Romans with intelligence on the other tribes and might ally with the Romans against hostile tribes. If an allied tribe became a problem, the Romans would simply make one of their enemies the most favored trading partner. By playing the tribes off against each other this way, the Romans rarely had to actually defend their frontiers.

Far from marking the end of the world, Hadrian’s Wall regulated Roman interactions with southern Scotland.

Also, Hadrian’s Wall didn’t create a permanent boundary (except in the sense of a physical wall that still survives). His successor Antoninus Pius decided to push the Roman frontier northward. He built a second wall, the so-called Antonine Wall, that ran between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. He ordered construction to start in 142 AD. For unknown reasons, the Antonine Wall was abandoned around 162 AD, when the Empire pulled back to Hadrian’s Wall. Then in 208, Septimius Severus decided to re-occupy southern Scotland and ordered the Antonine Wall repaired. This occupation was abandoned just a few years later, at which point Hadrian’s Wall became the permanent frontier for the rest of the Roman period.

Remains of the Antonine Wall

Whereas most films use prologue texts to establish the actual historical context, this movie uses its prologue text to assert a set of blatant, nonsensical falsehoods.

Let me summarize the problems with this by rephrasing the prologue text to demonstrate just how nonsensical it really is. “In 2017, the American army marched into the unconquered territory of Mexico. They were never seen again. All the men vanished, along with their traditional standard, the American flag. Shamed by this great loss, President Donald Trump ordered the construction of a giant wall that cut off Mexico forever. Trump’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

Want to Know More?

The Eagle  is available on Amazon. Sutcliff’s original novel (and its two sequels) is too.

If you want to know more about Hadrian’s Wall, you might try Patricia Southern’s Hadrian’s Wall: Everyday Life on the Roman Frontier. Amazon also has a lot of guides for walking the Wall; it’s one of England’s top tourist destinations. Having visited the Wall myself years ago, it’s definitely worth the visit if you’re in Northern England.

King Arthur: David Franzoni has a Lot to Answer For

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David Franzoni, Freedom!, King Arthur, Medieval Europe, Picts, Roman Britain, Roman Scotland

After three posts that mostly dealt with the general historical background to King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni), it’s time to actually look at the plot, and now I’ll bring my case for indicting David Franzoni for crimes against geography and assault with a pseudohistorical weapon.

The Northern Frontier

The film takes place in northern Britain, along Hadrian’s Wall. Arthur and his men seem to be stationed at one of the forts dotted along Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the legal extent of Roman Britain. Hadrian’s Wall is the most famous example of a Roman limes, a boundary wall used to separate the Romans from people they did not directly rule. There are at least ten of these structures known, including two that run along the Danube, one in Arabia, and one in Libya. Contrary to popular imagination, however, a limes was not really a towering defensive position like the Great Wall of China; the surviving remains of Hadrian’s Wall are actually quite low to the ground and it would not have been hard for a stealthy band of northern Britons to scale it unseen. The purpose of Hadrian’s Wall was more likely to act as a boundary check-point, controlling the movement of goods and peoples across the boundary and to demonstrate to non-Roman peoples the superiority of Roman engineering (and therefore by extension, military) skills. It would have slowed down a formal invasion and allowed Roman soldiers to send an alarm to one of the more heavily fortified forts along the wall, where substantial garrisons were situated.

Hadrian’s Wall. Note how low to the ground the remains are

Substantial scenes take place at one of the forts. The fort is never explicitly identified in the film, but in Lancelot’s closing voice-over, he identifies the final fight there as being the battle of Badon Hill (a point I had overlooked in my previous post about Germanus—my apologies), so I’m going to call this fort Badon, even though that makes absolutely no sense. Placing Badon on Hadrian’s Wall makes about as much sense as saying that the battle of New Orleans took place in New Jersey, since most of the sites that have been proposed for Badon are well to the south. Some people have suggested that the second battle mentioned by Gildas, the battle of Camlann, took place at Camboglanna, one of the forts on Hadrian’s Wall, but I’ve yet to see any serious argument that Badon was on or near the Wall.

Inside the Badon fort

At the start of the film, the antagonists are the indigenous natives of northern Briton. Historically these people have been referred to as the Picts. But the film instead calls them the ‘Woads’, reportedly because during the script read-through, someone suggested ‘Woads’ sounded cooler. Sigh.

We know the Woads are badasses because right at the start of the film they ambush the carriage bringing Bishop Germanus to Badon and get themselves entirely killed (except for one lucky guy that Arthur decides to spare for no clear reason). So let’s think about this. The Woads live north of the Wall, a heavily protected military frontier. Badon is just south of the Wall. Germanus is traveling up to Badon from the south. Do you notice a problem here? How did the Woads get over the Wall to launch an attack so far to the south? This is typical of the film’s approach to geographical issues, which is that they basically don’t matter at all. (Also, fun fact—carriages won’t be invented for another 1000 years, so they may as well have put Germanus in a humvee.  But see Update.)

After he gets to Badon, Germanus tells Arthur that his men have to go up north of the wall and rescue Marius and his son Alecto (who should be Allectus, but we’ve already established in this blog that movies never get Roman names right. Alecto is the name of a Greek goddess), who happens to be the pope’s favorite godson somehow. Marius is an important Roman who just happens to live north of the Wall, a very long way north as it turns out. Again, let’s think about the geography. The Roman Empire is to the south of the Wall, the hated enemy Woads to the north. Why is Marius, an important Roman, living well to the north of the Wall, in enemy territory? If the Woads dislike the Romans so much, why haven’t they massacred the defenseless Marius? Apparently the Wall and its military fortresses were just randomly plopped somewhere on the British landscape with no regard for who lives where, and Marius accidentally wound up on the bad side and some of the Woads wound up on the good side.

 

And Then There’s the Saxons

To complicate things, the villainous Saxons have landed an invasion force three days north of the Wall and are marching south to conquer Britain. Now, historically, the Saxons began their invasion well south of the Wall, pretty much the opposite end of the whole island actually, but failing to make historical sense is pretty much a given for this film, so by this point I had mostly gotten numb to that problem. But this makes absolutely no geographical sense either. If the Saxons are invading by boat, why land themselves such a long ways to the north and then march south to a major fortification which they will have to conquer before they can then march further south to conquer Britain, when ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS LAND THEIR INVASION FORCE SOUTH OF THE WALL?

The entire plot of this film falls apart if the leader of the bad guys (or anyone in the audience) just bothers to look at a goddam map. This is like making a film where Canada decides to invade the United States via Mexico. You see how absurd that is? Canadians are too polite to invade anyone. But David Franzoni won’t let little things like geography or manners stop his plot.

Invading Saxons

The villainous Saxons are led by the even more villainous Saxon leader Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgård). We know the Saxons are villainous because they rape women. We know Cerdic is even more villainous because raping woman is too nice for him. He wants his men to kill everyone instead because he doesn’t want them to produce weak children. So he kills his man for being nice enough to rape someone. (Why is it that Hollywood bad guys have to demonstrate their badguyness by killing the bad guys who work for them? Sure, it establishes a hierarchy of badguyness with the main villain at the top, but it seems to me that it would also be a motivation for his men to run away or try to kill him.) Cerdic’s son, Cynric (Til Schweiger) challenges him, and Cerdic once again demonstrates his badguyness by telling Cynric that the next time he challenges his old man, he better have a sword in his hand. Unfortunately, what this really establishes for the audience is that Cynric, who logically ought to be number two on the badguyness hierarchy, is really just a wuss.

Nothing says ‘villainous Saxon’ like furry shoulder pads.

But it does create a situation where the Woads turn out to not be such bad guys at all. They’re actually good guys who just happen to like launching sneak attacks over a heavily fortified frontier to massacre innocent traveling bishops.

The Woads’ lack of genuine badguyness is discovered when Arthur and his men get to Marius’ villa up north. Marius turns out to be an asshole. We know he’s an asshole because he doesn’t want to leave, despite the Saxon army heading his way, and because he’s confiscating all his peasants’ grain and letting them starve. Arthur tells the peasants they’re all free, because Arthur is a good guy and freedom is a good thing. The basic purpose here is to recycle the cliché of the good guy being ordered to rescue someone useless and stupid because that makes the meaningless death of most of the good guys more poignant somehow. The movie’s basically a shitty remake of Escape from New York with Arthur as a more freedom-loving Snake Plissken.

Arthur notices that a couple of Christian priests are bricking up a building, so naturally he insists on forcing his way in, despite the priests claiming this is a holy place. What he discovers instead is that the priests have been torturing Woads there, including a cute moppet whose primary purpose is to remind Arthur of his own unhappy childhood, and Guinevere (Keira Knightley), who eventually turns out to be the daughter of Arthur’s archnemesis the Woad leader Merlin (Stephen Dillane). As usual, this makes no sense. Why are Christian priests torturing people and claiming that the torture chamber is a holy place? Given that the film has already established a contrast between the good British Christianity of Arthur and Pelagius and the bad Roman Christianity of Germanus, making these British Christians horrible people just undermines the dichotomy Franzoni was trying to establish and leaves Arthur as the only Christian who believes anything nice, because freedom and not torturing people are nice.

King Arthur, or SCA event? King Arthur, because if it were an SCA event, the outfits would be more authentic.

The geography, by the way, has gotten worse. Arthur discovers that the Saxons are to the south of them (still north of the Wall, but south of them). They landed three days’ north of the Wall (so apparently Marius’ villa is REALLY far north in Scotland), and have apparently just been hanging out for three days, since Arthur has gotten further north than them without them getting anywhere near the Wall. And because the Saxons are to the south, Arthur is going to have to lead Marius’ people and the rescued Woads over the mountains to the east. The major mountain range in Scotland is the Grampians, which separates the Scottish Highlands from central and southern Scotland. So evidently Marius’ villa is west of Inverness or Loch Ness, and the Saxons, who are coming from the east (having left the region around the mouth of the Rhine river), have sailed northwards around Britain and landed on the western side of Scotland, maybe around Oban or Fort William. They can’t have landed on the east side, because going eastward over the Grampians would still put Arthur’s group north of the Saxons. So apparently Cerdic lands around Fort William, camps out for several days while planning to attack a defenseless villa, marches northeastward up the Great Glen toward the villa despite having the intention of conquering southern Britain, and then discovers that Arthur has gotten Marius out of there. So he then chases Arthur over the Grampians, with the result that Arthur gets south of the Saxons and gets back to Badon before the Saxons do.

It’s not just that the plot would fall apart if the Saxons looked at a map; the plot would fall part if David Franzoni looked at a map. Why the hell is Marius living so far into enemy territory, and why did the Saxons invade western Scotland? Why go north to go south? Because Franzoni isn’t going to let a little thing like geography get in the way of telling a not-very-good story.

After Arthur leads the defenseless peasants over the mountains and fights a battle on a frozen river (because it’s winter in Scotland, but not at Badon), Guinevere helps broker an alliance between Arthur and Merlin to fight their common enemy the Saxons. What Merlin gets out of this isn’t clear, because Arthur has a grand total of 5 men under his command, so he’s basically suckering Merlin into giving him a Woadish army when all the Woads have to do is keep out the way of the Saxons as they head south to plunder Roman Britain. The Woads, after all, are brilliant woodsmen whom even Arthur can’t catch. And instead of fighting among the forests of Scotland, which offer perfect cover for the hit-and-run guerilla tactics the Woads are so good at, and instead of using Badon as a strong defensible position that would multiply the power of his greatly outnumbered forces, Arthur decides the smart thing to do is opt for an open field battle next to the Wall. Why does anyone think this man is a skilled military leader? A ten year old with a pile of snowballs and a mound of snow to hide behind demonstrates more tactical sense than Arthur shows through most of this film.

Woadish trebuchets, cuz why not?

And so the film climaxes in the Battle of What’s In Your Wallet, in which hordes of villainous Saxon barbarians charge across a smoke-filled field to fight a few brilliant horsemen who spend most of their time fighting on foot while Woadish archers, including a leather bikini clad Guinevere, fire arrows at them without ever hitting any of the good guys. I suppose in that situation being insanely outnumbered is actually sort of helpful, because the odds of hitting a good guy are small. Oh, and the Woads also have trebuchets, while the Saxons have crossbows. I’ve seen Lego battles with a greater concern for historical accuracy.

You can’t be a Woad without wearing some woad.

Then Arthur wins and Merlin marries him to Guinevere and the happy couple live happily ever after, and the Arthurian legends live happily ever after, and history lives happily ever after. Everyone winds up happy. But not geography. Geography can go fuck itself.

Update: In response to a question from a reader, I did a little more research into Roman transportation. I had been under the impression that while the Romans used a variety two- and four-wheeled wagons, they did not have a covered, four-wheeled person transport with a suspension system–what i would consider a carriage. However, it turns out that an archaeologist working in Bulgaria in the 1960s did uncover the remains of what he reconstructed to be exactly such a vehicle. This is literally the only known example of such a vehicle, but it did exist, and the vehicle used in King Arthur looks not unlike a reconstruction of it in a Cologne museum. So I have to give the film credit for getting that detail basically right, although whether such a vehicle was still in use in the 5th century and on the edge of the Empire is probably debatable.

The Cologne reconstruction

Want to Know More?
No, you don’t. But if you really must, King Arthuris available on Amazon.

Also, think about picking up this: Britain and Ireland Wall Map (tubed) British Isles

King Arthur: Who the Heck is Germanus?

Tags

Clive Owen, David Franzoni, Germans of Auxerre, Ivano Marescotti, King Arthur, Linda Malcor, Medieval Europe, Pelagianism, Pelagius, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, St. Augustine

The first time I watched King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni), one of the more hopeful elements was the decision to include Germanus of Auxerre in it. Germanus was a real person, and his appearance early in the film led me to think that perhaps the film was going to do something fresh and interesting by tying the Arthurian legends into a genuine historical event that most people haven never heard of. “Maybe this film has something interesting to offer,” I thought to myself. Boy, was I wrong.

Germanus of Auxerre

Germanus, also known as St. Germaine and Garmon Sant, was a Gaulish (proto-French, to simplify) bishop of Auxerre in the early 5^th century. One of the most important events that we know about during his life was a visit he paid to Sub-Roman Britain sometimes around 429 or 430 AD.

A statue of St. Germanus in Paris

In 410, the Roman Emperor Honorius withdrew the last Roman troops from Britain, and in response, the local authorities essentially seceded from the Roman Empire, expelling the Roman civil authorities. For the next half-century, the Britons sought to maintain a degree of Roman civilization even as the economic, military, and civic underpinnings of the civilization were breaking down. This period is generally known as the Sub-Roman period, and traditionally it lasts down to 449 AD, when the Saxons began to overrun lowland Britain (although historians may occasionally disagree about the end date for this period, arguing that it lasts down to 597).

The motive for Germanus’ visit was the emergence of a theological movement that eventually came to be branded as a heresy, Pelagianism. The founder of this movement was a monk known as Pelagius; he’s usually thought to be a Briton, although by the time of the Pelagian Controversy, he was living in Rome, where he was a respected theologian. Very little of Pelagius’ thought has actually survived; early Christian authors had little interest in preserving the writings and doctrines of people they deemed heretics. In fact, it’s not even clear that Pelagius actually taught Pelagianism; it may well be that his supporters developed his thought beyond what he taught. Regardless, Pelagianism maintained that humanity is a capable of avoiding sin because we have free will, and that includes the choice to sin or not sin. Humans were capable of doing good deeds on their own, and in fact God required them to do so. Otherwise, how could God justly punish sin? If a person is incapable of not sinning, it seems perverse of God to expect them to not sin. Pelagius seems to have objected to people using human sinfulness as a justification for failing to live morally.

A 17th century drawing of Pelagius

Unfortunately for Pelagius and his followers, the most influential churchmen of their generation included St. Augustine and St. Jerome, both of whom were among the giants of the early Latin theologians and both of whom opposed them. Augustine, arguably the most influential Western theologian after St. Paul, articulated the doctrine of Original Sin, which holds that all humanity fell when Adam and Eve sinned. Because humanity is permanently tainted by the inherited stain of their sin, it is impossible for humans to do good works or avoid sinning without God’s grace and assistance. The doctrine of Original Sin was in complete opposition to Pelagianism, and in 411, the Council of Carthage condemned Pelagianism as heretical and affirmed Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, which subsequently became a fundamental teaching in the Catholic and many Protestant Churches (such as Lutheranism). Pelagius himself died naturally in 418, but Pelagianism continued to circulate.

St Augustine

It was to confront the reported spread of Pelagianism in Britain that Germanus and another bishop, Lupus of Troyes, traveled to Britain in 429 or 430. Some sources claim that he made a second visit sometime over the next 15 years, although some scholars have argued this is a confused report of his trip in 429 and that he only made a single visit. This visit has loomed large in scholarship on the Sub-Roman period for the simple reason that it’s virtually the only major event we have clear documentation for in the sources. As I mentioned in my first post on King Arthur, the Sub-Roman period is part of the British Dark Age, because we have so little information about the period. Between 410 and 600, we have precisely one written document that scholars uniformly agree was authentically written in Britain in this period (although the two letters of St. Patrick may have been written either in Britain or Ireland). That one invaluable document is Gildas’ letter that mentions the battle of Mt. Badon.

The story of Germanus’ visit is recorded in the Life of St. Germanus, written by Constantius of Lyon, a Gaul. He tells us that Germanus went to Britian and debated a group of Pelagian bishops and disproved their beliefs, with all the witnesses being persuaded to abandon the heresy. While there, Germanus took time to cure a blind girl, have a dream about St. Alban, break his foot, miraculously divert a fire, and defeat an invasion of Saxons and Picts by getting lots of people to shout “Alleluia!” so loudly that the echoes made the invaders think they were facing a much larger force than they actually were. I guess the Saxons and Picts back then were kind of dim. What he didn’t do, so far as Constantius tells us, is meet anyone named Artorius.

Germanus in King Arthur

After an intro sequence featuring Artorius as a young boy, the film starts in 467, with the arrival of Bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti). Bad guys attack the wagon he’s traveling in, and Arthur (Clive Owen) and his men kill the bad guys, but not before they’ve killed the bishop and most of his retinue.

But surprise! The dead guy in the wagon isn’t actually the bishop. Instead Bishop Germanus has cleverly disguised himself as the captain of the bishop’s guards. Because no one would try to kill the leader of the bishop’s bodyguard when they were trying to kill the bishop. That’s the sort of logic this film operates on.

Germanus pretending to be the captain of the guards

Although Arthur and his men and supposed to receive their magical discharge papers after escorting the bishop to the Roman fort, Germanus decides to jerk them around by insisting they undergo that great cinematic cliché, the One Last Mission, because somehow he’s in charge because the pope has taken control of the Roman Empire because…well, just go with it.

Arthur, as it turns out, is a follower of Pelagius. The film gets Pelagianism entirely wrong, because it seems to think of it as some sort of political movement revolving around every historical action figure’s favorite value, “freedom”. (Evidently, William Wallace was a Pelagian.) As Arthur insists, his people “were free from your first breath!”, conveniently forgetting that he and his knights were born into servitude, as the prologue has shown us. There is no discussion of the issue of Original Sin or the theology of Free Will at all. And Arthur is upset to eventually learn from Germanus that Pelagius was recently executed.

Germanus being a dick to Artorius

So the film makes the intriguing choice to introduce an important historical figure and a major theological debate, and then makes the mind-numbing decision to do nothing even remotely intelligent or even interesting with these details. Ok, I get that 5^th century theological debates are a hard sell to a modern action film audience, SO DON’T MENTION THEM.

The Dating of the Film

Simply put, the film’s chronology is a complete mess. The historical Lucius Artorius Castus was in Britain sometime between 175 and 235 AD, so well over 200 years before the time of the film. But that problem gets fixed easily, by making this Arthur a descendant of the original one.So that piece of chronology isn’t a problem (relatively speaking). Instead, everything else about this film’s dating is just wrong.

The events are set in 467 AD, when the Roman Empire is beginning to collapse. But Roman Britain hadn’t been part of the Empire for more than a half-century, since it seceded in 410. Bishop Germanus’ visit was around 429; granted, he may have made a later second visit, but that happened by the 440s at the latest, because Germanus died in 448. The film opens with a visit from a dead man to a part of the Roman Empire that’s hasn’t been a part of the Empire for longer than he’s been dead.

But there was still an emperor in the West in 467, because the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, wasn’t deposed until 476. So the idea that the pope is running the Empire because there’s no emperor is just silly.

Arthur (right) wearing what the film imagines Roman armor would look like.

And, as I noted in my first post on this film, the “historical” Arthur (if there was such a man) didn’t fight his battle of Mt. Badon for probably another 20-30 years, around 495 AD, give or take a decade. There is simply no way to massage the dates in the film to get them into even a remotely coherent order. And why the hell did David Franzoni settle on 467 as the date for the film? Did he mean to write 476 and just transposed two digits and no one else involved in the filming caught the typo? That makes about as much sense as anything else having to do with this film.

Why set the film in the waning years of the Roman Empire, why set “Artorius” in his proper century, if you’re not actually going to fight the battle of Mt. Badon? Why not just go with Malcor’s claim that Arthur belongs in the late 2^nd to early 3^rd century (when there’s actually an emperor to give him orders) unless your intention is to fit him into Dark Age Britain? If you want to set him in Dark Age Britain, why not get the dating at least partially right? Why get literally every chronological detail wrong?

This wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t made the film’s supposed historical accuracy a major selling point of the publicity campaign. They went to the trouble of recruiting a genuine scholar (granted, a folklorist with a rather half-baked theory, rather than a historian, but still…), but apparently Dr. Malcor didn’t bother to point out to them that the dates in the script are just so much word salad. Either that or she did point it out and they felt it didn’t matter, which seems equally likely, given that this is a Jerry Bruckheimer picture.

The film’s jumbled chronology is sort of like a Dan Brown novel, filled with clever clues to form a message that only the historically literate can parse out. But the message they form is “screw you, suckers! This makes no sense!”

Update: A reader tells me that in the closing narration, there is a mention that the final battle is Mt. Badon. I apparently missed that. But it makes absolutely no sense, since Badon seems to be modern Bath, which is nowhere near Hadrian’s Wall, where the battle is definitely taking place. This is sort of like claiming that the Battle of New Orleans took place in New Jersey.

Want to Know More?
King Arthuris available on Amazon.

King Arthur: The Sarmatian Theory

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Bad Prologue Texts, C Scott Littleton, Clive Owen, King Arthur, Linda Malcor, Lucius Artorius Castus, Roman Britain

King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni) opens with a prologue text, narrated, we eventually learn, by one of Arthur’s knights.

“By 300 AD, the Roman Empire extended from Arabia to Britain. But they wanted more. More land, more peoples loyal and subservient to Rome. But no people so important as the powerful Sarmatians to the east. Thousands died on that field and when the smoke cleared on the fourth day, the only Sarmatian soldiers left alive were members of the decimated but legendary cavalry. The Romans, impressed by their bravery and horsemanship spared their lives. In exchange, these warriors were incorporated into the Roman military. Better they had died that day. For the second part of the bargain they struck indebted not only themselves but also their sons and their sons and so on, to serve the empire as knights. I was such a son. Our post was Britain, or at least the southern half. For the land was divided by a 73-mile wall, built three centuries before us to protect the Empire from the native fighters of the North. So as our forefathers had done, we made our way in the cortege of the Roman commander in Britain, ancestrally named for the first Artorius, or Arthur.”

This opening signals that the film is drawing off the so-called Sarmatian Theory about King Arthur. This theory has two parts, one focused on Lucius Artorius Castus and the other involving an ancient people called the Sarmatians.

Lucius Artorius Castus

Artorius is primarily known from two large fragments of a late 2^nd or early 3^rd century sarcophagus that were used in building a wall of a church in Croatia at some point prior to the late 19^th century. (This is less strange than it sounds; pre-modern peoples frequently re-used stonework like this.) The two surviving fragments commemorate Lucius Artorius Castus by describing his military career. According to the inscription, Artorius served in Syria, Judea, the region around modern Budapest and Romania, Italy, either in Armorica (modern Brittany) or more probably Armenia, and most importantly (for this theory) in northern England, before eventually being named governor of modern Croatia. The inscription does not explicitly say he served in Britain; rather it says that he served as Prefect of the Sixth Legion Victrix, a legion that during the period in question was stationed at Eboracum (modern York). The exact dating of his career is unclear; dates range from the mid-2^nd century (with his governorship occurring sometime between 167 and 185) to the period between 215 to 232 AD.

One of the fragment’s of Artorius’ sarcophagus. The first line reads “L Artori…”

In 1924, a medieval scholar named Kemp Malone pointed out that a man with the name of Artorius serving in northern England could in theory have inspired the character of King Arthur. As we saw in my last post, if Arthur was a historical person at all, he probably acted as a general in at least one major battle in southwestern England around 495 AD. Artorius, however, is at least 250 years too early to be that man, and as Prefect of the Sixth Legion Victrix would not actually have participated in battles, since a Legion’s Prefect was an administrative officer and usually an older man rather than a leader of troops.

So What About the Sarmatians?

The Sarmatians were a confederation of Iranian peoples who initially occupied Sarmatia, the region north of the Black Sea, but who gradually migrated westward during the Roman period. They were primarily known as cavalry warriors. In 175 AD, the emperor Marcus Aurelius stationed 5,500 Sarmatians in Britain. This unit may have remained there for generations; a 5^th century Roman document mentions a ‘Sarmatian formation’ serving in northern Britain, although by that point it may well have been manned by men with no ethnic connection to the Sarmatians who founded the unit.

In 1975, Helmut Nickel floated a theory that perhaps Artorius led a unit of Sarmatians and somehow formed the basis for the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In 1994, two scholars of folklore, C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor, proposed an entirely hypothetical reconstruction of Artorius’ career, apparently independently of Nickel’s ideas. They proposed that Artorius had fought against the Sarmatians during his time in eastern Europe and that because he had experience with Sarmatians, the emperor assigned him to command a unit of Sarmatians that fought a campaign around Hadrian’s Wall against a group of invading Caledonians. His unit being destroyed, he then returned to Eboracum and was subsequently sent with a cavalry unit to Armorica.

Dr. Linda Malcor

The primary evidence Littleton and Malcor offer in support of this hypothesis is that certain elements of the late medieval Arthurian legend have parallels in legends that derive from the Caucasus region, not far to the east of Sarmatia. These ‘Nart Sagas’ are of uncertain dating, being only recorded in the 19th century AD, although elements of them seem to go a long way back into the Ancient period. The most interesting parallels include

• A Nart warrior’s sword must be thrown into the sea when he dies. One particular character asks a friend to undertake this task for him, but the friend twice lies about doing it before finally throwing it into the sea. This same scenario occurs in Thomas Malory’s 15^th century description of the death of Arthur at the battle of Camelot, in which Bedivere is ordered to throw Excalibur into a lake.
• Two Nart heroes collect the beards of their foes to make into cloaks. Different versions of the Arthurian legends describe him fighting an enemy who does the same thing.
• The Cup of the Narts appears at feasts and grants each person what they most like to eat. It can only be touched by a warrior without a flaw. The Holy Grail does this when it appears at Camelot. It is finally attained by the pure Sir Galahad.
• A magical woman dressed in white and associated with water appears both in the Nart Sagas and in Arthurian legend (where she is called the Lady of the Lake).
• The Sarmatians are closely related to the Alans. Various names containing ‘alan’ occur in various Arthurian stories, including Alain le Gros, Elaine, and most importantly Lancelot, which according to Littleton and Malcor could be a corruption of Alanas a Lot (“Alan of Lot River’).
• The Sarmatians were noted cavalry warriors, and so too were Arthur’s knights.

So here essentially is the Sarmatian Theory. Artorius led a group of Sarmatians in northern Britain briefly. At some point after his death, he was fused with various Sarmatian heroes and acquired a collection of stories and characters around him that ultimately evolved into the character of King Arthur. And that’s basically what King Arthur claims is the historical truth behind Arthur.

So Does the Sarmatian Theory Actually Work?

No. It’s riddled with problems. The biggest problem is that Littleton and Malcor offer literally no evidence connecting Artorius to the Sarmatians sent to Britain. It’s unlikely that Artorius commanded Sarmatian troops in battle, since by the time he was stationed with the Sixth Legion Victrix he was old enough to not be leading troops in battle, and they would have been with a different unit anyway.

Dr. C. Scott Littleton

In addition to not offering any actual evidence to connect Artorius and the Sarmatians, they also don’t explain why Artorius should have become the focus of an enduring legend. In their hypothetical reconstruction of Artorius’ career, the Sarmatians are eventually destroyed, so if he did lead them, he wasn’t a successful general. Nor did he die in Britain. He died years later in Croatia. Nor do they explain why his legend would have been passed down for centuries from Romanized Sarmatians to Romanized Celts to Anglo-Saxons and eventually to Norman English, other than a general tendency of people to repeat old stories.

Additionally, this theory ignores the story about Arthur leading troops at the battle of Mt. Badon. Why would a long-dead unsuccessful commander from the 3^rd century become attached to a battle fought two centuries later in an entirely different region of Britain?

Another huge problem is that the various motifs Littleton and Malcor cite are comparatively late additions to the Arthurian legends. Arthurian stories were circulating in Wales at least by the 8th or 9th century, and they remained Welsh story-matter until the mid-12th century when Geoffrey of Monmouth incorporated Arthur into his History of the Kings of Britain, thus bringing Arthur to the attention of the Anglo-Norman nobility. Since the Anglo-Normans were Frenchmen who had conquered England in 1066, this meant that the ‘Matter of Britain’ crossed over to France and began to circulate there, and French stories about these characters eventually crossed back to England and embedded themselves definitively in the corpus of Arthurian stories.

Most of the details that Littleton and Malcor cite as supposed evidence of Sarmatian influence don’t occur in the Welsh stories or in Geoffrey’s History. Instead, they trace back to late 12th century French stories or later English works. The Grail first appears in the late 12^th century in a work by the French author Chretien de Troyes, where it is a serving platter, not a cup at all. “Elaine” is a French variant on “Helen”, and it traces back to ancient Greece (Helen of Troy, y’all). Lancelot first appears in another of Chretien de Troyes’s French works. The stories about Excalibur being thrown into a lake at the end of Arthur’s life and the various characters called the Lady of the Lake are 13th and 14th century additions. The first appearance of the beard-collecting foe is Geoffrey’s Historia, where he’s a giant. The Sarmatian Theory claims that these details are part of the core Arthurian story, but doesn’t explain why the earliest stories about Arthur don’t make any mention of these details, nor does it do a very good job of explaining how they eventually got folded back into the Arthurian legends after being absent for the better part of a thousand years. It makes far more sense to see these elements as having been independently created in the 12^th through 15^th centuries, as scholars traditionally think.

Early Welsh warfare emphasized fighting on foot far more than fighting on horseback, since Wales is quite hilly terrain, which would make things like cavalry charges extremely difficult. And the Welsh Arthur seems to be fighting more on foot than on horseback. It’s only when the cavalry-using Anglo-Normans conquered England that Arthur and his ‘knights’ begin using horses. But the Sarmatian Theory holds that all the emphasis on cavalry warriors is an echo of Sarmatian cavalry warfare a millennium earlier rather than a reflection of the cavalry warfare employed by the culture in which the stories were being written down and favored by the men who were the patron of those authors. This is sort of like saying that the popularity of Cop Films in American culture is due to medieval stories of law enforcement; after all, the Sheriff of Nottingham is a famous late medieval character, so he was obviously the inspiration for 20th century Buddy Cop pictures.

Finally, the Nart Sagas were only written down in the 19th century. Exactly how old they are is unprovable. While some parts of them do seem to draw on ancient Iranian material, there’s no way to be certain that the stories were actually composed during the Roman period; 19th century nationalists were definitely not above fabricating supposedly old texts to support their claims of cultural identity. One could, in fact, argue that any similarities between the Nart Sagas and Arthurian legend are because whoever composed them borrowed from Arthurian literature. And the Nart stories aren’t actually Sarmatian or from Sarmatia; they’re from Ossetia, on the eastern side of the Black Sea.

As for ‘Lancelot’ originating from ‘Alanas a Lot River’…excuse me, I can’t actually type that with a straight face. Malcor and Littleton demolish a fringe theory that ‘Lancelot’ is a Welsh name, but ignore the far more common theory that it is a French diminutive of  ‘Lanzo’. Their evidence that it might actually be from ‘Alanus’ is, and I AM NOT JOKING, an email from somebody who suggested it to them.

So the Sarmatian Theory suffers from a complete lack of genuine evidence; it’s entirely speculation. It fails to explain why this obscure career military officers would have become the focal point of a group of legends borrowed from an ethnically unrelated people and why those stories would have managed to survive for a thousand years. It takes fairly obvious facts (like the idea that Chretien de Troyes invented both Lancelot and the Holy Grail) and replaces them with far more complex scenarios in violation of Occam’s Razor, and it relies on an undatable collection of stories being almost 2000 years older than their first actual documentation and being used by a people only indirectly connected to those stories.

The Sarmatian Theory in the Film

In Fuqua’s King Arthur, the main characters are descendants of the original 3^rd century Sarmatians (although no effort is made to make them look ethnically different from the Romans and Romanized Celts around them). The opening narration says that after their defeat, the Sarmatians agreed to bind their descendants to perpetual military service to the Roman Empire, so that they are sort of hereditary military serfs, of a type that actually never existed in Roman society. But, in true Hollywood fashion, these last Sarmatians are due to get their discharge papers, ending their centuries of servitude, until the asshole bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti) tells them that they have to go (say it with me now) on One Last Mission to rescue some Roman citizens inexplicably living north of Hadrian’s Wall. This is sort of like a Cop Film where the cop is on his last day of service, only he’s actually a vampire who’s been serving on the force since the American Revolution; you just know he’s going to get staked by the villain early in the film so his buddy can avenge him. (Spoiler: don’t expect all of Arthur’s men to make it to the closing credits.)

Arthur (Clive Owen, looking very Clive Oweny) is not the original Artorius Castus. Rather, he is the descendant of the original Artorius Castus “ancestrally named for the first Artorius or Arthur”. Like every other time Hollywood tries to use Roman names, this film doesn’t understand Roman naming conventions, because it thinks that ‘Artorius’ is a given name and ‘Castus’ is a family name, when in reality ‘Artorius Castus’ is a pair of inherited family names and Owen’s character’s given name is never mentioned. But it’s the 5^th century and the whole damn Empire is breaking down, so it’s ok that people are forgetting how to name their children. If I had to spend my time frantically trying to rescue Roman citizens living in other countries while my entire government was falling into the hands of douchebag clergymen, I’d probably forget my given name too.

Arthur and his men have become world-famous, or at least world-famous in Britain, because Guinevere (Kiera Knightley), living to the north of Hadrian’s Wall and not even being part of Roman society, has heard stories of Arthur and his men. So these Sarmatian troops are real bad-asses, even though they never actually fight from horseback the way that Sarmatians are supposed to.

So the film has nicely solved one of the Sarmatian Theory’s problems. The famous Artorius Castus is not the 3^rd century Roman but his 5^th century Sarmatian descendant, and it’s the distorted events of his life that we remember today. It’s a sign that your scholarly theory isn’t very strong when a Hollywood film can actually improve on it.

But that’s pretty much the only thing this film manages to do right. The rest of the film, as we’ll see next time, is just a mess.

Want to Know More?

King Arthuris available on Amazon.

If you really want to dig into the Sarmatian Theory, you’ll find it in From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail (Arthurian Characters and Themes). I don’t recommend it, unless you’re especially interested in alternative theories about the Matter of Britain.

Centurion: Roman Seal Team Six vs the Time-Travelling Killer Picts

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Centurion, Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Picts, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Roman Scotland, Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Ninth Legion

I’ve done four posts about The Vikings and I’ve got at least three more to go, so I thought I’d take a break and review something different, namely Centurion (2010, dir. Neil Marshall), an action film about the disappearance of the Roman 9^th Legion.

In 1732, a British scholar named John Horsley noticed something curious, namely that the Roman 9^th Legion Hispana disappears from the records sometime in the middle of the 2^nd century AD. In the 19^th century, evidence emerged that it had been stationed at York in 108 AD, and one scholar found evidence that it might have still been there in 116, but by 165, it was apparently no longer in existence (since it is not mentioned in a list of legions at that time). Since another legion was sent to Britain not long after 116, various scholars began to speculate that a revolt had happened in Britain around 116 or a few years later, and that the 9^th Legion had been destroyed in that rebellion. Then in 1954, novelist Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth offered a slightly different theory; instead of being destroyed by a rebellion in Roman Britain, the 9^th Legion had marched into what is now northern Scotland to suppress a Caledonian uprising, and was destroyed in the process.

Since then, scholars have continued to debate the fate of the 9^th Legion, and it remains an open question. The idea that it was destroyed in a rebellion around 116 or so continues to be the most plausible explanation for its fate, although some uncertain evidence has been identified suggesting that the 9^th Legion might have been on the Rhine in the 120s, which means that its demise must be sought elsewhere, perhaps in Judea or the Danube. For those interested in the debate, a nice look at the evolution of the problem can be found here.

The Romans pushed into northern Scotland in the 70s AD, encountering a people known as the Caledonians, defeating the Caledonian Confederacy heavily in 84. Despite this, the Romans pulled back soon afterwards, and in 122 began work on Hadrian’s Wall. In the 130s, they again pushed into Scotland, building the Antonine Wall, but around 160, they pulled back to Hadrian’s Wall again and gave up any interest in conquering Scotland.

Exactly why the Romans abandoned their desultory efforts to conquer Scotland is unclear. The Caledonians do not appear to have been particularly effective warriors, and so it is unlikely to be the case that Caledonian resistance forced the withdrawal. A variety of other factors have been offered to explain it. It has been suggested that the Romans concluded the region was too poor to be worth conquering, or that its lack of a market-based economy made supplying the legions more trouble than it was worth. Another intriguing explanation is that when Romans conquered a region, they preferred to adapt the existing native administrative and law enforcement structures rather than imposing their own system. They preferred to co-opt the existing ruling elites because it made social control much easier. But the Caledonians may have lacked enough of a system for the Roman model to be easily applicable.

Nor is it clear exactly what the relationship between the Caledonians and the later residents of Scotland, the Picts, was. It has been suggested that the Roman Empire’s actions in Scotland so disrupted Caledonian society that they gradually reorganized themselves into the Picts, but how and why that process happened is unclear. What is clear is that the Picts did not exist during the period of the Roman incursions into Scotland. The term ‘Pict’ is generally thought to be a Roman one, dating from the later 3^rd century. In the 2^nd century, Romans living along Hadrian’s Wall called the Caledonians Brittunculi (which roughly means “nasty little Britons’).

Centurion

Centurion builds on Sutcliff’s novel by focusing on the 9^th Legion and its fate in northern Britain. Thus the film is entirely historical speculation. There is absolutely no evidence that the 9^th Legion ever went into Scotland, and the idea that it was destroyed in a rebellion is purely guesswork, although definitely educated guesswork, depending on how one reads the various scraps of evidence. The chief villains of the film are the Picts, who, as already noted, didn’t really exist at this point; they ought to be Caledonians.

The film opens at Inchtuthill in 117, where the Romans have established a fort. It’s true that the Romans established a fort at Inchtuthill in Scotland, on the banks of the Tay River, in the early 80s AD, but the fort was abandoned and entirely dismantled less than half a decade later. A prologue text tells us that the Picts of northern Britain are waging a guerilla war against the Romans, who are unable to defeat them, resulting in a stalemate. The fort is attacked by Picts, who use flaming arrows without having to actually light them, and everyone is slaughtered, except the main character, Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), who is taken prisoner and presented to Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen), the Pictish king.

Fassbender as Quintus

Back at York, the Roman governor, Julius Agricola (a genuine Roman governor, but one whose term in office ended in 85 AD) orders the 9^th Legion into the north to fight the Picts. Their general, Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West) doesn’t want to go until Agricola introduces him to Etain (Olga Kurylenko), a mute female tracker from the Brigantes tribe. She’s good enough to help them locate Gorlacon’s forces. On the way, they run into Quintus, who has escaped from captivity.

Unfortunately for them, Etain is actually working for Gorlacon and leads the Roman legion into an ambush in which the Picts roll huge flaming boulders down on them to break their formation and then run in and slaughter the whole legion. They capture Titus, but Quintus and a half-dozen other men survive (including the legionary cook).

Quintus decides to rescue Titus, at which point the thus-far incompetent soldiers turn into a Roman version of Seal Team Six, capable of sneaking up on guards and killing them silently (including the cook–apparently Roman cooks get special forces training). But the rescue goes horribly wrong; they are unable to get Titus free from his chains, and he orders them to abandon him and return to York. But one of them has killed Gorlacon’s young son, so the Pictish chieftain sends Etain and a band of Picts to track them down and behead them all and the film turns into a ‘unit behind enemy lines’ story that is almost entirely predictable in its resolution.

We know fairly little about Pictish society in this period (especially since the Picts were actually Caledonians at this time, but let’s just pretend they were Picts), since they were a pre-literate people and the Romans had very little to say about them. The film gives us only hints about Pictish society, but what we see is perhaps broadly plausible apart from the warrior women, for whom there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever. I expected the Picts to be heavily tattooed or wear lots of face paint, but surprisingly the film is fairly restrained here. A few of the Picts wear small tattoos, but most have none. Later in the film, Etain and her warriors mix the ash from a funeral pyre into some woad that they paint on their faces, but it’s not as excessive as I was expecting. Quintus, mysteriously narrating this scene, tells us that this is something that the Picts do “as a sacred rite” indicating that they’d rather die than fail. This, of course, is made-up nonsense; we don’t even have any solid proof the Picts/Caledonians employed face painting at all, much less why they might have done so.

But the film isn’t particularly interested in historical accuracy. The Picts routinely wield recurve bows they must have stolen from the Romans, sometimes wear helmets they must have taken off of time-traveling Anglo-Saxons from half a millennium later, and occasionally use metal shields taken from wandering Greeks a millennium earlier. But then, this is the sort of film where Roman armor, the best available at the time, is essentially useless against the Picts just cuz.

The film routinely ignores issues of basic logic. When the Picts leap over the walls of the Roman fort in the opening action sequence, they immediately start firing flaming arrows. But how are they lighting the arrows on fire? And why didn’t the Romans notice torch-carrying Picts sneaking through the darkness? I guess the Picts also took bic lighters off of those time travelers too. Similarly, when the Picts ambush the Romans, they roll massive flaming boulders down on them, heavy enough to smash the Roman shield wall. What are these boulders made of this could be heavy enough to break a shield wall but still be flammable? Worst of all, Etain has been mute since childhood, when the Romans murdered her whole family, raped her, and then cut her tongue out. If that’s the case, how do the Picts know what happened to her? How do the Romans know her name? How does she communicate with the people who are following her? And why does she have such an absurd-looking spear?

Etain with…whatever the hell that spear is

The film resorts to two obnoxious conventions about women that I’ve already highlighted in this blog. Etain is a precursor to 300 2: Rise of an Empire’s Artemisia, a vicious female killer whose viciousness is entirely rooted in the fact that she was raped and brutalized as a child. Her only motivation is that she hates Romans because of what they did to her. The other significant female character, Arianne (Imogen Poots), who speaks English (standing for Latin) with a pronounced modern Scots accent, is basically a Woman as Prize given to Quintus as a reward for his surviving everything that happens to him. Mercifully she does actually have a separate plot function and is given a bit more agency than Isabel in Ironclad, and some degree of actual motivation for her choices. And at least the film tosses out a line explaining why she speaks Latin, whereas other characters conveniently know either Latin or Pictish (actually Scots Gaelic) with no explanation at all.

Also, as another example of the principle that films pretty much never get Roman names right, ‘Quintus Dias’ makes absolutely no sense as a Latin name, since his nomen is basically a modern Portuguese/Brazilian last name and not Latin at all. Titus Flavius Virilus almost works, except that they’ve misspelled ‘Virilis’.

The whole film is a bit of shame, actually, because the main actors all do a fine job with limited material. The Roman Seal Team is perhaps overly multicultural but is a nice acknowledgement that the Roman army was actually quite ethnically diverse and not just composed of Italians (although Tarak, who hails from the Hindu Kush, is a bit silly, since he would have had to travel through pretty much the entire modern Middle East just to enlist in the Roman army). Michael Fassbender does a particularly good job as Quintus. You actually care about him by the end of the film.

So if you’re in the mood for some mindless action set within very pretty scenery, Centurion is worth a watch, especially if you’re ok with having seen pretty much everything here before. But if you’re looking for a film that actually says anything about Roman Scotland historically, this isn’t the film for you. I’m not sure there is a film for you if that’s what you’re looking for, but it definitely isn’t this one.

Want to Know More?

Centurion is available on Amazon.

Or you could skip the film and read Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of The Ninth by Sutcliff, Rosemary (2004) Paperbackthat loosely inspired the film. 

If you want to know something about Northern Britain in the Roman period, there’s David Shotter’s The Roman Frontier in Britain: Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall and Roman Policy in Scotland

Boudica: The Right Story, the Wrong Script

Tags

Agrippina the Younger, Alex Kingston, Andrew Davies, Boudica, Emily Blunt, Nero, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Warrior Queen

When I discovered that there was a film about the Celtic queen Boudica starring Alex Kingston and Emily Blunt, I got really excited, since they’re both actresses I like a lot. Sadly, even their combined acting skills weren’t enough to save this not-very-well written film.

Trigger Warning: This post discusses rape.

The US version of Boudica

The Historical Boudica

Everything we know about Boudica and her famous rebellion against the Romans derives from two Roman historians, Tacitus (who mentions her in two works, the Agricola and the Annals) and Dio Cassius. Tacitus got his information from his father-in-law, Julius Agricola, and so his accounts are generally considered more reliable than Dio’s, which only survives in a summary.

The Romans conquered lowland Britain in 43 AD, while Claudius was emperor. During the conquest, they allied themselves to King Prasutagus of the Iceni, a tribe that occupied roughly modern Norfolk. Apart from a brief rebellion against the Romans in 47 AD, the Iceni were faithful allies. Prasutagus made a will in which he left his kingdom jointly to his two daughters and to Rome.

Unfortunately for the Iceni, when Prasutagus died, perhaps in 60 AD or a little before, the Romans chose to ignore this arrangement and directly incorporate the Iceni into the Empire. A number of the Iceni were enslaved, his queen Boudica was flogged and his daughters raped.

In 60 or 61, when the Roman governor of the province, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was leading a campaign in modern-day Wales, the Iceni and other British tribes rose in revolt. They conquered the poorly-defended Camulodunum (modern Colchester) and completely destroyed the town. The 9^th Legion attempted to intervene, but the Iceni almost completely destroyed the legion as well.

Suetonius made the strategic decision to not try to defend Londinium (modern London), and as a result the Britons brutally sacked it, impaling the noble women of the city on spikes with their breasts cut off and sewn into their mouths. The city of Verulamium (St Albans) suffered a similar fate.

The basic route of Boudica’s rebellion

While Boudica was sacking these towns, Suetonius was gathering his forces, and the two forces eventually met at an unknown location, probably in the West Midlands. Boudica’s forces appear to have severely outnumbered the Romans, but Suetonius took up a strong defensive position and (at least in the surviving Roman accounts) employed superior tactics. The result was a devastating defeat for the Britons.

Exactly what happened to Boudica is unclear. In the Annals, Tacitus says she poisoned herself, while in the Agricola, he says only that the rebellion fizzled out, but says nothing of how she died. Dio Cassius says she fell sick, died, and was lavishly buried before the Iceni were defeated. Given that sudden illness was often suspected to be due to poisoning, the two accounts are not incompatible. But it seems fairly clear that Boudica survived the battle and died sometime afterwards. The ultimate defeat of her people was probably due to a combination of the loss of her leadership and their loss at the main battle of the rebellion.

English interest in Boudica grew considerably in the later 19^th and 20^th centuries, when she was celebrated as something of a noble savage and a warrior queen (her name, coincidentally, means the same thing that ‘Victoria’ does, which naturally made her a popular metaphor for Queen Victoria.

The Westminster Boudica

Boudica

Boudica (released in the US as Warrior Queen, 2003, dir. Bill Anderson) is the story of a scriptwriter, Andrew Davies, who is much better at adapting other people’s work than he is at writing his own original scripts. Overall, the script feels like it was written by a college student who took a script-writing class as an elective. Agrippina actually utters the line, “You’re magnificent in your wroth, Nero!” No one ever utters the word ‘wroth’ outside of crappy scripts.

The film follows the basic outline of Boudica’s story, although it doesn’t really provide much context for the events. It begins while Prasutagus is alive (although he seems much younger than the historical king would have been), and more or less ends after the battle with Suetonius, without any clear explanation of what happened to Boudica. So the film generally gets the basic facts right. The problem lies mostly in the way the script is written, rather than what it presents as facts.

The film can’t really decide how to handle Celtic women. It wants them to be clichéd ‘fiery-haired Irish women’, and at the start of the film Boudica (Alex Kingston) seems to already be a warrior, as if this was normal for the Celts (which it wasn’t; Celtic women were expected to stand on the sidelines at battles and shout encouragements to their husbands rather than fighting on their own). But Arcon, the leader of another British tribe, ridicules the idea of female leaders. The script is using this as a way to generate some dramatic tension, but it feels like Davies is trying to eat his cake and have it too—the Iceni have female warriors and queens, but the other tribes don’t.

Kingston as Boudica

The characters also speak in a very modern style, making references to ‘economies of scale’ and the Iceni wanting to ‘be left alone to follow their religion’ and things like that. The uncharitable interpretation would be that Davies simply can’t write his own dialogue, but given that he’s written a number of well-received adaptations, let’s be more charitable and suppose that he was trying to imitate Robert Graves. In Graves’ I Claudius and Claudius the God, the Romans speak in deliberately anachronistic ways. Graves was trying to cut through the fussy archaic language 19^th century writers often employed to make Roman characters sound old-fashioned and make his characters more immediate to the audience. Sadly, Graves was a brilliant author and poet, and Davies isn’t. So his characters just get to say tinny dialogue.

Both Tacitus and Dio give versions of the speech Boudica said before the final battle (both versions certainly invented), but, as always happens, the script-writer decided he could come up with something better, and wound up with something more clichéd instead. It’s maddening to see so many interesting historical speeches abandoned in favor of modern crap.

As already noted, the film’s dialogue is generally pretty bad, so bad that even solid actresses like Kingston and Emily Blunt (who plays Boudica’s daughter Isolda) can’t do much with the lines they’re given. But the film doesn’t stop at bad dialogue. It just employs so much silliness, it’s depressing to realize that Davies wrote this as a serious script, with multiple drafts.

In an apparently attempt to generate tension, the film includes several scenes set at the Roman court. These scenes don’t actually go anywhere; they could easily have been omitted without affecting the overall narrative, but that would have made for a much shorter film. The script ignores the issue of messages taking months to travel between Rome and Britain, so the Roman court gets word of things that seemingly just happened in Britain, and orders are sent out that influence events immediately following. That’s a minor sin. But the film also just ignores all plausibility. Agrippina (Francis Barber) actually poisons Claudius in the middle of his court, and everyone just ignores the fact that he’s just mentioned how strange the drink she’s giving him tastes.

This film wants you to know how decadent Nero (Andrew-Lee Potts) is. He’s way too much eye shadow and purple neckerchiefs decadent. He’s French-kissing his mother in front of the imperial court decadent. He’s violently boning his mother decadent. He’s filling his court with people whose main job is to lounge around the imperial court having sex decadent. He’s poisoning his own mother and then stepping over her corpse decadent. Did I mention he’s decadent?

And for some reason all the Romans except Nero wear their togas indoors and pinned at the shoulder. Given that the toga was a cloak wrapped around the body when the wearer was outdoors, this is the equivalent of wearing your wool coat inside and stapling it shut so it won’t accidentally fall off. Oh, and the Romans wear pants under their togas, even though pants are basically a Germanic fashion introduced centuries later.

Boudica does a lot of pointing with swords in this film

Also, apparently the main reason Boudica’s rebellion was so effective is because she had a crack squad of Commando Urchins. These pre-teen kids are holy terrors who are well-versed in guerrilla tactics. They rob the Roman proconsul (actually shouting “nyah nyah” as they do so) and beat up his body guards. They tunnel under a Roman statue and cause it to collapse (and then climb out of the hole it just fell into), and they tunnel behind a group of Romans in a shield wall and ham-string them. Then they crawl through the ranks of another shield wall (because the soldiers are too stupid to notice them) and decapitate the proconsul. It seems clear that the reason Boudica lost her battle with Suetonius is that she forget to send in the Commando Urchins.

These Romans would have trouble defeating the Romans in Life of Brian

The movie also forgets that it’s supposed to be historical. Magior the Shaman (Gary Lewis) periodically works actual magic. He is constantly prophesying accurately. He shows one of Boudica’s warriors a vision. He throws things into the water and then makes them burst into flames. He levitates a sword out of a pond, and at the end of the film, he apparently turns Isolda invisible or teleports her away so the Romans won’t kill her after Boudica’s defeat. It’s nice to add magical touches because everyone knows that the Celts are all mystical and cool and whatnot, but let’s try to remember that the story is supposed to have actually happened.

And, for reasons that are never explained, Isolda can read Latin, even though all the other Iceni are illiterate. Maybe her Roman soldier boyfriend taught her in the few spare minutes they had together before things all went wrong.

It’s Not All Bad, Is It?

The film does have a few good qualities. Both Kingston and Blunt do their best with crappy material, and in a few scenes they really succeed. The scene after Boudica is flogged and her daughters raped is particularly effective. Boudica forces herself to stand up, repeatedly saying “Get up!” and as she unties her daughters, she tells them the same thing. Their struggle to be strong in the face of their trauma is quite moving.

The film also fully acknowledges the emotional impact of the rape. Isolda struggles to make sense of what has happened to her and contemplates suicide. She chooses to fight alongside her mother, hoping to die. But after the battle, when she wakes up injured but alive, she tells herself “Get up!” After Magior spirits her away somehow, the film ends with a shot of Emily Blunt as a modern Londoner, with the clear suggestion that Isolda was a strong survivor whose blood and spirit now run in English veins. As I’ve remarked in a previous post, I’m not a big fan of the ‘strong woman raped’ trope, but this film makes it work better than a lot of others I’ve seen, mostly because it explores the aftermath of the trauma without resorting to the ‘man-hating she-devil’ cliché.

The final battle is more realistic than the first one. The film takes some effort to show Roman tactics in a way that makes clear why the Romans ultimately defeated the Celts (although the film shows the two sides as roughly equal).

All in all, this isn’t a very good film, either as history or as story. It gets the basic facts right, which is certainly commendable, but it gets so much of the supporting details wrong that it loses the forest for the trees. The Romans are decadent to the point of cartoonishness. I would love to see what Alex Kingston and Emily Blunt could do with this story if they were given a solid script to work with. Just like Boudica’s rebellion, I have to regard this film as a lost opportunity.

Note: Her name is spelled a couple different ways. ‘Boudica’ and ‘Boudicca’ are both common; Tacitus uses two Cs, but other sources have only one, so both are basically correct. In the 19th century, a fashion arose to spell her name ‘Boudicea’, but that appears to be based on a copyist’s error during the Middle Ages.

 

Want to Know More?

Boudica is available under its US title, Warrior Queen.

Our sources for Boudica’s revolt are chiefly Tacitus’s Annals (Penguin Classics) and his Agricola, available in Agricola and Germania (Penguin Classics). Of these, the Agricola is probably the better choice for understanding Roman Britain, since Agricola, Tacitus’ father-in-law, was governor of the province.

Graham Webster’s Boudica: The British Revolt Against Rome AD 60 (Roman Conquest of Britain) focuses on Boudica’s campaign, filling out the somewhat scanty historical sources with evidence from archaeology, while Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin’s Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queenis more concerned with her posthumous reputation.