Spartacus Film Analysis

After watching the movie Spartacus (1960) and doing some research I found the movie to be both historical accurate and inaccurate. But I'm not going to nitpick the hole movie instead I would like to talk about some of the major details that are fairly well known; like how the Roman army fought in battle. The Roman army was know for its discipline, organization, and innovation in both weapons and tactics. First lets talk about the Roman army and how it was structured and organized. The Roman army was divided up into legions; with the soldiers being know as legionaries. Each legion was made up of 10 cohorts, with a normal cohort contained 480 soldiers. The first cohort in every legion was larger than the other coherts, which was made up of
double centuries. Then the soldiers separate into 6 groups of 80, that were called centuries and led by a centurion. Within each century, the men were even further separated into groups of 8 called a contubernium. As you can see the man power starts adding up rather quickly and along with their discipline and formation it can be very intimating to the enemy. Now what about Roman army tactics? The Romans realized that with training a soldier, they would need to have food, military equipment, salary, and honorarium (paid to those who received honorable discharges); soldiers were very expensive, and were far too valuable a resource to waste. Therefore, the best tactic would be the one that had the most achievement without exposing the troops to unnecessary risk. The idea of Roman infantry tactics was that by keeping troops in order, they would be able to fight more effectively. Each battle was handled differently, by taking into account the terrain, the type and strength of the enemy troops, and the type and strength of the Roman's troops.
The Romans would also give careful consideration to where the battle should be fought. The Roman commanders would like to try and get the higher ground when possible; and would also like to ensure that the sun and wind were behind their soldiers. Romans military were extremely good at siege tactics. Roman engineers developed several different devices that could throw stones and javelins long distances; the most important of these were the catapulta, ballista, ad onager. In the movie Spartacus the deployment of the Roman army is very interesting. In the battle scene you see a deployment of a legion in a quincunx formation (checker board pattern) this shows the discipline and organization of the Roman army. As the Roman army comes closer to Spartacus' slave army the front legion starts to form a solid front line and they would continue moving forward. As the front group is lining up you can see the back legionaries coming together into one group. As an opponent seeing this it can be quiet intimating. While there were some discrepancies in the final battle the director, Stanley Kubrick, did a good job at keeping it as accurate as
possible.