[ NNSquad ] A note from the "Everything You Know Is Wrong" department

[Lauren Weinstein]

[A new occasional feature of my lists, maybe.]

A note from the "Everything You Know Is Wrong" department

There probably is no more iconic image in film than that of the Roman
galley slave -- nearly naked, starving, whipped, chained to the oars.
There's just one problem -- it's historically inaccurate.

Roman war galleys were the aircraft carriers of their day. Immensely
expensive and needing expert handling. The Roman Empire was not about
to ordinarily trust these to ragged, dismal slaves who might revolt at
any time. In fact, except in exceptional and very rare situations, the
Roman galleys were manned by highly trained, professional paid rowers.
Even when extremely unusual and rare circumstances required additional
manpower beyond what professional rowers could provide, those slaves
recruited to fill in the ranks would normally be offered incentives
such as freedom at the end of their service to inspire voluntary
effort on their part. But again, the use of rowing slaves in the
galleys was only a rare, last resort and was avoided whenever
possible. There were of course slaves on the galleys performing
various other functions -- servants, administrative tasks, and so on --
but not routinely as rowers.

So how did the galley slave image get started? The most obvious answer
is the correct one: "Ben-Hur". The novel "Ben-Hur: A Tale of the
Christ" -- written in 1880 by General Lew Wallace, was an
international blockbuster, an enormous sensation that shook the global
publishing world of the time. It's influence was dramatic, leading to
the films and other media over the years that have retold the story.

There were galley slaves used routinely by some regimes during some
periods -- but this came many hundreds of years after Imperial Rome --
such as the Spanish Empire and the Barbary Pirates -- not Imperial
Rome. Wallace, apparently for dramatic effect, used the galley slave
stories from those later periods and placed them into his novel,
thereby forever creating a (false) association between Imperial Rome
and routine use of galley slaves.

Another famous image of Imperial Rome is the thumbs up and thumbs down
at gladiatorial games. Up for mercy, down for death. Unfortunately,
there is absolutely no actual historical evidence to support this
image, which appears to mainly have sourced from the famous 1872
painting "Pollice Verso" by Gerome. In fact, while some sort of hand
gestures were clearly involved at the games, there is no clear
evidence of exactly what they were or how the thumb was (or wasn't)
used. One theory says outstretched thumb mean death, thumb enclosed in
fist meant mercy. Another theory says thumb down actually meant mercy --
as in sheathing a sword. There simply aren't contemporary
references from the period that explain this, since apparently it was
assumed everyone already knew it. Which of course, at the time, they
did.

L

- - -
--Lauren--
Justice For Victims of ICE/CBP
Lauren Weinstein
lau...@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
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Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
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