June 2025 – Book and Sword

What Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” Gets Right

a blue-tinted photo of a white horse with a headless man riding it; Roman soldiers are in the background — I wish I could like a flick where this happens to a Roman in the first scene! This and all subsequent screenshots are from *Gladiator* (Ridley Scott dir., 2000) and the ActionPicks YouTube channel

In the Kingdom of Khauran, every hundred years a witch shall be born to the royal family. In the United States of America, every ten years Ridley Scott shall borrow unimaginable sums of money to mangle a new period of warfare. This has been foretold and has come to pass although none can foretell whether he will return with an Amarna Age epic where the chariots have exhaust pipes or a science fiction adventure which makes Starship Troopers look like sound military science.¹ Making fun of all the things these films get wrong is healthy fun around a gaming table or along a bar, and recently Bret Devereaux entered the genre on his ACOUP blog (part 1) (part 2) (part 3). But as I wrote back in 2016, complaining about bad things is often bad strategy. So this week I will wrote about the things I like about the opening scene in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. That is something I can cover in a short bookandsword post, whereas it takes three long ACOUP posts to cover some of the things that are wrong with the same scene.

Theories of Victory in the War against Iran

A very foolish and ignorant man has made a decision. Unlike some people with a PhD, I won’t claim I can predict the future. If you want that, I recommend you find a haruspex and slaughter an ox. What he sees when the steaming liver gleams like a mirror may be true or plausible lies, but at least you will get a summer barbecue for your trouble. But I can describe the structure of the situation as I see it, just like I did in The Iron Horse in Ukraine.

Some of My Recent Publications

A wooden bookshelf stained dark brown with many issues of the classics journal "Mouseion" in its dark blue softcover binding, three burgundy hardcover volumes of "Festschrift Rollinger", a white hardcover issue of "Medieval Clothing and Textiles," and the red and yellow hardcover "Soldiers and Silver" by Michael J. Taylor sitting on it

In the past year a number of my academic publications have come out (it often takes years from submitting an article to an academic venue to seeing it in print because almost everyone involved is a volunteer with a demanding day job and no personal assistant to help them organize and focus). This week I would like to talk about them.

Cross-Post: Queen’s University Special U.S. Doctoral Recruitment Initiative

Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, offers 20 scholarships of at least CAD $40,000/year for four years to doctoral students whose offers from top U.S. schools have been rescinded or who are reconsidering their acceptance to a US school for the 2025/26 academic year. The application is straightforward: find someone willing to supervise you, show your... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Queen’s University Special U.S. Doctoral Recruitment Initiative

Month: June 2025