Hadrian’s Ninth Legion on Film: “Centurion” and “The Eagle”

Hello. Welcome to Have Toga Will Travel, a podcast exploring the Mediterranean world, ancient and modern, through the eyes of two former classics professors. I'm Emily.

I'm Cam.

And we're your hosts. Hey, y'all. So today, we are going to wrap up our kind of section that we've been doing on Hadrian by talking about two movies connected with Hadrian's Wall, The Eagle and Centurion.

At this point, both of these movies are a little bit old now. They both came out not long after we hiked Hadrian's Wall for the first time way back in 2010, I think.

Yes, 2010. And notably, both of these movies deal with the fate of the Ninth Legion, which was stationed in Britain but disappears from historical records around the same time Hadrian's Wall was built.

So we'll start by talking a little bit about the Ninth Legion itself, since the Ninth Legion is so central to the plots of both of these movies.

And then we will tackle the movies one at a time. We'll describe their plots, of course, and we'll also talk about how well they do or do not work, especially when it comes to how they imagine what Britain was like under Roman imperial rule.

One last note before we really dive into this though, and that is that we have put up a bunch of pictures on our blog of Hadrian's Mausoleum and the Castel Sant'Angelo. So if you'd like to follow up our podcast episode on that subject with some imagery, go ahead and check out our blog, and I think you'll like what you see there.

Can put a lot of work into that.

It was a collective effort.

So let's start off by talking about the Ninth Legion. And to do that, we need to talk a little bit first about the Roman military. By the time of Hadrian, legions had been the main high-level unit of the Roman army for centuries.

But of course, they had evolved over time. For a big chunk of Rome's history, actually, the Roman army had been a militia army. And what that meant was that men of military age who could afford armor and weapons were basically called up for military service as in when needed, whenever there was a war.

So in this militia army model, legions were commissioned for specific conflicts and then decommissioned when that conflict was over and the soldiers were sent back to their civilian lives.

This reflects a time in Rome's history when campaigns were relatively short, were often fought during the summers. But of course, as the Roman Empire grew in size in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, legions and the soldiers serving in them could end up serving in theater for stretches of several years at a time.

Now that said, the militia system didn't really change fundamentally until the first Roman emperor Augustus transformed the Roman army from a militia army to a permanent standing professional army in the late first century BCE.

And it's at that point, really, that individual legions became more or less permanent institutions that had ongoing lives of their own, like a lot of military regiments do today. So soldiers and officers would rotate in and out over decades or even centuries, but the legion itself would persist.

Now, the Ninth Legion got its start under Augustus, although before he was Augustus when he was Octavian. And Octavian slash Augustus had raised it during the civil wars that would ultimately make him the emperor of the Roman world. And at the core of his Ninth legion were veterans from one of the legions that had been commanded by his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, which had also used the same number. They were also a Ninth legion.

Now, after the end of Octavian's civil war, the Ninth legion was one of the legions that would remain in service as a permanent component of Octavian's new professional standing army.

It then gets sent to fight in Spain in the late 20s BCE, which is where it earns the nickname Hispana.

Right, its formal name in Latin is the Legio Nonna Hispana, the Ninth Legion, the Spanish one. Then, over the next few decades, that legion saw service in a number of other theaters. So it was stationed for several years along the Rhine and Danube frontiers, even got a short deployment in Africa in the 20s CE.

And then finally, it is deployed to Britain, either as part of the invasion force sent there by the Emperor Claudius in 43, or as reinforcements shortly afterward. And we did talk a little bit about this in our episodes on Hadrian's Wall.

Yes. After the Ninth Legion was deployed to Britain, it stayed there for at least 60 years. And as a consequence, soldiers from the Ninth participated in most of the major conflicts in Britain as the Romans fought to expand and consolidate their conquests on the island during these decades. So just by way of example, they fought during the rebellion of Boudicca in the 60s. They fought in the campaigns against the Brigantes of northern England during the 70s. And they fought in Agricola's campaigns during the late 70s and the 80s CE when Agricola sought to bring the whole of the island under Roman domination.

For a big chunk of this time, maybe from like the 70s onward, the Ninth Legion was based at Eboracum, which is modern-day York. And we know this because of evidence from York, which includes things like building tiles marked with the stamps used by the legions and a bunch of inscriptions.

Now, weirdly, at some point in the 2nd century CE, this legion, which had been based in Britain for so long, ceased to exist. We don't know why, either it was destroyed in combat or it was disbanded for some reason or maybe some combination of the two. What we can tell, though, is that by the 160s, it was no longer in service.

And we know this because we have an inscription from Rome that probably dates from the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and this inscription lists all of the legions that were at that point still in commission. And notably, the Ninth Legion is not on that list.

Part of what's frustrating here is that we don't really have any narrative sources that mention the Ninth Legion during the Second century CE. All we've got are other kinds of evidence like inscriptions and so on. And the latest piece of evidence we have that actually can be dated with some precision that tells us about the Ninth Legion is a building inscription from the year 107 or 108. This inscription was set up at Eboracum in York, and the inscription credits the Emperor Trajan and the Ninth Legion for building a gatehouse. That inscription is dated precisely to the 12th year of Trajan's tribunician power. This is how Roman emperors tended to date their ascension to the imperial throne. And that allows us to pinpoint a specific date, 107 or 108.

So this is a date about 50 years prior to the list from the 160s that doesn't show the Ninth. So we know that the Ninth is still definitely there as a legion and present in Britain in 107-108 and its longstanding base, but what happens in the interval, we do not know.

Yeah, and that's really the big question when it comes to the Ninth. What exactly happened to the Legion to bring it to an end, apparently, and when?

Yeah, so for a long time, historians answered this question by suggesting that the Legion had been destroyed in battle at the very beginning of Hadrian's reign. And they pointed to a passage in a biography of Hadrian included in a late Roman text, the Historia Augusta, where we're told that the Britons were in revolt when Hadrian became emperor.

Right. Seemed like a fairly straightforward case. The Ninth seems to have disappeared. We know there was conflict in Britain in 117-118. Hey, presto, maybe they just got destroyed at this particular moment in time. But that said, the story became more complicated a few decades ago with the discovery of some additional interesting bits of evidence. Those bits of evidence include, first of all, some funerary inscriptions that describe the careers of Roman officers who clearly served in the Ninth because they list their service in that legion. But to the extent that we can piece together their careers as a whole, it seems really, really unlikely that they served in the legion as early as 117 at the beginning of Hadrian's reign. So that's too early a date for the legion to have been destroyed.

Additionally, there is evidence that soldiers and some officers from the Ninth legion were present on the continent, or what we may call continental Europe, in what is now the Netherlands and Germany. And in particular, we have roof tiles that were made by soldiers of the Ninth Legion, who stamped them, as they do. So we have the Ninth Legion's marking on these tiles. And there's also an altar dedicated by a high-ranking officer of the Ninth Legion at Aachen in Germany.

So confronted with these new bits of evidence, some historians started suggesting that maybe the Ninth wasn't actually destroyed in Britain, but was redeployed to the continent and then perhaps destroyed in a later conflict, either during Hadrian's war against rebels in Judea in the 130s, or maybe in a war against the Parthians during the reign of Antoninus Pius.

But, of course, there is no concrete evidence for any of this, and the evidence for the presence of the Ninth Legion on the continent can be accounted for in other ways, other than imagining that the whole legion was redeployed away from Britain.

Right, and what that means in practice is that consensus seems to be shifting back to the idea that the Legion was destroyed in Britain, or maybe at least suffered enough casualties in Britain that it was disbanded and surviving soldiers were reassigned to other units.

Right, because the evidence for the Ninth Legion on the continent isn't necessarily that significant. One, some of it's hard to date. Two, it can also be explained away. So the soldiers who stamped the roof tiles in the Netherlands could have been members of a smaller detachment, like a cohort of the Ninth Legion on some temporary duty, rather than the whole Legion being there. And the altar from Aachen, which was dedicated in a healing sanctuary, could have indicated that the officer was traveling for personal reasons and not there in an official capacity.

Right. Lots of reasons you can imagine why a soldier would want to go visit a famous healing sanctuary.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the main argument here is that a handful of inscriptions detailing the careers of military officers from the second century mention an Expeditio Britannica in Hadrian's reign. The reason that's significant is because on inscriptions, it seems, the term Expeditio often seems to refer specifically to a military expedition led in person by the Roman emperor himself. So an Expeditio Britannica must be a military expedition to Britain commanded by Hadrian.

And we do know that Hadrian visited Britain in 122, as we have talked about in other episodes. And if this visit was in fact the Expeditio Britannica, then there must have been some very serious fighting going on while Hadrian was present in Britain.

And what that means is that it is entirely possible that 122 CE is the context in which the Ninth was essentially destroyed. And that's actually a date that's wholly consistent with what we can tell of the careers of some of the officers that we know from their funerary inscriptions. Although they can't have been present with the Ninth as early as 117, there's no reason why 122 doesn't fit with what we can piece together of their careers.

That all said, this doesn't mean that the evidence supports the idea that we get in sort of modern media around the Ninth Legion, which is sort of this idea that, like, the Legion marched off on its own well beyond the Stanegate frontier and simply vanished somewhere in the Scottish Highlands.

Yeah, and as we'll see, that is the story that dominates both of the movies we're going to talk about.

Yeah, and it is a story you'll see in other media as well, but probably not what actually happened, even if they are destroyed in Britain.

It sounds a little bit silly, right?

Yeah.

Send a legion off into the unknown, and where did it go? Anyway, let's talk about the two movies themselves. As we'll see, there's a lot of overlap between the two films we want to talk about here, Centurion and The Eagle, when it comes to their subject matter. So just on a purely superficial level, as we've already mentioned, both films really do center around the Ninth Legion and its disappearance in Britain sometime during the reign of Hadrian.

Additionally, both films posit that the Ninth Legion was destroyed, fighting north of what would be Hadrian's Wall, except that they are set 20 years apart from one another. So one film, Centurion, is exploring the loss of the Ninth itself, and The Eagle is in some ways exploring the aftermath of that loss.

Both movies do try to imagine, to various degrees of success, the nature of society in Roman Britain during the Hadrianic period. So for example, both films have non-Roman characters who speak Gaelic in the film. That's a way of capturing difference between them and the Romans, even though Gaelic as a language was not historically present yet in Great Britain. Gaelic probably first comes into Northern Britain from Ireland, in the 5th century, so much later. And it doesn't really expand beyond Scotland's west coast until probably about the 8th century.

Yes. So the language that would have been spoken in northern Great Britain, what is now Scotland, during the reign of Hadrian would have been Pictish. Now, disclaimers here, Pictish is not particularly well defined. This is the general name given to what's called a P-Celtic language that is spoken in that area before Gaelic arrives. Gaelic is actually from a different branch of Celtic. It is a Q-Celtic language.

Mind your P's and Q's.

And the Pictish language is not necessarily connected to the Picts as a cultural group. Pictish is a very messy term when you get into linguistics. And someone argued with me intensely about using it. And I had to go point out a bunch of dissertations that do use it and explain it as problematic. Anyway, now what's interesting here is there was actually a point in the 20th century where scholars were arguing that the language of Scotland during the Reign of Hadrian would have been some sort of like pre-Indo-European language. And then it was like, okay, well, maybe the Pictish language has some like pre-Indo-European substratum in it. And that idea seems to have increasingly, I think, fallen out of favor, but it's still up for debate if Pictish retains some sort of pre-Indo-European linguistic characteristics. But nonetheless, Pictish, the P-Celtic language of Northern Great Britain in antiquity.

I'm sad that my Ps and Qs joke totally flopped.

You made a joke? I totally missed it, dude.

All right. Finally, the other commonality between these two films, point of overlap, if you will, is the fact that both of them engage on some level with Roman imperialism and the tensions that it created in Britain between Romans and the native British. Now, we'll contend a little bit later that The Eagle engages with these issues in a much more deliberate and thoughtful way than Centurion does, but we'll get there.

Yeah. And just a spoiler alert before we get into the movies, we think The Eagle in general is a much better movie than Centurion, despite their scores on Rotten Tomatoes, where somehow Centurion is rated higher.

Yeah, that boggles my mind. I don't understand how that happened. But The Eagle is a more interesting film, for sure.

It's also a better film.

Yes. All right.

All right.

Let's start talking about the movies. So let's start by talking about Centurion. This is a film released in 2010, written and directed by Neil Marshall, starring Michael Fassbender and Dominic West. You may or may not know Michael Fassbender. He was a thing in the early 2010s, although he's apparently on hiatus now doing car racing or something like that.

I think he's back. But yeah, he took a break to become a race car driver.

Dominic West is probably more familiar to most of our listeners because he was Prince Charles in the two most recent seasons of The Crown on Netflix.

Yeah. In Centurion as well, in supporting roles, some actors whose names you may or may not know, but you probably recognize their faces. So we have Noel Clark, whom I know best from playing Mickey in the original seasons of the Doctor Who reboot. Also, Riz Ahmed has a small supporting role in it. And then finally, Paul Freeman, and you may not know his name, but if you know Raiders of the Lost Ark, he is the same actor who played Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And if you are a fan of Hot Fuzz, which we are, he plays the vicar in Hot Fuzz.

Yeah, my mind almost exploded when you pointed that out to me. Like, I did not recognize those three characters as being played by the same guy.

No. We can't quote your reaction here on the podcast because we're not—

We're trying to be a family-friendly podcast, yes. But also, yes, Hot Fuzz is amazing, and I wish we could review that, but it doesn't really fit with the theme of the podcast.

No. Also, side note here, Michael Fassbender and Dominic West were both in 300.

Yeah. Yeah, the less said about that movie at the moment, the better. Although I don't think Centurion is much better than 300.

No, I believe I described it as a cross between 300 and Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, but that makes it sound a lot better.

Yeah, yeah, no, we'll talk about that later.

All right.

Less said about 300, the better.

All right, so let's just move into talking a little bit about Centurion. We'll start by talking a little bit about what the movie is actually about. As we've already anticipated, it's really about the disappearance of the Ninth Legion. The story is set right at the beginning of Hadrian's reign, and the movie invites us to imagine that at this particular moment in time, there's a stalemate between the Romans, who have taken over the southern part of Britain, and the Picts in the north. Picts here is being used ahistorically. That's not a name for people that enters the historical record until a couple centuries after this, but we'll let that go. The point is in this particular...

Will we?

We'll let it go for the time being. The point here is that, you know, at this particular moment at the beginning of the film, the Romans are unable to conquer the Picts to the north, and the Picts have been unable to really drive the Romans out of Britain altogether.

Now, the Roman governor Agricola, who was not still general, or sorry, not still governor at this point in time, but whatever. The Roman governor Agricola sends the Ninth out to eradicate the Picts, and he sends them with a Celtic scout, a woman named Etain. And Etain leads them into a trap.

I'm shocked.

I know. And it's set up in the film, like, clearly to evoke the attack of the Teutoburg Forest, which is a famous battle during the reign of Augustus, where three legions are wiped out in Germany.

At the end of the battle, there are a handful of surviving Romans led by Quintus Dias, played here by Michael Fassbender. They learn that the commander of the Ninth Legion, played by Dominic West, has been captured, and they decide they're going to rescue him. So they track him down to the home base of the Picts, but they're unable to break him free from the chains that have him bound up to a big boulder. That gives us what's meant to be a touching scene, I guess, in which the commander orders Quintus Dias and the other surviving Romans to just leave him behind and to escape and return home without him.

So the Romans escape. However, they are pursued by the Picts because one of the Romans had killed the Pict king's son during their effort to rescue the general. And like several Romans die on the journey, including one who gets eaten by wolves.

Yum, yum. Lots of running, lots of chasing, lots of fighting, I guess. And what ends up happening is that the survivors, including, of course, Quintus Dias, end up taking shelter with a British woman named Arianne, who has been exiled from the rest of the Pictish village for witchcraft, and who now lives alone in the woods somewhere. She nurses them back to health and, of course, protects them from Etain and her people when Etain comes looking for them.

Now, when the Romans finally arrive back at their outpost where they had been stationed, they learn it has been abandoned because Hadrian has ordered a retreat to the south. And here at the abandoned outpost, they have their final confrontation with the Picts who have been pursuing them, and everyone dies except for Quintus Dias and one other soldier from the Ninth Legion.

As Quintus Dias and this one other survivor approach Hadrian's wall, on the brink of escape from the north, a guard on the wall mistakes them for the enemy, fires an arrow, and kills one of them. The one who's not Quintus Dias.

Yes, of course.

Our hero cannot die so ignominiously.

Yeah, I will point out that Hadrian's Wall at this point in the movie is under construction.

Yes, yes.

Fun fact, the actor who plays the guy who shoots him is the director in a cameo.

And what a cameo it is.

So here we have our last survivor, Dias, who reports to the Governor Agricola what has happened to the Legion. And Agricola, not wanting his reputation to be sullied by a military failure, nor the fate of the Ninth Legion to be an inspiration to other tribes to revolt, he decides that the Legion's fate should remain a mystery, and that Dias should be killed to ensure that the truth stays secret.

This is really the movie's big idea, I guess, if you want to call it that. This idea that the reason we don't know the fate of the Ninth Legion is because there was an official cover-up.

Dun-dun-dun.

Dun-dun-dun, yes. I didn't say it was a good idea.

It's not just that, like, the historical record is just really patchy.

Right.

Anyhow, so our hero, if we can call him that, Quintus Dias, manages to escape this attempt to kill him, and he escapes back north of the wall, and he returns to Arianne, And presumably the two characters then go on to live happily ever after out in the woods together.

Now, if that plot summary makes the movie sound kind of boring, well, that's because the movie is pretty boring. I mean, I don't really know how else to describe it.

Yeah, I mean, okay, so I remember the first time we watched this, we got like 10 minutes into it, and we stopped the movie, and we were like, this is really bad. Do we keep going? Maybe it'll get better.

It did not.

It did not. And I think on re-watching it, you know...

You had hoped that it would be better on a second viewing.

Yeah, I mean, I was prepared for some of the things I found jarring, like the really weird CGI stuff that was in it. More prepared for that, but as I said earlier, I've described it as a cross between 300 and Lord of the Rings. But the comparison to Lord of the Rings is strictly on the level of cinematography. Because you do have these like really like sweeping shots of like vistas and countryside and designed to sort of give it this big epic feel. And some of that cinematography is really lovely.

Yeah.

But that's the limit of its point of commonality. Otherwise, it just it feels like a 300 wannabe like.

It doesn't even have the style of 300.

Yeah, it's not as stylized. It's just bad CGI, characters you don't care about.

Yeah.

Like we couldn't even name the main characters rewatching it. We had to go back after watching it and being like, wait, did any of these characters have names?

I think you get one scene in which they each tell everybody else their name and that's it.

Yeah, but like they just, there's no personalities. There's just, it's like—

The only character who actually has a personality is Riz Ahmed's character. Who is like the camp cook, basically. And that's his shtick. He throws cleavers.

Yeah, he throws cleavers. And he gets killed off too.

Yes.

Yeah, it's just. No. Okay. So we didn't like the movie. But at least, you know, when we were looking up reviews of it, we were actually kind of happy to find that a lot of other critics felt the same way, even though somehow it still has a fairly high rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which we don't understand. But Rotten Tomatoes creates this critical consensus, and its consensus for this movie is "it's a bloody geyser of Neil Marshall's typical stylish B-movie action, but Centurion is too focused on hacking and slashing to deliver original dialogue or interesting characters."

Yes. I like the other one you found on film four, which said "it's just a shame none of this stuff was thought through a little more carefully because there's a talented cast here who have been hung out to dry."

Yeah, that's very true, like there's there's a lot of talent in that cast.

Yeah.

Although I—I had some fun digging into these reviews. Roger Ebert, uh, good quote from him here: "most of the characters are so characterless that you can't tell who they are when they get impaled or beheaded, and you can't remember who they used to be after they're dispatched. Not that it matters."

Yeah. Like I said, the only character that is distinctive anyway is the cook who throws cleavers.

Yeah.

And then finally, it's also worth saying that Ebert has another great line when he's talking about the scene in which Quintus Dias and the other survivors encounter Arianne in the woods for the first time. What he says is, "you've seen this scene so many times before on these kinds of movies that you know exactly what happens, and it does. But even when we get near enough to the characters to recognize their physiognomy, they remain dramatically featureless."

And I do remember having that reaction the first time of like, this movie is so predictable. You know where everything's going. You know everything that's going to happen.

Yeah.

Before, like, it was just so there was nothing engaging about its outcome. There was no, like, uncertainty as to what was going to really happen in the end. And like—

It's just that Roger Ebert is able to articulate that view with a lot more snark.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't really recommend Centurion, but that's where we are. So, I mean, those criticisms aside, let's talk about how Centurion treats the theme of imperialism. And unfortunately, the treatment of imperialism is not that much better than its treatment of its characters. Now, it's worth saying here that the British, and the English in particular, have long had a complicated relationship with the Roman Empire and its history.

Right. So for one thing, in a lot of ways, the British saw the Romans as figurative ancestors, if you will, in the sense that the Romans were an imperial power, much like the British for a long stretch of their history fancied themselves an imperial power. We've touched a little bit about this in... Sorry, Emily just cracked up.

The British fancied themselves an imperial power.

We've touched about this a little bit in previous episodes, and here I'm thinking primarily of our episode on the life of Brian, where we talk a little bit about the what have the Romans ever done for us scene.

Which is as much about British power as it is about Roman power.

Yeah.

But interesting enough, there's also a literal connection between the British and the Romans that I don't know if most people know about. But Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in the 12th century writes a history called A History of the Kings of Britain. And in this, he traces the British people to refugees fleeing the sack of Troy, led by a man named Brutus, from whom the Britons take their name. And of course, this is the same kind of mythological origin story that the Romans have for themselves, right? Aeneas leading refugees fleeing the sack of Troy.

But even though you have these efforts to sort of draw parallels between the British and the Romans, the British Empire and the Roman Empire, in some sources, there's still a tendency to depict the Roman invasion of Britain as an overreach of some sort, driven mostly by greed and ambition.

What's interesting is that this idea also shows up in Geoffrey of Monmouth, right? That the invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar is this like greed-driven thing that's like not good.

Yeah, and what's kind of central to this version of the story is that the Romans are unable to fully master Britain, which sometimes gets imagined, incorrectly, I think, as the most dangerous or problematic frontier of the empire in a way that makes Britain somehow distinct.

Yeah, let's not talk about what happened in Mesopotamia.

Right. Anyway, these complications in how the English in particular see empire are fully visible in Centurion, which unfortunately I don't think really does much to address them in a particularly interesting way. So for example, to be fair, there is a superficial effort at least to recognize that the Roman conquest of Britain was violent. It entailed a lot of violence and upended the lives of lots and lots of people who were already living on the island.

So for example, we are told that the leader of the Picts, a character named Gorlacon, was a farmer until the Romans killed his wife, at which point he picked up the sword and became the Picts' most talented military leader.

And that's basically a direct quote from Centurion. So that's not us writing lame sentences. That's really lame dialogue. Likewise, we discover that the tracker, Etain, this woman who leads the Ninth Legion, into a trap, had also been traumatized by a Roman attack on her village. And that attack becomes the explanation both for why she's mute in the movie, she doesn't talk, we discover that her tongue was cut out, and also it becomes the explanation for why she's so determined to kill Romans, to take her revenge.

Yeah, I'm not going to put any sort of comment on there that like, one of the two female characters who get significant screen time is mute and can't talk and can't even tell us her story. So we don't actually know that that story is true.

Right, yes. It's something that we're told exclusively by Gorlacon.

Yeah. And at the same time, there is a kind of celebration in the film of the ruggedness of the British people. And this is captured really in particular in the way that the movie treats the landscape of Northern Britain, as I mentioned before, right? The movie is full of tons of like wide aerial shots of forbidding mountain landscapes, which are gorgeous and well shot. And this film was entirely filmed in the UK. And that's actually probably one of the highlights of the film is its landscapes.

Yeah. And what's funny here is that the Romans themselves are incapable of coping with this environment. So the Ninth Legion is easily ambushed as it's marching north. The survivors have a hard time escaping. And of course, the British antagonists themselves are depicted as just as forbidding and rugged as their landscape, perfectly capable of coping with these hardships that come close to defeating not just the Ninth Legion, but also our heroes.

Now, at the same time, in spite of this pro-British emphasis and emphasis on, you know, the negative sides of Roman occupation, there is also this celebration, perhaps even fetishization of Roman military culture.

Yeah, there are lots and lots of scenes of manly Romans doing manly things in their legionary bases. Things like drinking and arm wrestling and fighting and all that good stuff.

Even more so, or even more importantly, the movie clearly expects us to sympathize with the Roman soldiers trapped behind enemy lines, rather than with the people they're sent to conquer, who have, of course, entirely understandable reasons to be angry at the Romans and bent on revenge.

This is a conundrum for the movie, I guess, this effort to make the Romans seem sympathetic, even while the British have perfectly good reasons for resisting Roman power. And the way the movie attempts to sort of navigate through that conundrum is by portraying the Roman soldiers who get killed and hunted by the British as victims, in a way, of selfish and misguided Roman leadership. So the movie claims that the governor Agricola is basically angling to achieve some kind of victory that will elevate his own status at a very critical moment here, the first year of Hadrian's reign, when Agricola still has the freedom to sort of do what he wants.

And at the same time, Agricola orders this invasion against the advice of the commander of the Ninth Legion, who says it's a bad idea and it's pointless.

So we end up with a movie that seems to admire British resistance to the Romans, but which also can't really abandon the idea that the Romans are the heroes, or at least, you know, the Roman soldiers who do the actual fighting, even if they don't make the decisions.

Yeah. And ultimately, this just doesn't work. And that's partly because the movie doesn't really seem all that interested in the tensions with which it engages, but also because the Roman characters aren't really drawn with enough complexity to engage our interest.

Yeah, as we've noticed already, the only one who's really distinctive is the cook. And he's distinctive only because he throws cleavers. The movie does make some efforts to sort of humanize some of these characters, but they come too little too late, I guess. The most effective scene along those lines happens fairly late, and that's when Quintus Dias and two of the survivors from the ninth end up holed up in Arianne's place. You know, and she nurses them back to hell, she protects them and so on. And there are a couple of conversations there that actually show a human side to these Roman soldiers. But by that point, we don't really care.

Yeah. And then, of course, we end up with this kind of trite ending in which Quintus Dias and Arianne, you know, each reject both the British and the Roman worlds and like, shack up together and end of story. And it's an ending that doesn't really solve anything at all.

No, none of those fundamental tensions are resolved.

Yeah, it's just like, and story ends.

Yes. And that's it. That's Centurion. Let's talk about The Eagle. That's a better movie.

Yeah.

So The Eagle came out only a year later, actually. Came out in 2011. It was directed by Kevin MacDonald. And it's an adaptation of a historical adventure novel written for kids, a book called The Eagle of the Ninth, written way back in 1954 by the English author Rosemary Sutcliffe.

So the plot of the film follows a Roman centurion, Marcus Flavius Aquila, played by Channing Tatum, who hopes to redeem the family honor by serving nobly in Britain. His father had been a senior centurion, technically a primus pilus, who had disappeared with the Ninth Legion along with the Legion's eagle standard. Now, this disappearance happened 20 years earlier, just before Hadrian decided to build his famous wall. And the movie has a line about the eagle being lost, being particularly problematic. So eagle lost, honor lost, honor lost, all lost.

I mean, the movie is right in that the loss of the eagles was a big deal. You know, and most famously, Augustus got a lot—

After the Teutoburg Forest.

Well, I was going to say that, but also Augustus got a lot of mileage about getting eagles back from the Parthians.

Oh, that too.

Right, eagles that had been captured when the Parthians wiped out Crassus and his army back in the 50s.

Yeah, and then isn't it like, after Teutoburg Forest, for the rest of his life, Augustus would just occasionally shout, Varus, where are my eagles?

Yes, actually, where are my legions? Varus, give me back my legions.

Oh, give me back my legions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway.

Maybe Eagles is what's in I, Claudius.

That could be. I haven't watched I, Claudius in a while. Anyway, Marcus, who takes command of a garrison somewhere in England, ends up getting discharged from the army after he suffers a pretty serious wound during an attack on that garrison. His perceptiveness and decisiveness saved the garrison. He has a moment of what we might call reckless bravery, but alas, he's so grievously wounded that he can't carry on in his career as a soldier. and while recovering on the estate of his uncle Aquila, who's played here by Donald Sutherland, he hears rumors that the eagle captured from the Ninth Legion way back 20 years earlier has been spotted north of Hadrian's Wall. And at that point, he decides he will go and try to recover it with the help of only one other person, his enslaved attendant Esca.

Now Esca, who is played by Jamie Bell, is a member of the Brigantes, a British tribal confederacy based in what is now norhtern England. Esca had been sent to die in the amphitheater, but is spared at Marcus's instigation. And this is where the two characters first encounter each other. Now, just fun fact here, both of the leads, Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, got their big break in movies, in movies about dancing. So Channing Tatum sort of famously was in the movie Step Up, and Jamie Bell, his first role was as Billy Elliot in Billy Elliot.

Alas, not much dancing in this movie. This movie is a lot more grim.

Yeah, I feel like they missed opportunity there.

So Esca and Marcus head north. They cross through Hadrian's Wall, where they're told by the sentries on duty that they're basically crossing over the edge of the earth.

Yeah.

The edge of the known world. And they wander off into what is essentially now Scotland, where eventually they learn that some members of the Ninth survived the destruction of the Legion. And that the eagle had been captured by a group of people known as the seal people, who are characterized in the movie as the most vicious of the northern tribes. So our two intrepid heroes go looking for the seal people, and when they finally encounter them, Esca tells them that Marcus is actually his slave, a play that keeps them from getting killed in the moment, and that buys them time for the two of them to figure out what happened to the eagle, to find it, and to basically rescue it.

Yeah, although Esca does not tell Marcus that that's what he's doing, And so there is a tension there of like, has Esca betrayed Marcus? And, you know, what's going to happen? So they get the eagle and then they escape. Of course, they are pursued by the seal people. And there's a moment where Marcus's injury slows him down. And he doesn't feel like he can go on. And he tells Esca to keep going. And Esca says, I'm, you know, honor bound to stay with you. And so he frees Esca so that Esca can flee without him. But now having his freedom, Esca refuses to flee and abandon him. And instead, he runs off to get help, and he returns with the surviving members of the Ninth Legion who show up to defend the eagle and restore their honor by keeping it from being taken again.

Naturally, we then get a battle scene. The Seal People warriors catch up with Esca, Marcus, and the survivors of the Ninth. There's a fight, and that fight ends in the death of all of the Seal People warriors and most of the veterans of the Ninth. Marcus and Esca then head back across the wall and present the eagle to the Roman governor. The governor, as you might imagine, is amazed, and he hints that the emperor will want to reconstitute the Ninth and might even put Marcus in charge of it. But Marcus declines, and he and Esca leave together. And the final scene is basically Esca turning to Marcus and saying, so what next? To which Marcus replies, you decide.

Well, and I feel like, you know, the last shot of the movie is from behind them walking out the door together. And I feel like one thing like that scene is just missing is like them holding hands as they walk out the door together like you can almost feel the tension the moment of like both characters are having to just hold back from like holding hands as they go out the door. And weirdly enough there is actually an alternate ending that they decided not to go with where Marcus, rather than return the eagle to the governor, burns it, on the idea that the eagle belongs to the men who fought for it and they're dead and so the eagle, you know, deserves to be burned.

Yeah, you can tell in one of the scenes there where they're lighting the pyre that they filmed it in a way in which the eagle could be placed on it.

Yeah. And then in that film, like, it ends with Marcus and Esca approaching Hadrian's Wall from the north and, like, talking about the future. But that's not the ending we got.

But in either way, it ends with the will-they-won't-they couple moment, it sounds like.

Yeah, yeah. The platonic life mate vibe.

Yeah. So that's the movie. As far as we can tell, it does differ a little bit from the source material, Rosemary Sutcliffe's novel. And one obvious difference is that it's probably a little bit more violent than the original source material, which after all was a book for kids.

Yeah. The book does end with Marcus and Esca still together. But what happens is that, you know, Marcus decides to settle down on a farm in Britain with his British wife and with his buddy Esca.

But the other major difference, which we'll talk about a bit more as we sort of pick apart some of the themes of the movie, is that in the novel, the antagonists, the seal people, did not differ as radically from other British groups as they do in the film.

Yeah. And this term, the seal people, not to be confused with the sea people from the Odyssey discussion—

That's a totally different problem, yes.

Right. This idea of the seal people probably in it carries some implicit reference to Scottish myths of the Selkie who were like seal human shapeshifter figures, let's say.

Yeah, probably. But here in the movie, they're presented really as a pre-Celtic remnant, right? Part of the Neolithic population of Britain that existed before Celtic culture really came into the island.

And yeah, at the same time, they've like adopted some Celtic cultural elements, but they are fundamentally different on some level.

Yes.

And it seems pretty clear that the director modeled them, and he's even said as much, on Inuit and Native American tribes and kind of intended it as a sort of homage to a movie like Last of the Mohicans. The director has also mentioned that he used evidence from Neolithic sites in Scotland as inspiration for his seal people as well.

Yeah, it gets a little odd. And like I said, we'll probably dig into this in more detail in a couple of minutes.

Now, in addition to something like Last of the Mohicans, there were some other notable film references that I spotted when we were watching it. Movies like the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, Gladiator. Lots of sort of classic sword and sandals movies seem to get little moments in the film. Although one of the interesting differences between this and classic movies about Rome is that in this movie, Romans have American accents rather than upper-class British accents, and then the non-Roman characters in this movie have British accents.

Yeah, I don't remember any big kerfuffle here about ancient people speaking in American accents.

No, I don't either.

Nothing comparable to what just happened with The Odyssey.

No.

Anyway, this movie is just a lot more fun than Centurion was.

Yeah.

Centurion was just never-ending, grim, I don't know, pointless nonsense for the most part. This actually seems to have a bit of a plot, right? A plot that is more than one thing happens and another thing happens and another thing happens.

That is how all plots work?

Yes. Well, you know what I mean. It's not just a series of events in order. It's a series of events that are actually connected to one another.

There's like a narrative arc.

Yes, there are causes and consequences.

Yeah, and you do get some cool shots of their sort of imagining Hadrian's wall and the countryside, although I will say this film was not shot entirely in the UK. A lot of it was shot in Hungary, particularly the parts that are Scotland were shot in Hungary. But yeah, I enjoyed this movie a lot. I remember when we first watched it and I was like, is Channing Tatum up for this?

I mean, the answer is probably not, but it's okay.

Yeah, no, I think he does a fine job. You know, he is sharing the screen with some really talented actors. And, you know, he's at least holding his own.

Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment.

Yeah.

The actor who really steals the show is Mark Strong, who has a very small part as one of the survivors from the Ninth Legion. But he's a veteran British actor with like a zillion credits to his name.

Well, yeah. And like, I mean, Dennis O'Hare shows up. I mean, it's a really strong cast.

Yeah. And although the Rotten Tomatoes score for this movie is for some reason that I cannot comprehend at all somewhat lower than the overall crowd score for Centurion, at least the critics like this movie a lot better.

Yeah.

So for example, you know, Ebert gave it three stars out of four or whatever, and had some decent things to say about it. So among other things, he brings back the term rip-snorting. "The Eagle is a rip-snorting adventure tale of the sort made before CGI, 3D, and alphabet soup in general took the fun out of moviegoing. Here we see, for the most part, actual actors trekking through real locations instead of quasi-animation."

Yeah, and I think it gives the film a real tangible look, kind of in the way that we talked about with Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, right? That that texture that you get from really doing stuff and like that is something that Centurion doesn't have in the same way.

Not quite, which is weird, though, because a lot of that is on location, too, very much.

Yeah, but there's like really obvious CGI in it. Like the CGI in it is jarring.

Fair, yeah.

Yeah. And like this is an idea that carries through an Ebert's review about the tangibleness. Because things are live action, they have to be, you know, done on like a human scale. And he says this about the fight scenes, right? That "the editing is so rapid that we can't really follow the strategy of the swordplay, but at least a finite number of physical humans seem involved instead of the absurd tidal wave of warriors in a CGI-fest like 300."

Yeah, you could add Troy to that list too, right? Basically anything from that first decade of the 2000s.

Yeah, yeah. So that there's a realness to it.

Yeah. And as he said, "Tatum and Bell do a good job of sculpting the heroes to a fairly human scale and not indulging in foolish poses against the horizon." I'm not entirely sure what he's bashing there, but it's a funny quote.

It is a funny quote. And you kind of know what he's responding to there.

Yeah.

And I think the two main characters do do a good job of creating a sense of a bond between their two characters. So much so that at the end, yeah, I wanted them to walk out holding hands. It just felt like they had a tighter bond than just like, we're going to walk out side by side, like we haven't just been through this whole thing together.

I guess you could play this as sort of a prototype heated rivalry if you wanted to redraft it for the 2020s.

Guess which TV show we've been watching recently. Yeah, we're a little late to the program with that. Well, I'll note that Channing Tatum's character doesn't have a wife in this movie.

Well, nor does Jamie Bell's, as far as we can tell.

Well, but I don't think he has one in the book either.

Ah, okay. Ah, I see. The plot gets more complicated.

Yeah, I know. Anyhow. So let's talk about some of the things that we think make The Eagle a more interesting movie than Centurion. And one of them is the fact that The Eagle actually acknowledges that slavery was a thing that existed in the Roman world.

Wow, imagine that.

Right? So Esca enters the story as someone who has been enslaved, probably after being captured by the Romans in a battle, although the reason for his enslavement isn't explicitly stated anywhere.

Yeah, and actually the movie goes on to try to wrestle a little bit with the complicated nature of slavery and the kinds of relationships that could exist between the enslavers and the enslaved. So in one early scene, when Aquila, again played by Donald Sutherland, learns that Marcus wants to go looking for the eagle with no one to help him but Esca, he responds with a very Roman argument. What he says is that Marcus can't trust Esca if they go off alone, because coercion is basically the only thing that keeps Esca loyal. As Aquila says, "Esca's a slave. He says what he says and does what he does because he has to."

And this is a suspicion that Marcus does carry with him through much of the movie, both when he suspects that Esca isn't being an honest interpreter in conversations with the people they encounter north of the wall, who, of course, don't speak Latin and in the world of the film are speaking Gaelic, but also when he believes that Esca has sold him out to the seal people.

Right. And this is the movie's way of dealing with one of the most common ancient Roman beliefs about slavery and enslaved people. And that's the belief that an enslaved person was somebody with no honor, with no social worth, who by extension was also someone whose word couldn't be trusted.

Yeah. Now, Esca, however, has a very different opinion about who he is and his own character. He does not see himself as an enslaved person, despite what his status is, right? He makes it clear in an early scene that he sees himself as a warrior of the Brigantes, who is honor-bound to serve Marcus because Marcus saved his life in the arena, even though, as he tells Marcus, quote, "I hate everything you stand for and everything you are."

Now needless to say, that assessment of himself conflicts fundamentally with the Roman view that he's a person of no worth who has to do things only because he's forced to, only out of compulsion.

Yeah. And that conflict remains a persistent source of tension in the film at moments when Esca tries to honor what he sees as his obligation to serve Marcus, even though Marcus is being high-handed and suspicious or insisting on obedience from him.

And this only really gets resolved toward the end of the movie when Esca persuades Marcus to set him free. That fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between the two men and makes something like a friendship ultimately possible.

Yeah. So at the end, there can't really be any doubt that Esca's decision to help Marcus by rallying the survivors of the Ninth Legion and by fighting alongside him is his own choice and not one that's forced on him by the circumstances of slavery.

We can quibble with exactly how the relationship of enslaver to enslaved is presented here. But that said, the conflict between how Marcus sees Esca and how Esca sees himself really does become an interesting dynamic in a lot of ways. And among other things, it helps explain why Esca doesn't just side with the seal people immediately when he and Marcus encounter them at first, even though at this point in the narrative his sympathies probably lie mostly with the seal people as people who are trying to resist Roman power.

Yeah, it also makes the Esca character really interesting and compelling because there is this tension there and this conflict in him that he is trying to work through.

Yes.

And of course, there probably were real world parallels to this kind of situation, although, um, it was probably not the overwhelming majority of enslaved people who would feel honor bound to protect their enslavers to the same degree.

No, um, you know, this is a long running debate in scholarship. To what extent did enslaved people in the Roman world resist their enslavement on a regular basis? Yeah.

Well, in this case, right, there's this extra set of circumstances, which is that Esca was going to die in the arena had Marcus not, for reasons we don't really understand, jumped in and said, no, he should be saved and gets the crowd on his side and Esca is saved.

Yes, Esca is spared, yeah.

Right, and this is their first encounter, right, is that moment. So they do add this other element to help explain why Esca makes the choices he does.

Yeah. So anyway, like we said, the fact that this movie grapples with slavery at all puts it light years ahead of Centurion in terms of complexity. At the same time, the eagle is way more interested than Centurion in the whole question of imperialism and the tensions that the Roman conquest of Britain provoked. So for starters, you know, a title card at the beginning of the movie frames the story in the eagle as one that takes place in, quote, Roman-occupied Britain. And that way of referring to Britain inherently begs the question of whether or not the Roman presence there is justifiable, especially since, somewhat ahistorically, I guess, the movie runs with the idea that the Romans continue to face ongoing and heavy resistance, even in the southern parts of the island, in the 140s, which is when this story is set.

Yeah. Additionally, as we've mentioned before, the movie makes the choice to have the Roman characters speak with American accents, while the British characters either speak Gaelic, which of course is a stand-in for ancient British languages, or when they're meant to be speaking Latin, they speak with regional British accents. So for example, Jamie Bell, who plays Esca, is from Teesside, and he speaks in his own accent, which is a nice touch since the character he is playing is actually from that part of Britain as well.

Yeah, Teesside is basically between York and Newcastle, so right in the heart of the territory that was once dominated by the Brigantes.

Yeah.

So in an interview we read, director Kevin MacDonald explains this choice by saying that he wants to evoke the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, a decision which in and of itself seems designed to make the audience maybe somewhat uncomfortable with Roman presence in the island, or at least invite them to question whether or not the Romans should be there.

Yeah, I'll point out this was in 2011.

Yes.

But even if we set that aside, right, what the director was trying to do, the difference in the accents also draws a pretty clear and sharp distinction between the two different groups of characters. And so it does really emphasize the Roman presence on the island as foreign, alien, other.

And then finally, another really interesting thing about the eagle is that it allows some of its characters to mount a sustained criticism of Roman imperialism, again, on a level that just doesn't happen in Centurion. And this begins really early in the movie. So in one of the first scenes, a druid, quote unquote, leading a rebel army begins his attack on Marcus's fort with a fiery speech in which he makes a bunch of arguments, including the argument that the Romans have stolen the lands of the Britons, killed their sons, violated their daughters, all of that sort of stuff.

And then later, after Marcus and Esca cross the wall going north, they have a conversation in which Marcus attempts to explain what it is that the eagle represents to him. And he kind of ends by dismissively stating that, you know, Esca can't possibly understand.

Right, but this actually gives Esca the opportunity to talk about his own past. So he gives this story, and what he says is that his father was a war leader among the Brigantes, and that he and other war leaders rebelled when the land of the Brigantes was stolen by the Romans. So of course in this story, the Romans retaliate, they destroy Esca's village, kill his entire family, all that sort of stuff, and it's a really powerful speech.

Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's well done too. And then finally, we meet a survivor of the Ninth Legion, who is now going by the name of Guern, which is not his Roman name, right? He's dropped his Roman name and now going by like a local name. And he's basically, you know, gone native in Northern Britain. And this is the character that we mentioned earlier, who's played by Mark Strong. And he gives a speech in which he basically attacks Roman imperialism using the language of excess. Why did the Romans need more? Why couldn't they be happy what they had? So on and so on. And right, you get the sort of disillusioned Roman legionary's take on Roman imperial power of like, what was I doing? What was I doing this for? Why were we doing this? And it's a really compelling, just, well, one of the best speeches in the movie.

In part because it's delivered by Mark Strong.

Well, yes, in part because it's, yes.

Who knows how to sell a scene for sure.

Yes, he does.

Yeah. So you've got these moments in which the movie is really leaning into a critique of Roman imperialism in a powerful way. But what's kind of frustrating, I guess, on some level is that these decisions in the film about how to deal with Roman imperialism sit kind of uncomfortably alongside another decision the movie makes, another one we've already mentioned. And that's the decision to depict the north of Britain as a wild and inhospitable place, and the people who live there, the film's ultimate antagonists, the seal people, as equally wild and inhospitable, I guess, if you will, a stone-aged indigenous culture that is in some sense primitive.

Yeah, basically backwards and uncivilized. So, for example, in contrast to both the Romans and the other Britons, the seal people dress almost exclusively in fur. They use weapons and tools that are made of wood and or stone rather than metal. They paint themselves like head to toe in mud of some sort as some kind of war paint. They decorate themselves with animal bones, and they seem to subsist on fish that they catch and dry rather than agriculture. Granted, this does make for some interesting visuals to see the fish drying on racks.

Yeah, some of the aesthetic choices are actually really interesting, just from a visual standpoint. And on another level, you can see how the decision to depict the seal people in this way could amplify some of the other points about imperialism the movie makes. Because in theory, you could use it to make a case that, you know, empires come in and they basically destroy or assimilate the cultures that exist in the regions that they're colonizing, much like the European cultures did, for instance, in North America.

But because the film wants Marcus and Esca to be the good guys, it also needs to establish the seal people as clear antagonists. And it does so with a sequence of events in which Esca develops a relationship with a boy who happens to be the son of the seal people's war leader, and in which ultimately the war leader ends up killing the child, that is his own son, because he believes that the boy has betrayed him by allowing Esca and Marcus to escape.

Yeah, and the effect here is that the movie veers straight into the noble savage stereotype. On the one hand, the seal people are interesting. They have this complex culture, even though they're using primitive tools and so on. But on the other hand, in this moment where the war leader kills his son, they're definitely portrayed as savages, as uncivilized in all of the bad ways that you can imagine that word being used. And I'm not entirely sure that was the intent, but that's definitely how it reads at this moment in the film.

I mean, it's interesting, right? Because if, you know, MacDonald is modeling this to a certain extent on Last of the Mohicans, which of course, the book was written by James Fenmore Cooper, who is really like the touchstone writer for giving us this stereotype of the noble savage.

Yeah.

So it might be inherent in some of the kind of source material that he's drawing on, even if it's not conscious.

Yeah.

And of course, doing this, right, making the seal people just like—

Oh, they're bad.

Full-on villains in this way, r eally does weaken what is otherwise an interesting aspect of Esca's character, right? Which is his sympathy for other non-Roman characters. Which, of course, when the seal people leader kills his son, right, that sympathy is now gone for Esca. And when that's gone, right, the possibility that that sympathy might affect his relationship with Marcus is now kind of no longer operable either.

Yeah, he's no longer potentially interested in resisting Roman power for whatever reason at that moment.

Yeah, yeah.

So for that reason, the conclusion of the movie ends up being a bit jarring. Because it's almost like the movie, like Centurion, wants to celebrate British resistance to the Romans to some extent, but also can't abandon this idea that the Romans are the heroes. At least in the case of Marcus in this particular film.

Yeah. And to a certain extent, you also get a similar idea of like Roman and Britain sort of going off together. Although in the case of Marcus and Esca, they're not like leaving society behind. They're just like forging their own route, whatever it's going to be.

Yeah, it's a weird ending. I mean, Marcus definitely sort of turns his back, literally and figuratively, on the Romans.

Yeah, that is true.

And walks away. So, you know, it maybe has more parallels with Centurion.

But they're not wanting a way to like live in the woods outside of society entirely.

Yes, we don't know exactly what they're going to do. Yeah.

It's like there's going to be like buddy adventures.

Yeah, buddy adventures. I mean, you know, that might have made a good sequel. I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, in the end, it means there's like no real resolution to this fundamental tension caused by Roman imperialism.

Right.

Other than Marcus and Esca somehow seem to have...

Gotten past the whole problem of imperialism.

Gotten past it or like found a human connection that for them is now more important than these other issues.

Yeah, so a little bit of a letdown, but still, once again, this movie actually engages with ideas.

Yeah, and it says something that at the end, Marcus also defers to Esca, right? And there's a lot in that moment as well of letting Esca take the lead, which could be seen as sort of Roman power yielding to local power.

Could be, yes.

You think I'm overreading it?

I don't think you're overreading it, necessarily. I think I'm reacting to the idea itself, which is not your idea, right? This is the way the movie is trying to spin things.

I liked the ending, even if it doesn't resolve this stuff. But the ending, maybe the ending really just speaks to the lack of resolution to this kind of problem.

Could be, yes. Right, so there you have it, our take on two movies that are connected, albeit in very loose ways, to what we've been talking about for the past few episodes, which is Hadrian.

And Hadrian's Wall.

And Hadrian's Wall. That's a callback to a series of episodes that we did a few weeks ago now, I guess, maybe even a few months ago, right?

Dude, it was a few months ago.

All right. How time flies.

Not a few weeks ago.

Yeah. So I think we're going to take a break from Hadrian, definitely, at this point.

Yes, yes.

We're probably also going to take a break from the Romans and do something Greek for the next few episodes. Although, to be honest, we haven't exactly sorted out what the next episode is going to be about yet.

No, we're, yes.

Life has been busy.

Life has been busy and we've got a lot of ideas. And so.

So our next episode will be a surprise to you as well as to us. So we've all got that collectively to look forward to. Shall we close out?

So I guess that's all for today.

I guess so.

I've been Emily.

I'm Cam.

And this has been Have Toga, Will Travel. Subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And you can follow us at havetogawilltravel.com or on all the socials.

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