The Eagle: The Relevance Of The Ninth Legion

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In the Eagle, the disappearance of the Ninth Legion gives a fictional character, Lucious Flavious, the undying fire to find the missing legion and eagle. His drive for finding lost legion was for his father and his family’s honor. He struggles with the lack of support from Emperor Hadrian and his leading officials. Flavious set off to be a general of an army in Britain so that he could be stationed near the location of where the Ninth Legion disappeared under his father’s rule. Shortly after, a crazed Druid and his barbarian tribe bombarded Flavious and his army. Flavious was injured badly in this battle and was sent to his uncle to heal. He was relieved from the army with an honorary discharge. He then takes his uncle’s servant, Esca, with …show more content…

The movie gave a false representation of historical facts regarding chariots, time periods, tribes, apparel, characters, location and even the overall history of the Ninth Legion. First, the Eagle represents war chariots as a fully loaded combat machine with spinning blades firing from the sides. However, in reality, chariots were just carts on two wheels pulled by horses. The chariot was only to carry the higher end warriors during battle. The warrior was the one who did the fighting, not the chariot. Most warriors would actually leave their chariots soon after the fighting began. The chariots were not used for extreme combat weapons, but merely for transportation. Another major inaccuracy the movie got by with was the time frame of the missing Ninth Legion. The movie depicts their disappearance around A.D 140. However, the last piece of evidence of the Ninth Legion was earlier in the A.D one hundreds. The last known location of the Ninth Legion was in York dated in A.D 108. That is thirty-two year difference in the time period that the movie depicted. Time is a very important factor when it comes to history because a lot of social and political changes occur throughout small gaps of …show more content…

In the Eagle, the movie was shot in Scotland and Hungary. The movie setting was shown to be in Rome and the outskirts of Britain. However, the last documented location of the Ninth Legion was in York. The Ninth Legion did enter a battle in Britain, however that was not the last that was seen of the Ninth Legion. Also, even though the movie did well on exhibiting some of the ancient Roman attire, some of the apparel was not accurate regarding historical findings. For example, in the movie Flavious wore a breastplate with an abdominal six pack plastered to the outside. Also, the armor and clothing in the movie was brown in color. The Roman apparel in this time period actually wore armor with solid breastplates and the traditional colors of their equipment were red and an off

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