I love ancient history. The things that people have done is just freakin incredible! Right now I'm reading about the Greek and Persian war. 300 spartans held off an army of possibly a million men in a mountain pass. When told that the Persian arrows would blot out the sun they replied that they would then fight in the shade! Smurfing incredible.
Then there was Alexander the Great taking a small army from an obscure mountain nation to conquer the world's superpower. He went all the way from Macedonia to all the way to the Indus river near India!
And Hannibal crossing the Alps with Elephants to whoop the Romans. And Julius Ceaser using a tiny army to conquer all of Gaul and making himself dictator in the process.
The world was just huge back then and men did big things on a regular basis. Fiction can just not even begin to compare to real life in the ancient world.