This is the third part of the fourth part of our four(ish)1 part (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) look at the how the Roman military system and its manipular legion were able to defeat the Hellenistic military system and its Macedonian sarisa phalanx in the third and second centuries BC. Last time, we looked at the largest of the great Roman wars against the Hellenistic successor states, the Roman-Seleucid War (192-188) and the decisive action of that war, the Battle of Magnesia (190). We concluded that, once again, the Romans seem to have a clear tactical edge, but what makes that so catastrophically decisive against Antiochus III’s Seleucid Empire were Roman advantages in naval warfare and allies as well as the “remarkable Seleucid glass jaw.”
This week, we’re looking at the last of the major wars that Rome fights against the Hellenistic ‘great powers,’ the Third Macedonian War (171-168), leading to the decisive Battle of Pydna in 168, after which the Romans, for the first time, simply abolish one of the successors of Alexander. At the same time, as we’ll see, the Roman Republic is able to immediately put the deterrence power of that victory to work forcing an end to the Sixth Syrian War (170-168) between the Seleucid Empire and the Ptolemaic Kingdom and in the process setting the Seleucids on their long road to decline while dramatically asserting Roman hegemony across the eastern Mediterranean.
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The Background
You will recall that after the Second Macedonian War (200-197), the Romans had opted to prune the Antigonid kingdom of Macedon but not fully uproot it: Philip V (r. 221-179) was left in power, but Macedonian control over Greece was ended (in favor of a looser but still quite real Roman hegemony), with Philip’s kingdom largely pruned back to Macedon proper. The peace also limited Philip V to a 5,000 man army and a token navy.
That limited army and the need not to anger Rome meant that Antigonid ambitions would have to be curtailed for a time, but it is clear that Philip V was not idle. On the one hand, he supported Roman military operations in the region (particularly in the Roman-Seleucid War) as a means of avoiding further Roman intervention in the region. One may read his support for Rome against Antiochus III in particular as a bid to remove Rome’s excuse for remaining heavily involved in his own backyard. Meanwhile, Philip V appears to have turned inward towards what strength Macedon proper could provide. Livy (39.24) reports that Philip V expanded state revenues from agriculture, trade and mining, while both encouraging natural population growth but also moving substantial numbers of Thracians into his kingdom to provide for more manpower. The irony then is that this reduced Antigonid state will meet Rome with greater financial resources and more men than the much larger Antigonid state of the late 200s.
Philip V dies in 179 and is succeeded by his son, Perseus. Perseus himself seems to have been anti-Roman in outlook, in contrast to his brother Demetrius, who had been held as a hostage in Rome and seems to have been much more pro-Roman in outlook (e.g. Livy 39.53.1-6). We’re told that Perseus, fearing that when his father died the Romans would supplant him with the more pliant Demetrius, schemed to incriminate him in a plot against Philip V in the last years of his reign and have him killed, thus clearing the way for Perseus to take the throne without opposition.
Relations between Perseus and Rome seem to have soured fairly quickly. Livy, our main source for this, presents Perseus as implacably anti-Roman, having plotted since before he was king to fight Rome (Livy 42.5.1) and so when he becomes king began preparing to do so. In practice, Perseus, it seems to me, was of a similar mind to the other Hellenistic rulers of this day, especially Antiochus IV (r. 175-164). Remember that by this point the successors of Alexander had been fighting over his empire for a century and a half, with variable fortunes. In that context, it was reasonable to suppose that Rome was just one more contestant in the ring, whose fortunes would rise and then fall. Consequently, a few decades after Rome’s great victory, with a renewed kingdom, it made sense to begin attempting to reestablish the Antigonid position, the same way Antiochus IV was, at this very moment, reestablishing the Seleucid position and would soon attempt a renewed conquest of Egypt.
What may have actually set Demetrius apart – though our sources give no indication of this, so take this as the pure speculation that it is – was that, having been in Rome, he might have been a bit more aware of the degree to which the Roman Republic was a different creature than the Hellenistic kingdoms. After all, being in Rome, first as a hostage and later as a diplomat, he couldn’t have been unaware of how many other wars Rome was waging, almost continuously in this period. and how substantial the military forces Rome kept continuously deployed. After all, in the last ten years of Philip V’s reign (so from 189 to 179), Roman annual deployments never slip below about 110,000 men in any year. By contrast, the Antigonids will never deploy more than about 50,000 at any point in their history. But that massive disconnect might simply not have been obvious for an eastern Mediterranean state which might, understandably, be ill-informed about the seemingly endless Roman wars in Spain, Northern Italy and Gaul.2
Meanwhile, agitating for renewed war in the region was Eumenes II of Pergamum – the fellow who won on the Roman wing at Magnesia – who clearly saw a resurgent Antigonid Kingdom as a threat and also stood potentially to gain at the expense of Perseus by greater Roman involvement. Seizing on the fact that Perseus seemed to be wooing the Greek poleis to resistance to Rome (which he was), Eumenes came to Rome in person (or perhaps he sent his brother, though Livy thinks it was Eumenes, Livy 42.11.1) to claim that Perseus was preparing for war. Perseus’ own embassy, predictably, denied the charge but got little hearing, in part because they didn’t seem particularly afraid to risk a war if it came to it (Livy 42.14.2-4). Interestingly, a number of Greek states, fearing that Eumenes rather than Perseus, might use a war to establish his control of the region, appealed to the Romans in the opposite direction, but succeeded mostly in irritating the Senate for abusing such a stalwart Roman ally in their speeches (Livy 42.14.9-10). As a result, late in 172 the Romans move for war against Perseus and the Third Macedonian War begins.
Armies and Allies
Perseus responds to the Roman declaration of war by assembling his own army at Citium (in Macedon, not the Citium on Cyprus) and Livy provides a report of the forces he assembled there (Livy 42.51). Michael Taylor breaks down the numbers3 – which require a touch of interpretation due to the way Livy presents them – as consisting of 21,000 Macedonian phalangites, 5,000 Macedonian peltasts (elite heavy infantry, not skirmishers – the 2,000 man royal guard, the agema is drawn from this number), 3,000 Macedonian cavalry, 3,000 Paeonians and Agrianians (probably light infantry), 2,000 Gauls (medium infantry), 3,000 ‘free Thracians’ and 1,000 Odrysian Thracians (medium infantry) along with 1,000 Odrysian cavalry, 3,000 Cretans (missile troops), 500 Aetolians and Boeotians (thureophoroi?) and probably another 500 Greek mercenaries (thureophoroi?) because that is what makes the numbers add up. All told, a force of 39,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry and the strongest army that Macedon proper had marshaled since Alexander. Perseus’ alliance with Cotys IV, king of the Odrysians – the largest polity in Thrace – clearly pays off here, but beyond that most of his troops seem to be mercenaries rather than the product of robust local alliances. Notably, for all of the effort Perseus had spent courting the Greeks in the years before this, he gets very little in the way of useful military force from them and one imagines he probably had to ‘overpay’ for what meager Greek troops he did get.
Clearly, Philip V and Perseus’ efforts to strengthen the core Antigonid realm had succeeded, though it is also worth noting that another reason for this relatively large mobilization was actually defeat: the loss of territory in the Second Macedonian War had freed the Antigonid state from the need to garrison those areas. The fact that this increases the effective military power of the state speaks to the limited degree to which the Antigonid kingdom could really have ever drawn military force from many of its conquests. Unlike the Romans in Italy, who had a very effective system for converting conquered peoples into military force, the Antigonids never quite figured out how to turn their control of Greece into a military asset instead of a military liability. To be fair, the Romans also make no attempt to draw meaningful military force out of Greece, leading one to assume that the fractious nature of the Greek poleis and federal leagues, as well as their relative military weakness might have meant that effectively any attempt to actually draw military force out of Greece in this period was likely to be counter-productive.
Such an army was clearly formidable, though as we’ll see, Perseus never quite gets all of it on to the field at any one point. On the other hand, the Romans for the year 171 are deployed as follows: Of the consuls, Gaius Cassius Longinus was assigned Italy as his province and spent most of the year bashing up the Gauls in Cisalpine Gaul (the Senate has to stop him from trying to invade Macedonia through Illyria), while Publius Licinius Crassus (Publius, not Marcus) is assigned the province of Macedonia. Of the praetors, C. Caninius Rebilus is in Sicily, L. Canuleius Dives is in Spain, L. Furius Philus is in Sardinia and C. Lucretius Gallus is assigned the fleet to support operations against Macedonia. We also have a few brief pro-magistrate holdovers from the previous year in Spain and Greece, mostly holding until the new magistrates could arrive to release them. All told, the Romans have ten legions under arms in the year, for a rough count of 110,000 soldiers, of whom only 12,600 Romans and 16,800 socii (29,400 total, 1,400 of which were cavalry, the rest infantry) were bound for Macedonia. To stiffen this force, the Senate also permits Crassus to enroll older veteran soldiers and centurions and to appoint (rather than elect) their military tribunes, presumably also to get experienced men in the roles (Livy 42.31.4-5).
From that figure, the immediate strategic problem, which it is not clear if Perseus understood, should be obvious. That Roman army will require Perseus’ whole, undivided attention in order to stop (though he does handily outnumber it if he can concentrate his whole army at a point), but it represents less than a third of Rome’s total military commitments for the year – and a year that, while it wasn’t a low activity year, was also nowhere near a Roman maximum effort either. And the small seeming Roman army could also, of course, count on reinforcements from allies in the region. Chief among these, of course, was Eumenes II of Pergamum, but the Romans also could expect at least some military assistance from both the Achaean and Aetolian Leagues, as well as from the Thessalians (who had been removed from Antigonid control by the Romans in the Second Macedonian War), though it is clear that political sympathies among the Greeks were split.
Consequently, the Romans could pressure Perseus at this level of military engagement effectively forever if they had to. Roman command of the sea – which Perseus was entirely unable to challenge – meant that Roman armies could be brought from Italy into Greece via Apollonia and Perseus could do nothing to stop them. Yet Perseus does not appear anxious to avoid a war with Rome in the run-up to hostilities but is content to adopt a largely defensive strategy, which suggests that he seems to have thought he could win on the defensive, perhaps exhausting Roman efforts, and perhaps in the process reassert the previously dominant Antigonid position in Greece.
Callinicus
Like the Second Macedonian War, this war is one where a lot of the maneuvers are defined by the problems created by the mountainous topography of the region, however the area of operations has shifted and so we are concerned with different mountains and passes than before. Whereas the problem in the Second Macedonian War had been how to break through the mountains separating the Adriatic coast (and the Roman port at Apollonia) from Thessaly, for the Third Macedonian War, the Romans start with a foothold in Thessaly (the cities of which were nominally independent) and the question is how to slip past Mt. Olympus into Macedon-proper from northern Thessaly, though of course before they can do this the Romans will first have to secure northern Thessaly as a jumping-off point.
Military operations begin in earnest in 171. Crassus moves his army successfully across the Adriatic to Apollonia, then cuts through the mountains to break out into the open plains of Thessaly, making his camp a short distance off from Larissa, the chief city of the region. Perseus, meanwhile, had moved south out of Macedon into northern Thessaly and proceeded to secure the northern part of the region, negotiating the surrender of some towns and assaulting others in a series of actions probably meant to secure the approaches to the passes that led up to Macedon and perhaps secure his own base of supply for operations in Thessaly, as Perseus seems, at this point, to have intended to try the Romans in pitched battle in Thessaly. This accomplished, Perseus attempts to draw the Romans out with some raiding and foraging, which succeeds in getting Crassus to move his camp up to Larissa in central Thessaly, as previously mentioned. Larissa sits on the Peneus River which cuts across Thessaly west-to-east, and at this point effectively divides the zones of Roman control, south of the river, and Macedonian control north of it (all of these actions are Livy 42.53-55).
That sets the stage for the first significant battle of the war, the Battle of Callinicus (171), effectively an overgrown skirmish. Perseus moves his army in force towards Larissa, evidently knowing the Romans’ general position but not fully informed of their strength or precise disposition (Livy 42.57.8) but clearly looking to provoke at least a skirmish if not a general engagement. A minor and brief skirmish ensues on contact, but evidently not the larger battle Perseus hoped for and so Perseus begins deploying his cavalry and light infantry in the same area each day, hoping to draw the Roman cavalry and light infantry into a fight; Crassus in turn refused the engagements, deploying his own light troops and cavalry but not engaging, in a rather un-Roman-like turn (Livy 42.57.9-12).
Perseus now springs a rather clever trap. Having lulled the Romans with the apparent consistency of his deployments, he moves his camp forward much closer to the Roman camp and moves his troops out earlier than usual, occupying a hill near the Roman camp called Callinicus (thus the name of the battle) before the Romans were prepared to meet him. Crassus now responded by deploying his own cavalry and light troops, though both armies kept their heavy infantry back (the Roman infantry deployed on the ramparts to defend the camp, if necessary). The Roman force was a mix, with Roman and socii cavalry and light troops (including the socii cavalry extraordinarii, a picked group of elite cavalry drawn from the socii), along with Greek allies, with Eumenes’ Pergamese cavalry in reserve.
After an initial exchange of missiles (Livy 42.59.1), Perseus’ Thracian cavalry charged the Roman right wing and disrupted the socii cavalry deployed there, but didn’t yet chase them off (Livy 42.59.2-3), and then Perseus himself hammered the center of the Roman position, scattering Rome’s Greek allies (this passage is a bit odd, because Livy put the Greek allies not in the center, but on the left, 42.58.12 and one wonders if perhaps he – or his sources – is doing a bit of patriotic cover for the failure of the socii extraordinarii in the center failing to hold their ground). While the southern Greeks evidently fall apart, the Thessalians – long famed for having the best cavalry in Greek – managed a fighting withdrawal, grouping up with Eumenes’ reserve (Livy 42.59.5-6). At this point, Perseus’ heavy infantry begins to come up and the king apparently considers making a general attack, but is persuaded not to, instead withdrawing having inflicted quite a bit more damage on the Romans than he took in return (Livy 42.59.8-11).
Roman losses were sharp, with 200 cavalry and 2,000 light infantry lost in the skirmish and another 600 captured, to Perseus’ losses of only 60 (Livy 42.60.1); Crassus responded by retreating across the Peneus and the morale of his army soured, as you might imagine, with bitter recriminations (mostly at the Aetolians, who fled first) in the council of war. Perseus then attempts to negotiate a peace, which the Romans refuse; that Perseus and his councillors thought the Romans might be moved to peace with such a tiny skirmish, I think, reflects a failure to understand both the Roman strategic position and also the Roman mentality. For Rome to back down at this point would mean largely surrendering their position in the Eastern Mediterranean and giving other rulers, like the restive Antiochus IV (soon to start his own war against Egypt) a green-light. The Romans would hardly accept such strategic losses because of such a mild bloody-nose and so it is strikingly odd that Perseus and his advisors thought such negotiations might work (Livy 42.62.6-7).
What follows this is a bit of frustration in our sources. The Romans engage in foraging operations, while Perseus moves his camp forward to Mopselus to harass them, with Perseus managing to ambush some of the foraging operations with a small force (Livy 42.65.2-6), which then again leads to a potentially larger engagement. What Livy then reports is first, in his own voice, that Perseus gets the advantage in the skirmish but is too late to bring up his phalanx, leading to a brief engagement primarily of light troops in which Perseus takes just 324 losses, after which Perseus, unable to get his disordered phalanx into fighting formation in time, instead withdraws (Livy 42.66.5-8) and Crassus, “content with his modest success” (contentus modico successu; this is not a compliment) lets them. Then Livy notes that “there are those who affirm that there was a great battle on that day, that eight thousand enemies were killed, among whom were the king’s officers Sopater and Antipater; that around 2,800 were captured alive and 27 military standards were captured. Nor was it a bloodless victory, more than 4,300 of the consul’s army were slain and five standards belonging to the left wing were lost.”4
What Livy is signalling with that, “there are those who say that…” opening is that he doesn’t believe them and frankly, I don’t either. While Livy doesn’t name those sources, one quite immediately suspects the Late Annalistic tradition (e.g. Valerias Antias) and that the situation Livy is in is that his preferred source (Polybius) has reported merely a skirmish, while his other sources (the annalistic ones) have reported a big battle. Livy thus concludes that the late annalistic sources have invented a victory, perhaps as a patriotic cover for the embarrassment at Callinicus, when in fact the fight was much smaller. I am inclined to agree with Livy’s judgement – Polybius is unlikely to have left out such a major battle (the Polybius for this period is lost to us) and Livy is unlikely to have expressed such skepticism about Polybius’ report. More to the point, Perseus’ actions immediately following this don’t imply the kind of retreat that a battle with 8,000 casualties would create.
Instead, Perseus stays at his camp at Mopselus for a few days (Livy 42.67.1), then moves back into Macedon, dispersing his army into winter quarters (at home, where supplies would be secure); he also releases Cotys IV and his Thracians to head home to deal with problems being stirred up by some of Eumenes II’s forces in Thrace. This is not the action of a king retreating to his kingdom after a sore defeat and potentially facing pursuit, but of one who had tried to pull the Romans into a major battle on favorable grounds, hadn’t quite managed it and had exhausted the campaigning season. Crassus, attempting to salvage something, anything, from a dismal year, attempts to seize the town of Gonnus, which guarded the approach to the Vale of Tempe, the main route into Macedonia (to which we will, in a moment return). Crassus is unable to take the town, but secures a few other minor towns in northern Thessaly (Livy 42.67.6-8), but accomplishes little otherwise, aside from pillaging some Greek towns so unnecessarily that the Senate later ordered the captives restored (Livy Per. 43.2-3). It will thus not surprise you to learn that he is not retained in command the following year.
Getting Into Macedon
Instead, the Roman command for 170 goes to Aulus Hostilius Mancinus.5 We’re less well informed about the actions in 170, because book 43 of Livy, which would have told us about it, isn’t entirely complete and so Livy’s narrative here is mostly missing. In practice, the Roman problem, now that Thessaly was largely secured, was getting into Macedon proper to force Perseus into battle. That effort, in turn, had one particular obstacle, namely that Mount Olympus was in the way, which is a pretty decent obstacle, all things considered.
One again, I am leaning quite hard on J.N. Morton’s dissertation, “Shifting Landscapes, Policies and Morals: a Topographically Driven Analysis of the Roman Wars in Greece from 200 BC to 168 BC” (2017), because the problems the Romans face in 170 and 169 are fundamentally topographical in nature. Some maps here are necessary to understand the issue. I am quite bad at maps, but here I will try my best; there are better maps in Morton’s dissertation, which you can find with a bit of googling. Let’s start with the big picture here:
And you can begin to see the problem, in that the Romans have to get from Thessaly over some fairly formidable mountains to get into Macedon, no matter what direction they go. Moreover, while Thessaly was a agriculturally rich country which could easily supply Roman armies, the moment those armies move out of central Thessaly, they’re moving off of their supply bases and into more thinly populated regions, until they reach the open plains of Macedon, where they could resupply by foraging or by bringing in grain via ship through one of the ports there. But, as you may note, the straight line route from Thessaly to Macedon passes directly over Mount Olympus, the tallest mountain in Greece. Moreoever, the goal here is that southern spur of Macedon, called Pieria, which in turn bottlenecks repeatedly on the way up the coastal road, with the northernmost bottleneck, Pydna, marked here.
As we zoom in, Roman options narrow even further. We can dispense first with the options not taken. The most direct route would be via the Vale of Tempe, following today what is the E75 to the coast, from where one could simply follow the coastal plain up into that southern spur of Macedonia (which is called Pieria). The problem is precisely that this route is obvious and the Tempe Pass cut by the Peneus River is both really narrow at points and also well-blocked by Macedonian garrisons. Alternately, you could try to get cute and move through Epirus, bypassing Thessaly and instead trekking through the central Pindus mountains to surprise the Macedonians from the west. But the Illyrians and Epirotes on the route aren’t particularly friendly and the terrain for that kind of effort is unfavorable. That leaves essentially two options: you can take the pass on the north side of Olympus, or the pass on the south side of Olympus. Finally, you could head straight north to Elimea (where Lake Polyfyto is now), more or less following the route of the GR-3/E65 to get out of Thessaly, but then you have simply delayed the problem of where and how to descend into the Macedonian plain. This route is considered by the Romans, and Mancinus may have attempted it, to no avail. That leaves just two options:
You can go north around Mt. Olympus, through the Petra pass; this terrain here is the most challenging, but it drops out out cleanly into central Pieria, potentially behind Perseus. The more tempting route is the Lake Ascuris (now drained, but at the time, there was a lake) Pass, which drops you off at the southern end of Pieria, just above the top of the Tempe Vale, but terrain here, while not as bad as the Petra pass, is not good. Both routes now feature paved roads, but at this early point, for a Roman army with limited local knowledge, either route is going to require local guides to avoid getting lost as one moves through the passes over the mountains. Perseus, meanwhile, can base his army between the two passes, post garrisons on the passes and lookouts on the hills and wait to see which one the Romans try to take and then block them, all while the Romans’ supply ‘timer’ is running down because, remember, they’ve moved out of central Thessaly and its rich supply areas to do this, and don’t have easy access to a coast to naval resupply. And this is exactly what Perseus does.
As mentioned, we’re not well informed about the campaigns of 170. Aulus Hostilius Mancinus seems to have skirmished unsuccessfully in Thessaly with Perseus before trying that northern route through Elimeia but Perseus seems to have anticipated his movements and the year ends with the Romans back in Thessaly and Perseus back in Macedon. We’re better informed about 169. Mancinus’ year ends and he is replaced by Quintus Marcius Philippus, a senior Roman politicians (he had been consul before, in 186) but a checkered war record who then has to navigate this problem. He considers three routes in his council of war: the northern route, the Petra pass and the southern route past Lake Ascuris and repeating Mancinus’ route through Elimeia, aiming to keep some optionality, loads up on a month’s worth of supplies and heads into the Perrhaebia (that northern-most spur of Thessaly), where he could conceivably take any of the routes. Perseus responds by guarding all three of the routes, splitting his army in four (one garrison for each route, plus a core force Perseus keeps with himself to reinforce whichever direction the Romans go).
Philippus ends up attempting the southern route, past the now-drained Lake Ascuris, aiming to drop out north of the Vale of Tempe. Philippus gets himself into some trouble in the passes – while both generals are working without exact knowledge of the other, Perseus seems to have guessed Philippus’ route, as he defended it the most heavily – but manages to get himself out and descends into Pieria, having lost a fair bit of time.
Perseus, his army currently divided, pulls back, retreating with his army and much of the food supply to Pydna, the northernmost bottleneck. But Philippus also has a serious problem: supplies. Morton (op. cit.) tallies the days, but in essence it took Philippus a bit over ten days to get to the Lake Ascuris pass, and then another roughly ten days to get through them, with a lot of time wasted in skirmishing and dealing with the Macedonian force there. So when he drops into the Pieria, he has a fairly limited food supply (as, you will recall, he loaded up a month’s supply, which is quite a lot). Philippus, for all that effort, ends up with just enough time to secure his route out by taking Heracleum – the southern bottleneck between the Pieria and the Tempe Vale – and then heads back to Thessaly to resupply and wait out the winter. Another campaign that had mostly fizzled out and Perseus reasserts control over the Pieria, rebasing to Phila at its southern end (just south of Heracleum, for those keeping track of places).
In fact, as Livy notes (44.6.3), the Romans had largely avoided disaster because of Perseus’ panic when Philippus finally gets through the mountains. Had Perseus simply gathered his army and tried to hold his garrisons, Philippus would have rapidly run out of food still trapped between Perseus (in the central Pieria) and the Macedonian garrisons in Heracleum and the Vale of Tempe. Perseus could have ‘bagged’ an entire Roman army here, but loses his nerve and misses his chance.
And if you are thinking, “wait, so Perseus loses his nerve and misses his chance for a major victory at Callinicus, and then again skirmishing later that year, and again now – is this going to be a thing with Perseus?” Yes. It is.
In any case, the Romans are not impressed by Philippus spending the season blundering through a pass, nearly running out of food and ending up mostly back where he started, so he too is not retained in command, with the new consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus assigned the job, although it will take him some time to get to the theater from Rome.
Paullus has at least some advantages: the route through Tempe is now clear, so when he arrives and takes up command of the army (reinforced, as we’ll see in a moment), he can move through the Vale directly to Phila, meaning we’re now concerned not with the passes but rather with the bottlenecks of Pieria.
As Paullus moves to Philia, Perseus opts to drop back to the Elpeus River, near Dion, where he constructs a fort on the banks that evidently was quite formidable (Livy 44.32.6-10; Plut. Aem. 13.5). And it is worth pausing here for a moment to try to assess Perseus’ plan in all of this. I think it is fairly clear at this point that Perseus doesn’t have the nerve to try a pitched battle, at least not intentionally. Instead, he keeps opting for the cautious approach of confronting the Romans behind favorable terrain and trying to stall out their campaigns from the logistics difficulty of operating in the region. And so far, that has kind of worked. As the crow flies, the Romans have, at this point, spent three years moving about 20 miles from northern Thessaly to their tenuous foothold on the southern end of Pieria. Perseus presumably hopes that putting the Romans in an endless series of campaigns where they lose light infantry and cavalry skirmishes before running low on supplies and having to head back to Thessaly will either sap the Roman will to continue or prompt some sort of fatal rashness allowing Perseus to engage in battle on extremely favorable circumstances; Plutarch (Aem. 13.4-5) explicitly attributes to him this sort of delaying strategy. I say ‘extremely,’ because as Livy notes, Perseus has had the chance to engage on merely very favorable circumstances and retreated instead.
I don’t think this strategy could have ever worked long-term. The Romans were willing to put up with far greater and more frustrating campaigns in areas of far less strategic significance. The First Punic War (264-241) was, as the date labels there imply, a twenty-three year long high intensity war. Perhaps more apt a comparison, the Romans will be attempting to seize the Celtiberian stronghold of Numantia (and thereby end Celtiberian resistance in Spain) for twenty-one years, from 154 to 133 BC, albeit with some pauses. It is a similar campaign in that the Romans are struggling with the logistical difficulty of actually applying their army to the target, combined with clever opponents who know the local terrain. I do not think Perseus could actually wait the Romans out, but that may not have been clear to him at the time.
In any event, Perseus’ luck has run out, because the new Roman consul, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, is neither rash, nor slow, nor timid, but both energetic and quite thorough. Livy’s narrative stresses Paullus’ careful attention to logistics, scouting, sentries and communications. At the same time, Paullus does not delay; in his own accounting he takes just fifteen days to complete the campaign (Livy 45.41.4; App. Mac. 19). Paullus is in a hurry. And of course, he has to be: he is going to have the same logistics problems operating here that his predecessors did. Every day has to count.
Paullus first sends scouts to figure out where Perseus is, and on getting news of his fortified camp on the Elpeus, Paullus moves up and camps opposite it. Paullus considers both a frontal attack and an attempt to use the Roman fleet to essentially flank Perseus, but dismisses both: the camp was too fortified for a frontal attack and Paullus perhaps correctly guessed that Perseus already had forces in Thessaloniki to forestall any such use of naval power. Instead, Paullus decides on a clever plan: he’ll dispatch one of his military tribunes, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum (not that Scipio Nasica, but his father) with a small force to head back, through Heracleum, where they’d be resupplied by the Roman navy, then loop back around through the Perrhaebia (taking a route past Lake Ascuris) and up through the Petra pass, dropping into the plains of Pieria behind Perseus’ fortified position. Nasica’s march is brisk; he’s supplied with ten days of cooked rations (cocta ciberia; probably bucellatum, Roman hard tack). As a result, he can presumably leave all of the cooking supplies behind and march fast and light with just rations and equipment.6
The plan works: Nasica drops into the plain behind Perseus, able to threaten his line of supply. Perseus’ army, which we’ll tally in a moment, was almost certainly too large to supply fully locally. Consequently, Perseus instead falls back along his supply lines back, setting the stage for a decisive engagement at the last bottleneck: Pydna.
Pydna
And at long last, we come to it: the last great clash between a Hellenistic army and a Roman one. Our sources for this battle are somewhat difficult. On the one hand, we would prefer Livy, but we’re reaching the ragged edge of the Livy we have; books 43 (171-169), 44 (169-168) and 45 (168-166) of his Ab Urbe Condita start to have gaps, before the whole thing breaks off with finality. Unfortunately, one of those gaps is a chunky lacuna in book 44 that covers the early stages of the battle. On the other hand, we have Plutarch, whose biography of Lucius Aemilius Paullus includes a much shorter narrative of the battle with no breaks. Both authors are relying substantially on Polybius (lost to us), as well as an account written by Scipio Nasica.
Fortunately for me, Paul Johstono and Michael Taylor recently went through the trouble of untangling the sources for the battle in light of the terrain of the battlefield in an article for Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies (GRBS, a major journal) that is gloriously open-access, “Reconstructing the Battle of Pydna” (2022). So my narrative follows their reconstruction, which I think is sound.
Paullus’ army is somewhat large if relatively normal Roman force. He has two legions as normal, but both are larger than usual, 6,000 men rather than the typical 4,200 (Livy 44.21.8). The socii wings (alae) were probably around 5,000 strong. We know Paullus has 600 Roman cavalry and presumably some larger number of socii cavalry; Johstono and Taylor guess around 900, which would be fairly typical). Of the socii, we know that a cohort of Paeligni (a people from what is today Abruzzo in Italy) was part of the army, probably among the extraordinarii and they’ll have a key role in the battle. Quake with fear, for a Paelignian officer has brought a flag.7
Paullus also has a grab-bag of allies and auxiliaries. Plutarch mentions 700 Ligurian auxiliaries (Aem. 18.2), which are presumably what remained of the 2,000 recruited in 171 (Livy 42.35.6; these guys are skirmishers and the Romans have been taking nasty losses so far in skirmishes, so this isn’t shocking). After the embarrassment at Callinicus, the Romans were reinforced with allies from Africa: 1,000 each of Numidian cavalry and infantry, along with 22 elephants; apart from the elephants, it is unclear what of that force remains by Pydna. We also have the troops from Pergamum, initially 5,000 of them (4,000 infantry, 1,000 cavalry) and Attalus is present with the army, so presumably some number of these fellows are still there, but we get no exact count. Likewise, no exact count of Greek allies, but there were almost certainly some. Finally, we are told some 600 Gallic cavalry auxiliaries had been sent earlier (Livy 42.21.6), but we have no idea if they arrived. Johstono and Taylor figure perhaps 35,000 men total and that seems about right. In the event, the cavalry and special troops won’t play a huge role in the battle, so a precise account of them isn’t strictly necessary.
Plutarch reports Perseus’ army as four thousand cavalry and just short of 40,000 infantry, which Plutarch presents as being basically all of the phalanx (Plut. Aem. 13.4), but we know the core Macedonian phalanx wasn’t that large and that some of these fellows were rather more lightly equipped. Notably, a report to the Senate earlier in 168 had put Perseus’ strength at only 30,000 men (Livy 44.20.4), so it isn’t clear if Perseus had reinforced since then or someone is in error. Perseus’ army clearly included the core Macedonian phalanx, but also Thracian auxiliaries, Paeonians, Greek mercenaries, and so on. In either case, our sources are clear Perseus has the somewhat larger army (Livy 44.38.5; Plut. Aem. 16.6), though some of Perseus’ troops may still have been detached guarding the coast or passes. In the event, the armies were of comparable size.
Perseus fell back to a blocking position at Pydna, encamped on some convenient hills at a point where the plain narrows, framed by marsh on one side and hills on the other, allowing a tight, flat battlespace in the center ideal for his phalanx. Paullus arrives late in the day after marching and forms up a battle line, probably in the wider section of the plain (Plut. Aem. 17.1-6), but when Perseus doesn’t come out and Paullus refuses the entreaties of his younger officers to rashly attack on unfavorable ground, Paullus carefully peals his maniples off one by one to construct the standard Roman fortified camp for the night.
And that night, we get an endearing little Roman episode; Paullus evidently knew (Plut. Aem. 17.9) that there was going to be an lunar eclipse that night – the ancients were pretty good at estimating the timed occurrences of stellar phenomenon even when they didn’t know why they happened (and Plutarch actually does know that the moon is passing through the shadow of the earth). Paullus has Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, one of his military tribunes, explain to his soldiers what an eclipse is and that these things are predictable, natural phenomenon (Livy 44.37.5-9), but then just to be sure, observes the traditional Roman rituals anyway: the Romans would bang pots and make loud noises to call back the goddess Luna and her favor (Plut. Aem. 17.8). The Romans banged their pots, Paullus sacrificed to the moon (Plut. Aem. 17.10) and Luna graciously returned.
The mood in the Macedonian camp was less positive: lunar eclipses were thought to signal the fall of kings and there was only one king on this battlefield.8
Instead of a planned engagement, the battle was triggered by a skirmish between foraging parties going for water which then spiraled into a major battle. These sort of scouting and foraging parties were fairly typical for ancient armies, as we’ve discussed. In this case, the terrain plays a role, as the primary water source, the Agios Georgios stream, sat between the two armies and so made a natural point of contention for these light scouting forces. Plutarch notes reports that Aemilius Paullus planned to precipitate a battle this way, but given that Paullus is pretty clearly caught somewhat off-guard as the battle begins, one doubts it (Plut. Aem. 18.1, Livy 44.2-3). In any case, the aforementioned 700 Ligurians, covering a watering party ended up in a skirmish with some Thracian troops, possibly over a loose horse and the battle expanded from there, with Scipio Nasica evidently riding forward to try to observe the Macedonian advance and coordinate (Plut. Aem. 18.5).
The battle erupted quite suddenly; neither the consul nor the king had time to get their armor (19.3 and 19.7-10), which leads to a battle where units are coming into combat as quickly as they can be moved out of camp and drawn up. We’ve actually already discussed the difficulties of command, information and sight-lines in this specific battle before, so I won’t dwell on them here. Both armies seem to have tried to deploy in a more or less standard battle array, with units on the right side (from the Roman perspective) coming into contact first. Notably, both sides also lead with infantry, with the cavalry doing effectively nothing in the battle. This is going to be an engagement decided by a direct, head-on clash of heavy infantry.
As Paullus is getting his legions out of his camp, the Macedonian army likewise moves out, with the Thracian mercenaries in the lead, followed by the mixed Greek and Paeonians, and then the Macedonian elite peltasts and the Agema, followed by the cream of the main Macedonian phalanx, the chalkaspides, ‘bronze shields,’ moving in a line to form the left flank of the Macedonian army. Paullus’ first legion – commanded directly by Paullus himself – forms up opposite of the chalkaspides, with his right wing covered by the camp guard (the praesidium) of picked socii cohorts and the rest of the dextra ala (the right wing of the socii) forming up to his right.
The action proper then starts with the agema, leading out, slams into the troops of the praesidium, in particular a cohort of the Paeligni (Romans are still mostly in maniples in 168, but the socii have been in cohorts for some time, see M.J. Taylor, “Tactical Reform in the Late Roman Republic: The View from Italy” Historia 68 (2019)). The Paelignian officer, doing what the Paeligni do best, rallies his troops by seizing their cohort’s standard and flinging it into the mass of the Macedonians, so that his troops, to avoid the shame of losing their standard, would push forward (Livy 44.40.7-8). Believe it or not, this is not the only flag-throwing Paelignian praefectus either, this happened before (Livy 25.14.4). So let me offer my advice: if a Paelignian officer throws a flag, banner or other kind of standard at you, run and do not look back.
The Paelignians are clearly hard-pressed, but Paullus seems to have judged, correctly, that they’d keep the agema occupied; the Paelignians, outnumbered and facing the best of the Antigonid’s troops fall back and the agema evidently follows them, leaving the chalkaspides isolated for a head-on-head clash with Paullus’ first legion. Meanwhile, the second half of the phalanx, the less impressive equipped leukaspides, ‘white shields’ (who are, contra Sekunda, sarisa-phalanx troops, not thureophoroi) form up to the right of the chalkaspides and thus opposite of Paullus’ second legion, which is bring driven forward by Lucius Postumius Albinus.
Meanwhile, the Roman dextra ala (right wing of socii), with the Roman war elephants comes into contact with the Macedonian left, composed of the mixed Paeonians and Greeks, along with the Thracians. Perseus apparently had a specialized anti-elephant corps prepared for this moment but these fellows fail with some intensity, leading Livy to dryly remark, “For just as many new devices of mortal men have strength in words, but put to the test, when they must function, not just have their function explained, they vanish without any effect, so to it was with the elephant-fighters: they were a name without a use” (Livy 44.41.4; and who says Livy is a boring prose stylist!). The dextra ala follows this up and pushes back the Macedonian left, but are still fighting it as the battle continues.
Meanwhile Legio I and the chalkaspides seem to have come into contact next and the legion is initially pushed back (Plut. Aem. 20.1-6). We know from a fragment of Polybius that Paullus was terrified at the onset of the chalkaspides, so things were evidently not going well (Polyb. 29.17). What happens next is decisive; Livy in his fragmented narrative presents this as a somewhat natural result: the Romans attack catervatim, “by companies or troops” (that is, in smaller units, probably maniples) and in so doing, disrupt the phalanx, as opposed to the Paeligni, who advanced as a single line and got beaten back for their efforts (Livy 44.41.7-9). Plutarch presents this as a command decision by Paullus, to engage in “not a single battle, but many separate, successive battles” (Plut. Aem. 20.8), especially an order for each maniple to advance or retreat “in their own time” as it were. As a result, the Roman heavy infantry started to get inside the pikes of the chalkaspides.
And here we can imagine what comes next, thinking about the tactical and equipment advantages the Romans have. The Romans have a bigger shield (the scutum) and heavier armor, along with a somewhat longer multi-purpose sword (the gladius Hispaniensis) and a fighting style designed for one-on-one combats (in formation, of course). Their Macedonian opponents, while being (Polybius notes this), some of the best soldiers in the Mediterranean, are trained for pike tactics in groups, relatively densely formed (with less space for swordplay) and while still heavy infantry, they lack the heavier Roman armor, particularly the mail lorica hamata. Worse yet, the close-combat weapons they do have, the xiphos straight-sword and kopis forward-curving sword, are both of limited use against the mail armor the Romans have.9 Clearly, the Roman is going to have the ‘edge’ in that fight and indeed, given what we’re told about the length of the battle and the casualties, the phalanx crumbles with remarkable speed in a fairly lopsided slaughter.
Meanwhile, on the Roman left, Legio II hits the leukaspides, perhaps before they were fully formed up, leading to its swift collapse, at which point the whole Macedonian army effectively falls apart (after all, both its left wing and both elements of the phalanx are now collapsing by this point). The whole battle evidently occurred quite quickly, despite its fierceness, with Plutarch noting the battle took less than an hour (Plut. Aem. 22.1).
Perseus – wait for it – panics and flees (Plut. Aem. 23.1-2; Livy 44.42.2-3). He seems to have been formed up with his cavalry, in proper Macedonian fashion, waiting for the moment when the powerful Macedonian cavalry could be used to hammer a key gap or weak point. In the event, he never saw his opening. The agema‘s successful initial engagement ought to have created such a gap, but it is possible that in the rolling terrain, Perseus could not see it. On the other hand, Perseus gets a reputation in the sources (particularly Livy) as being something of a vacillating coward, so it is possible he simply lost his nerve again. I don’t think it would have mattered, with the Romans relatively quickly winning over essentially the entire field.
The Romans then pursued and butchered the Macedonian phalanx, to staggering casualties. Plutarch reports some 25,000 Macedonian dead (Plut. Aem. 21.7), whereas Livy more carefully reports 20,000 KIA, with another 11,000 prisoners (Livy 44.42.7); both are probably exaggerations, but it is clear Macedonian losses were devastating. Roman losses, by contrast, were very light; Plutarch says Nasica reported 80 losses, an otherwise unknown Poseidonius 100; Livy reports, “not more than one hundred died of the victors, and of these the major part was the Paeligni; many more were wounded” (Livy 44.42.8). The report that many Romans were wounded but few killed is striking and I suspect a testament to the relative effectiveness of Roman body armor in the close-in fighting as the phalanx collapsed: effective armor doesn’t negate wounds, but it turns debilitating or lethal piercing and cutting wounds into survivable blunt trauma wounds or shallow cuts.
Why Roman Victory in the Third Macedonian War?
The lopsided Roman victory at Pydna effectively ended the Third Macedonian War and the Antigonid dynasty and the Macedonian state. Perseus fled, but there was no chance of mounting real resistance anymore; Plutarch reports that even Perseus’ cavalry bodyguard took the chance to melt away into the countryside (Plut. Aem. 23.1-9). Perseus was eventually captured and taken back to Rome to feature in Aemilius Paullus’ triumph. The Romans seized the Macedonian treasury, which was brought back to Rome and displayed in the same triumph, with Polybius reporting it amounted to some six thousand talents and Livy that it was 120 million sesterces (Polyb. 18.35.3, Livy 45.40.1, note also Plut. Aem. 33.2-24 and Diod. Sic. 33.8; all of the figures given, as Taylor notes in Soldiers and Silver (2020), 149 come out to around the same figure of c. 30 million drachma).
We’ll have a seperate post next week, an ‘epilogue,’ as it were, discussing the broader impacts of Roman victory here, but instead I want to close this post by focusing on why the Romans won.
The first thing that I think is quite clear here, especially as we’ve now looked at all four of the big second century Legion-v-Phalanx battles, is that the Roman legion simply has a tactical edge against Hellenistic armies. Polybius, of course, famously notes as much, though scholars are often somewhat skeptical of his schematic explanation (Polyb. 18.28-32). While the popular conception focuses a lot on rough ground (often imagining very rough ground like forests and mountains), the three pitched engagements (Cynoscephalae, Magnesia and Pydna) occur on ground that, while certainly not flat in all cases, isn’t extremely rough, nor is it clear that the roughness of the ground was purely decisive in any case.
Instead, both Cynoscephalae and Pydna come down to the flexibility of maniples as independent maneuvering units, with the Romans in the first battle able to redeploy maniples to exploit a gap and in the second to advance maniples seperately to create gaps. Meanwhile at Magnesia, the Roman left was able to engage in a fighting withdrawal in situations were we might expect its formation to crumble, seemingly also because of the relatively flexible manueverability of Roman maniples.
That flexibility becomes decisive because of what I’d argue is a real Roman equipment advantage, which isn’t really a technological advantage, per se. The only new technology the Romans are using is mail armor, which, to be fair, is very good and I think quite impactful. But if Roman and Hellenistic iron-working or production methods differ, we can’t see it. Instead, it isn’t a technological advantage, but a mismatch that gives the Romans the edge. Roman heavy infantry are heavily armored for the attritional, close-combat the legion is built around, by contrast, Macedonian phalangites, while still heavy infantry, were less well protected, because they were supposed to have those long sarisae between them and the enemy and in any case were a pinning force, not a killing force.
Consequently, once the Romans disrupt the Macedonian formation and the fighting becomes more fluid, the Roman equipment set, designed to produce casualties and avoid taking casualties, is in its element, whereas the key pinning element of the Macedonian phalanx, the sarisa, is suddenly useless. We cannot know, but I suspect equipment followed training here and that Macedonian soldiers who found themselves in that killing-fight rather than a pinning-fight were aware they had strayed outside of what they had trained for, which probably had catastrophic implications for morale and cohesion.
Beyond this tactical edge, Aemilius Paullus is also just clearly a better general than Perseus. In a surprise battle that neither anticipated, Perseus first vaciliates and then panics (again), while Paullus keeps his head, keeps his legion and wins his battle. And that comes after fifteen days of bold, decisive but well-planned and not-at-all-reckless movement from Paullus, who moves with an urgency his predecessors lacked. Even Paullus’ management of the eclipse shows a general more in tune with the morale of his men and more active. That said, we should be careful: it’s clear that both Livy and Plutarch understand Perseus as something of an archetype of a bad king, cowardly, greedy, self-serving and narcissistic, and they may be constructing that archetype to moralize a bit. Still, that Perseus was solidly out-generaled is not hard to establish.
Finally, moving up the levels of analysis, Roman command of the sea remains crucial for getting Roman armies to the area of combat and – once you have a general like Paullus who can coordinate it – keeping them supplied there. Moreover, Roman command of the sea is important because it forces Perseus on the defensive, giving him essentially no true offensive options, though the Antigonid kingdom hardly had the force necessary to invade Italy in any event.
More broadly, I think Perseus’ defensive, exhaustion-strategy was effectively doomed from the beginning. Rome deployed 10 legions in 176, 7 in each year from 175-173, 6 in 172, 10 in 171 and 170, 8 in 169, and 10 again in 168, with some of them over-strength that year.10 In short, Rome maintained deployments of about double Perseus’ maximum, all-effort deployment at effectively all times. The Romans could wage Perseus’ war of logistics and exhaustion forever, rolling the dice every year until they turned up a commander who could outmaneuver Perseus’ army into a decisive battle. Perseus had to win all of the battles; the Romans merely needed to win one of them.
The difference in military power wasn’t a pure product of demographics. The Antigonid kingdom had plenty of people. But mobilizing armies is more complex than merely finding warm bodies. Often to be soldiers those men need to be of the right ethnic group, the right social class, or have enough wealth to buy equipment. Alternately the king must pay them. In any case, raising fresh armies takes time, which Perseus did not have after Pydna, though I doubt he had many fresh troops to raise. Mobilizing ancient armies was, instead, a complex product of harnessing resources, labor, men and money in the context of societies with extremely low productivity and low labor specialization (when what you need is lots of specialized labor). For reasons that essentially summarize to, “read my book project when it is done” the Romans had built the more effective machine for turning farms into weapons and farmers into soldiers, wildly more effective than any other similar system in the Mediterranean (only Carthage comes remotely close).
And that larger resource pool, combined with the Roman Republic’s political system and its abilityto furnish a seemingly endless supply of ‘good enough’ workmanlike generals and strong strategic direction from the Senate meant that despite Rome not being obviously larger or richer or more urbanized or more sophisticated or more advanced than the Hellenistic states, none of Rome’s wars in the East were particularly close. Indeed, as Polybius notes, “the progress of the Romans, from the beginning, was not due to chance, nor was it automatic, as some among the Greeks chose to believe” (Polyb. 1.63.9).
And that is how you beat a Macedonian sarisa-phalanx.
Romans!
- This level of self-parody never ceases to be funny to me.
- Manpower figures from Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020)
- In Soldiers & Silver
- The left wing, sinistra ala, would be a formation of socii, not of Romans, so these are not legionary standards.
- Roman names are incredible sometimes.
- On this trick, see, uh, me, “Organization of the Military Food Supply: Rome” in Brill’s Companion to Diet and Logistics in Greek and Roman Warfare (2023), eds. J.F. Donahue and L.L. Brice.
- If this joke makes no sense, give it a minute and it will.
- J.E. Lendon has a brief but well-written telling of this episode that I always found memorable in Soldiers and Ghosts (2005), 199-200.
- On this, see, uh, me, “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022).
- Figures from Taylor, op. cit., 28-9.
Typo towards the end. “Perseus as something of an achetype of a bad king”
Fixed.
“One again, I am leaning quite hard on J.N. Morton’s dissertation, ”
ITYM “Once again”
More in typospotting: “behind teh infantryman”
Also last paragraph: “its abilityto furnish”.
“the best cavalry in Greek”
should be Greece
This is something of a sidenote to the main thrust of the campaign narrative, but how did Mancinus load up a months’ worth of food and then move it over the mountain pass? I seem to remember from the logistics post you link to that a Roman army could generally only carry about ten days’ worth of supplies at a time. Mancinus, even if his efforts are ultimately unsuccessful, manages to triple that and over some pretty nasty terrain, which I would think would impede the use of things like heavy wagons or lots of draft animals. How did that work out?
The answer is probably that we don’t know. I read it as meaning that he took direct control of a month’s worth of food all at once instead of whatever system of continual deliveries the local allies were providing, and then set up his own system for getting continual deliveries from the base to the front. But that’s just rationalizing along the lines of my expectations; several other parts of the narrative are created the same way, just by people who are a lot more qualified than I am.
IIRC it was a soldier could carry about 10 days food + all his other equipment. Could be he has more pack animals, which he also slaughters as he goes, to carry the next 20 days of food. Could be he has his army leave behind certain things it didn’t expect to need (it normally travelled with a bunch of ballistae dissasembled in wagons IIRC, you could try to put food in there instead, for example), or a mix of the two. Or a mix of the two + setting up extra supply driven in behind him at higher speed than he is travelling.
Off-topic, but because it was just last week, Manor Lords has now been released into Early Access on Steam and GOG. I notated the previous episode with this information but figure people may not have noticed. I purchased a copy owing to the positive impression and favorable reviews so far.
Did Republican Rome ever give up and go away? It is said that Augustus did after Teutoburg Forest but do we have any earlier examples?
Crassus’ Parthian campaign may be the most well known example I think. But how much of its notoriety is political aftershock versus just the military value?
Even then, it’s less that the Republic backed off and more that it got distracted by the civil war. Caesar was famously planning a campaign against the Parthians, and Mark Antony fought an inconclusive war with them during the Second Triumvirate. It was only after Octavian became sole ruler that Rome gave up its ambitions in that direction (for a century at least).
I suspect that Parthia’s greatest strength was that it was a long way from the Mediterranean, thus negating the Romans’ usual strategic advantages. There was nothing inherently flawed about the Roman tactical system in a match up against the Parthians. Despite the disaster at Carrhae, Cassius was able to defeat the Parthians when they attacked into Syria afterwards.
Cassius was able to defeat the Parthians, and the Romans went on to sack Ctesiphon several times over the next few centuries. In fact, I’d say that most pitched battles were won by the Romans, for all that everybody remembers Carrhae.
Imperial Rome certainly got the better of its wars with the Parthians, including taking the Parthian capital Ctesiphon three times.
Rome eventually abandons the province of Dacia, I believe once the mines were exhausted, but both that and Augustus are during the Imperial period, not the Republic.
I have to doubt that story about the mines being exhausted. In the middle ages Dacia, under the name of Transylvania, became once again known for bountiful mines and thousands of Germans settled there to work them, founding many cities which are still there in modern Romania. Were the mining methods of AD 1200 really so much more advanced than those of Rome as to exploit deposits the Romans never could have reached? Seems more likely to me that the historians wanted to defend Aurelian’s decision to abandon the province.
Mid-late medieval mining methods were more advanced than Roman ones – Roman mine taillings were worked over at profit. But it would also be a question of the costs of defense against the return.
Yes, the reason why it was Germans setteling those areas was, that a lot of development of mining technology was happening in what is today central Germany and West Czechia.
Mainly better pumps and ways to move hydropower up the hill and down the mineshaft, was developed and improved upon in that time. Allowing to dig deeper mines, and exploit deposit that would have been to far away from a power source before.
The first couple Mithridatic wars kinda fit the bill. A civil war at home distracts Rome from punitive expeditions abroad.
I had first come across the Paelignian standards ancedote in Val Max 2.20. Based on Walker’s translation: “When Valerius Flaccus, the tribune of the third legion, saw this, he turned to his men and said ‘As far as I can see, we have just come here to look at other people’s courage, but I do not want our nation to have the shame of seeing Romans coming second to Latins in glory'” and naturally another centurion does the same thing, flinging the Roman standard into Capua while shouting “This is going with me now inside the enemy palisade! If you don’t want to have it captured, you’ll have to follow me!”.
I just discovered this blog yesterday, and started reading this very series. I was gutted to discover that it wasn’t finished yet, but to get another instalement so soon after I read the others is a delight!
Had a similar reaction to the Rohan series when I started reading. Check out the archives if you aren’t already, lots of good stuff to look at.
Just when I thought I couldn’t get enough, I found the post I didn’t know I needed. Also, I can’t find a link to your book even when combing through your latest posts. Is it possible to pre order when it does come out?
We’re not to the stage yet for pre-orders or anything like that. We’ll get to that stage next year, but probably not early next year.
Darn…
Patience. Quality takes time.
Not that I’m any happier with that reality than I suspect you are . . .
I know. Reading this series has reminded me that anything from him is worth the wait. I just didn’t know how soon or how long it would take.
It seems like the pike phalanx is really bad at actually inflicting casaulties in pitched battle. We’ve got this reoccuring occurance of the Romans getting pushed back in good order with surprisingly low losses. It’s not like we dont have plenty of examples of Romans breaking in battle and/or taking heavy losses but these elite heavy infantry repeatedly fail to do either.
The phalanx (pike and otherwise) seems optimized around the asumption that if you dislodge the enemy they are routed and disordered and you will inflict disprorportionate losses. If that assumption doesn’t hold then suddenly the pike phalanx becomes a white elephant. You’ve focused all your best infantry resources into a formation that is optimized at a task that doesn’t actually matter. Sure the pike phalanx will dislodge the legions but if it neither kills nor routes them all that means is they get to repeat the process a few hundred yards later.
It makes me wonder if the secret sauce for Pyrrhus was actually that he was the only Greek king who was recruiting in Italy. Having Samnites articulating your phalanx isn’t just protecting the flanks, it’s putting troops there who are ready and willing to keep the pressure on the withdrawing romans. Medium infantry just wouldn’t be up to that role later on when the social status of the medium infantry was lower and the armor of the Romans was heavier.
The sarissa phalanx isn’t supposed to kill enemies. That not its job; its job is to pin enemy infantry formations down. What did the killing was the cavalry (and later elephantry), which is why the king stayed with them. The problem is that these can’t kill troops in good order and the Roman system ensures that even if the first two lines collapse, there’s always another line to fall back to and give those soldiers time to reform. What’s more the Roman system is shot through with senior officers whose whole job is to lead and rally a small portion of the army — which again, provides enough of a backstop and speed bump for the rest of the army to get away, draw up, reform, and get back into the fight.
By contrast the killing power of the Roman legions is in the infantry. Once the infantry can get to close grips (meaning inside the reach of a pike) they are trained and equipped to do the killing all themselves, not merely to pin the enemy down and wait for cavalry to arrive and finish the enemy off.
The phalanx is really bad at killing. For starters, aiming the point of a pike accurately is actually harder than aiming a javelin or arrow at a pike’s-length-away target. It’s descended from a formation that was developed for deterrence-defense and only used offensively in intraethnic conflicts where enhancements in lethality would not have been socially rewarded.
Wild hedgehogs are notably non-lethal to their predators and each other too.
Very curious know how the phalanx compares to the much later Swiss and landsknecht pikemen, who were famously aggressive and fought in columns .
Yeah, the Swiss and their followers seem to have managed to avoid a lot of the criticisms levelled at Macedonian phalangites (bad at killing people, vulnerable to attacks from the flanks). It would be interesting to see a proper comparison of the two. I’d imagine there wasn’t much difference between Swiss pikes and Macedonian, but the Swiss seem to have been much handier with theirs, so maybe there was some difference that made the later weapons easier to wield?
Maybe I’m getting the century wrong, but Swiss pikemen were heavily armored and shieldless, no? So they had two hands on the pike, and heavy armor for protection from slashing weapons.
Maybe I’m getting the century wrong, but Swiss pikemen were heavily armored and shieldless, no? So they had two hands on the pike, and heavy armor for protection from slashing weapons.
Actually, Swiss pikemen were famously rather lightly armoured, which allowed them to move very quickly on the battlefield (it was said they could charge the length of a cannon shot in the time it took to reload it). Meanwhile, their Landsknecht opponents generally only had a breastplate and helmet. Now, obviously 16th-century armour is going to be better than Hellenistic, but generally when fighting with a sword or spear you’d want to hit the enemy’s unarmoured parts rather than try and punch through their armour, so I don’t think a Renaissance-era pikeman would have much of an advantage over a Macedonian pikeman in this regard. As for shields, the Macedonians strapped their shields to their arms, leaving both hands free to wield their pikes.
Swiss pike blocks were a offensive units. They formed in smallish squares, deployed these in echelon and went straight in fast. The officers had breastplates and the rankers helmets. If the pikes tangled men with halberds and two-hand swords came into play. So tactically more like Romans than Macedonians.
Most of it was training, but it’s worth noting there were formation and weapon differences. Most tellingly the smallest swiss pike formation unit was not only typically smaller, being 10*10 instead of 16*16, but was a maneuver unit. It was also drilled to switch direction under pressure, charge, and seize ground, none of which the Phalanx was expected to do, which was possible because the formation was so much handier.
The other part is weaponry. First they, of course, ditch the shield. While this does make them more vulnerable to missile fire they were also dealing with gunpowder formations, and while you might be able to *make* a shield that can reliably deflect round shot you couldn’t make me carry it. Forces designed to engage gunpowder either accept that armor will be penetrated or deploy screens. The European propensity for field cannon negates even that.
Further the Swiss pike was also notably lighter and shorter. The Sarisss was 5.8 meters long, give or take. The Swiss likes were 4.1-5.1 m in length. That’s actually significant with levers, and weight wise that plus construction saved maybe a kilo, if I trust the weight given earlier in the series for a Sarisssa.
Combined with better overall armor quality and it’s not so strange that the Swiss are more nimble. Those with armor may have steel instead of bronze, saving even more weight. Their pikes are less heavy and they aren’t carrying a shield. Hence their smaller units can and do sprint into position and charge knights, cannon, and lesser infantry like they were Roman cohorts rather than a Phalanx. And at various points in time or space billhooks and halberds and poleaxes rise to prominence, which trade length for significantly more killy stabby parts and highly maneuverable designs.
I feel like it comes down to a difference in expectation. If the phalanx was culturally expected to be a pinning force throughout it’s entire history then it is not going to develop a culture that routinely expects it to do the bulk of the killing (thus, behaving in a suitably aggressive manner in order to achieve that).
Conversely, the Swiss and Landsknechts were expected to be aggressive killing implements, and behaved as such.
Less a question of equipment, and more one of cultural expectation influencing fighting style.
What you’re describing – battles where most of the casualties are inflicted once one side breaks order, i.e. on the “back half” of the fight – is, I think, actually the norm for ancient battles (and for the most part continues to be until the widespread use of firearms). Even lancer cavalry will have a problem charging a dense formation of infantry armed with spears if they don’t break to create gaps. Mobile missile troops – infantry with heavy javelins and swords like the Romans, or horse archers with a secondary weapon like the Parthians or Mongols – can inflict attritional losses on the enemy before they break (which also increases the likelihood of the enemy breaking).
It’s worth noting that other pike formations are plenty killy at various times and places, but they drill differently. Also there’s an inverse relationship between pike length and offense; shorter pole weapons are terrifying weapons indeed at an individual level. The trade off is reach, particularly against cavalry and other pikes, where longer pikes let you keep formations at bay and completely negate cavalry. The Swiss settled on a slightly shorter pike and could and did charge heavy cavalry, although they preferred to take the charge for pretty obvious reasons; at various times we get comments on the pros and cons of soldiers using shorter pikes or mixing in other polearms. The Sarisssa was just clearly on the defensive end of the gradient and the soldiers weren’t drilled to maneuver in the same way.
So, in the end, the Romans weren’t so much more powerful than their enemies, but more efficient, better trained, and better led.
Which, I suppose, is a type of power all its’ own.
The Romans also had more armies, or rather were better at leveraging their existing populace to fight for them than their enemies are. “Having more soldiers” is pretty powerful all on its own.
Rome: the honey badger of ancient civilizations.
That last map, the one you captioned “Via Wikipedia, a map of the region”, was much easier for me to read than the others, with respect to understanding the terrain. I know, we’re lucky to get maps and visual aids at all, and thank you. 🙂 It’s not always easy to find good maps. But I thought I’d register a preference, in case it ever matters. (I’m guessing it depends a bit on whether other people chime in, and whether they agree.)
It does seem like rotating through commanders was a Roman strength. It reminds me of Monty Python: “the fourth one stayed up!” Whereas the Hellenistic armies were stuck with their king, however good or bad he turned out to be.
So, the whole war took 3-4 years. I presume that, even though the commanders rotated, the legionaries stayed in the field. With all the talk of harvests in the comments of the last post, this makes me wonder: if they were farmers, what was happening to their farms? Wives could take over administration, and hired or enslaved workers wouldn’t be affected, but if the legionary had anything physical to do, wouldn’t this disrupt the farm work? Were the farms run by a nuclear family or an extended family? My understanding (although it’s been a long time) is that when classical Greek poleis went to war, there was a rough “campaigning season” during which the men of a polis would go out and fight someone, which was a time when agricultural labor wasn’t necessary.
Pretty sure our host dove into these details many posts ago but the vast majority of roman soldiers were juniores right? They were considered too young to marry yet, and in most cases still under their still living father’s potestas. And there’s also the transition from traditional cum manus to sine manus marriage around this period too.
With all the talk of harvests in the comments of the last post, this makes me wonder: if they were farmers, what was happening to their farms? Wives could take over administration, and hired or enslaved workers wouldn’t be affected, but if the legionary had anything physical to do, wouldn’t this disrupt the farm work?
It did, and the plight of Italian farmers was a big issue in Roman politics from the time of the Gracchi onwards.
It did disrupt agriculture, and the greater the numbers the Romans kept in the field and the longer they kept them there, the greater the disruption. As Mr. X. says, this became a major political issue and came to a head (for the first time) under the Gracchi, just about a generation after Pydna. It kept right on being a major political issue and source of ongoing crisis
But farming households throughout most of history do seem to involve extended familes. For more on this, you can see Dr. Devereaux’s posts on this site about grain production and farming from a few years ago. We definitely have enough evidence to say that Roman farming households were usually extended, with a reasonable hope that there would be other able-bodied males present to keep the impact of losing one man to the legions from being devastating.
Still, any system like that has its limits, so there will be households that are pushed to the edge of ruin by a soldier going off to a prolonged war (especially if he comes back less than able-bodied, or not at all). And, again, this absolutely did become an issue for the legions and for Roman politics in general. Even if the impact on the collective farming households of Italy of a few years of intense warfare was manageable, the cumulative effect of this having gone on for a century or more by the time of the Gracchi and continuing into the period of the Late Republic and the civil wars that ended with Augustus establishing the Empire were pretty hard on a lot of those same households.
There is also the point that Heraclitus made first: “War is father of all and king of all; and some he manifested as gods, some as men; some he made slaves, some free”
That is, war is a high-stakes game: you may die, or get enslaved, but some return with incredible wealth. And in a rural society, “incredible wealth” is surprisingly little of wealth. Thus, a prolonged war has a habit of steepening social differences. One family’s son dies, another’s returns as a crippled drunkard, but the third family’s son returns with a purse of gold and half a dozen slaves in tow. This will likely mean that the newly rich family will be able to increase its holdings, and money is injected into the subsistence-agriculture economy, making everyone else much worse off. A couple of generations of this will change the land ownership patterns drastically.
Incidentally… The performance of Roman armies seems to have fallen in the decades after Pydna. In the first part of the second century BC they smashed the Hellenistic monarchies in pretty short order, as recounted in this series of posts, but a couple of decades later they struggled to beat Carthage, which by this stage had been reduced to little more than a city-state, struggled to beat Jugurtha, and got massacred by the Cimbri and Teutones until Marius was able to turn things round. There’ve been various explanations offered for this, but I wonder if part of the reason wasn’t simply that the rank-and-file weren’t as strongly motivated any more, because they knew there was a good chance that they’d return home to find their farms gone to rack and ruin and their families bankrupted during their absence.
This series has made me wonder, how does one defeat Romans (while inflicting enough casualties for the victory to matter)? What weakness did their legions have, and was their anything they were more vulnerable to than their peers?
Well, to defeat the Romans as a non-Roman, what you do is be the last in a long line of foederati whose land grants had pushed the edge of the Roman empire back into Italy so that you are in control of a large army already camping just outside of Rome and just need to convince your troops to attack the city (joke).
In general, though, it seems clear that to inflict losses on the Republican Army, you need to catch it in its home territory, where’s it’s loath to retreat and will fight more ferociously even when it involves taking losses (see Hannibal and Pyrrhus). Which in turns requires you to manage to land troops in Italy, so you have to face the Roman Navy, which seems to have even less weak points than the army.
It’s kind of hard to give a better answer because of the counter-historical nature of the question – part of the reason why we know the Roman military system so well and keep examining in such detail is because they *kept winning* and built a massive empire with that military system.
The Foederati weren’t even really non Roman. Many of them considered themselves Roman and they were really fighting for political control, which by then was the favorite pastime of militaristic Roman elites anyway. The empire didn’t really fall, it fractured and suffered a temporary demographic collapse due to food trade disruption.
The problem with beating the Navy is that once a power has hegemony the cost to entry is high. Rone learned this against Carthage as they kept feeding ships into the grinder, and seems determined to never suffer that indignity again; no future power was able to dedicate the time, money, and manpower to matching their buildup and hence suffered catastrophic losses due to Lancaster Laws.
The real answer was to either have an excellent mixed army that could collapse the Roman flanks while holding their center, or to operate outside their logistical range. The Germans and Persians (to simplify to modern borders) were far from where Rome could either send supplies or extract meaningful resources; about the only place Rome might have been able to do so and didn’t was a long the black sea, and there aren’t any great natural borders besides “within sight of shore”.
I suspect armies from a millennia in the future, even without their advanced weapons, could do it too; even taking away firearms early modern armies could be strong in precisely the same ways Roman legions were, and Mongol, Mamluk, and Ottoman armies were very sophisticated. Plus, of course, the Ottomans *did* defeat Rome, decisively and finally. Finally Chinese armies throughout many of it’s periods were easily comparable in dominance and tactical nuance to Roman ones, for all that they were half a world away.
The answer might well be “Nothing, Rome conquered everyone around it, so its about as optimized for warfare as a society of that time could get”. But Rome does lose a few battles, and never conquered some areas, plus never fought in other parts of the world such as India or China, where possibly some societies could have evenly fought or beat them.
Roman strength comes in a few areas, raising lots and lots of soldiers and sending them all over the place, and having the individual parts of the army organized well, and the individual soldiers being well equipped. So a society would have to be competitive in all those areas.
Carthage raises a pretty similar number of soldiers as Rome in a different way. Some of these are high quality soldiers individually: Gaulish/Spanish and Numidian cavalry, Libyan foot soldiers are described this way in most battle descriptions I see (Maybe Libyans don’t fully stand up to Romans on average, but did make solid infantry in the same range). Big weakness seems to be leadership, so Hannibal wins a lot and sometimes other commanders, while others end up gradually losing over time. Parthians win their battle against Crassus, and some later battles trade back and forth (though seem more on the losing end), though this is empire period with full time soldiers so probably not a good comparison. Romans do also lose some battles against others (even in Greece, though Celts, Spanish, and Germans seem the most famous and more common overall.)
It overall looks like Legions don’t have obvious rock/paper/scissors type weaknesses that another army could exploit, or be batter at handling, but they are just high quality soldiers and could in theory be matched by other good quality ones with good leadership. Likely something like a modified Carthage with better generals commanding a mix of Numidians, Spanish/Gaulish cavalry, Libyan foot soldiers, good skirmishers, cataphracts, and/or horse archers (And maybe other types of Persian cavalry), maybe some other Gaulish and German foot soldiers thrown in, could match legions in battle and probably win some wars.
The obvious possible competitor (to me anyway) is Qin, maybe the other chinese warring states. Also extremely militaristic, seems to have their own well tested fighting style, able to mobilize huge numbers of soldiers with a highly militarized population (at least according to most history), and doing their famous conquests at about the same time as the Punic was, but using different institutions and types of weapons/way of fighting. Of course not having good historical simulators, and being on opposite sides of the continent, we’ll never know how the two would really compare if they met.
Based on Hannibal’s career, one possible answer might be “Have a cavalry force which is capable of actually delivering the ‘hammer’ part of hammer-and-anvil tactics.” Hannibal was able to drive off the Roman equites, surround the legions, and slaughter them; the Successors generally couldn’t defeat the Roman cavalry, and got slaughtered instead.
Though to be fair Hannibal may have engaged in a bit of light plagiarism from the Romans… Among other things he stole their fighting formations and equipment. Might have been good for him if he also picked up their view on elephants, they didn’t do him much good at Zama.
Hannibal’s adoption of Roman equipment was probably because he was in Italy with no secure lines back to home, so the only way to replace lost or damaged equipment was by stripping it from dead Romans (or getting local allies to supply it, but these were all fighting in Roman style by this time anyway). At least at the Trebia, and probably at Trasimene and Cannae as well, his troops would still have been using their regular equipment and formations, and this evidently didn’t stop Hannibal wiping the floor with the Roman forces.
Ability to steal your opponents’ techniques is a vital tool.
The Romans’ fighting strength seems to have depended less on equipment (which is relatively easy to copy) and more on formations and the manner in which officers were promoted and assigned to the legions (which is not). The equipment was pretty good, mind you, but the big ‘killer app’ was “just be heavily armored lol,” which wasn’t some brilliant discovery nobody else knew about.
Yeah, though at Zama Hannibal was also using the three line system other than not allowing the front ranks to withdraw. Given most of his forces were pretty green there, I wonder if he was worried that if they withdrew to the back they’d never come back.
Rome copied its equipment from others too, though.
Romans suffer tactical defeats often enough that I don’t think that’s the problem: The problem is that no matter how you defeat them tactically there’s more of them to come, and no one of their opponents past the very early stage could really effectively touch the core of roman power ot the point where they couldn’t just raise another army.
If you mean the question in the sense of battles, the glib answer is “don’t try until you luck into an overwhelming advantage.” You can see Perseus here actually trying that a bit, but being so cautious that he never actually goes for the victory. More broadly, the way to beat Romans in battle is to be fighting a war where the Romans have to defend a large enough frontier that they can never choose their battlefield to attack you, either because they have to defend more places than they have troops for or because they have chosen to fight purely defensively.
Being far enough from the sea for Rome to have less of a logistical advantage seems to help.
Defeating the Romans, in this era, was just _difficult_. If there was an easy way to do it, more people would have done so.
For the Eastern Romans, breach the walls of Constantinople with cannons after a 53 day siege and force the breach with Janissaries.
For the Western Holy Roman Empire, be Napoleon.
I feel like somebody has to stand up and express some sympathies for Mancinus and Philippus, who I feel got hit with bad press for not managing the impossible. As you describe it, getting around Olympus is a hard task for any general, and they did manage that, without any blunders, and more importantly, by doing so, they pushed Perseus back by one bottleneck each, opening the way for the decisive confrontation at the final pass.
Also, I petition that any self-citation in an academic work should begin with “see, uh, me”.
I think I said it a few posts ago, but in math, the standard for auto-citations in talks is first letter, so I’d cite a theorem as (L, 2016), or even as (Benedetto-Ingram-Jones-L, 2014).
Looking at the series as a whole, one can maybe chart a sort of tactical learning process for the Roman legion when facing the sarissa phalanx centre of the army: From aggressively throwing themselves at it against Pyrrhus, for massive losses on both sides for little tactical gain (although because of the depth of Roman manpower, possibly decisive strategic gain), to cautiously staying out of spear reach to minimize losses against Philip and Antiochus, to using the greater flexibility that had already carried the day before in a smaller scale by granting more freedom to the maniples against Perseus (so that instead of a whole third of a legion having to use the gap between two lanes, a maniple might be able to use the gap between two syntagmata).
As some people have noted before, one can argue that the Legion “lucked out” in that middle stage, that the Diadochi of the time did not use the gaps created by the slowly retreating stalemate against the sarissa phalanx with their cavalry, and that more competent sub-commanders in these battles might have shifted the battle record in favour of the Hellenic army.
Beware of Paelignians throwing flags.
I think it sounds better if it’s ‘flinging flags’.
When flung flags fly foes flee ferocity, fast.
I’ve sort of thought long before this that maybe what Macedonia needed to do was leave Greece alone for a while other than Thessaly. Focus on expanding in non-polis lands. Particularly integrating Thrace, which seems to have been fairly lightly populated and unurbanized relative to potential population. This general strategy was good enough for Alexander father… Also most of it is uninterrupted flat land which makes resistance somewhat harder and if anything more arable land than Thessaly+Macedonia combined.
Given all the dominance of the Roman navy in this series, I wonder if we’re going to get a series on how that happened — how did Rome end up navally dominating the Med?
Short answer: The First Punic War.
Long answer…is long.
Good collections series? This is also relevant more recently, since naval domination was so important for the military success of Early Modern Europe in general, and Britain in particular – and we’re also seeing it with the US today (US military spending is something like 30-35-35 Army-Navy-Air Force; I don’t think any European military, even the UK’s, has Navy > Army).
For that comparison to work, you need to combine Air and Naval spending; a lot of the tasks that could be done in a pre-flight military system that are now done by air were first done by ships.
That makes it even more lopsided. It’s common enough for a Western European NATO member to match the US on ground force per capita measured in brigades or battalions and then have a weaker air force and a much weaker navy. (The US Navy’s total warship displacement is something like 13 t/capita; the Royal Navy’s is around 6 t/capita, the French Navy’s is around 5 t/capita, and everyone else’s is lower.)
The Army-Navy-Air Force division is slightly tilted by the fact that the US Navy has its own army, the Marine Corps, which has a budget somewhere in the vicinity of $50 billion, which is… I don’t know exactly, but in the vicinity of 6% or so of overall defense spending. Those are rough numbers, mind you.
Our Great Host did a video on the First Punic War in collaboration with Drachinifel. It is great
As mentioned above, see the joint episode on Drachinifel. To summarize: in this technological era, combat fleets consisted of oversize rowing boats and had no independent logistical staying power to speak of. They needed to pull up on the shore basically every day to get supplies, not just food but also drinking water. Less frequently, but still very often by sailing ship standards, they also had to pull up the boats onto dry land to do maintenance on them. The supply issue in particular implied that fighting fleets had to based either in a friendly port city, or follow an army that creates a protected beach. And of course, none of this is an option if all the beaches nearby are sheer cliff-faces or otherwise unsuitable.
Separately, fleet construction was much less of an issue than in the sailing and “steam, steel and shell” periods. The bronze ram at the front cost more than the entire wooden hull it was mounted to; yearly maintenance cost (not operating crewing cost) was on par with construction cost; the cost of paying all the rowers far exceeded maintenance cost. Thus much the same way a polis did not have a standing army, but a panoply hanging on each citizen’s wall, and they formed up into the army when required, warships spent most of the time out of the water, only being launched and crewed on occasion. These were not capital ships but labor ships.
Thus the main answer is: Roman naval dominance was mostly a result of Roman diplomacy (and occasionally armies) creating a dense enough pattern of possible bases for the navy to operate out of. Secondarily, just as total Roman land army mobilizations were several times larger than that of individual Successor monarchies, the fleet mobilizations that Rome could afford were several times larger than what Successor monarchies could afford. But whereas Rome never directed all of its land armies into a single theater (or single war against any Successor state), it could and routinely did direct the entire fleet into a single theater.
This is probably a stupid question, but: was it not possible to ferry troops directly to Macedon with Rome’s naval superiority, with the land routes being so difficult?
Tricky. Ports are relatively easy to defend.
People had already figured out how to create temporary ports by scuttling and beaching ships though, right? So it’s really just the Churchill/Gallipolli decision then, it’s not worth sinking a ship just to create a situation where the army might still lose anyway.
It’s not enough to land on a beach somewhere. You need to be able to land somewhere with roads / navigable rivers to where your army wants to be, and the odds are that the locals have already figured out where these places are and occupied them.
Also, even in a harbor, your ships aren’t staying at sea, they’re all landing at night almost every night. You need to be able to beach the entire first wave transport fleet which means you need a nice gentle slope right down to the water, rather than some mass of rocks.
Scuttling a ship gives a break against waves, which is useful with ships that you don’t want driven aground by a storm, but I’m not sure it’s all that useful when you want to ground the ships yourself.
And it’s likely that every good beach with fresh water available is already in use, because ports with fresh water and flat land are valuable.
And that’s almost certainly in the sense “built their city and live there” not “sent military forces.”
On top of everything that’s already been said, there’s the problem that an army deep-striking into enemy territory may well be on a suicide mission if it can’t be kept supplied with food. Because as soon as the food carried with the army runs out, the troops will be forced to disperse to look for something to eat. They won’t be able to move as a coherent body. The enemy’s cavalry will start picking off foraging parties and columns of de facto deserters. Most of those guys don’t come home.
“Deep strikes” with pre-modern warfare generally only work if you have local allies who can feed the army. Hannibal could do it against Rome in Italy because he had some of the Italian city-states on his side. Rome could do it against the Antigonids in Greece because they had some of the Greek city-states on their side. Rome could not do it in the diminished Macedonian heartland of Perseus’ time, because now all their allies were outside and they were up against a relatively coherent mass of unified state.
Warships could carry troops (but not fight with them aboard) but not supplies, and could beach anywhere. Cargo ships carry supplies but need wharves or piers or lighters. So you need a spot where you can land, protect the shore, find a lot of water locally, be protected from weather and transport supplies ashore fast enough to keep the army fed. Any disruption is fatal (as the Mongols found in Japan).
Dr. Devereaux, and other commentators,
I think this article series has done a good job of portraying the operational, strategic, and logistical advantages that the Roman Republic enjoyed over the Hellenistic polities, and how these factors contributed to the decisive series of Roman victories. I also enjoy the campaign breakdowns, and the focus on key operational details like topography, supply, and marching routes. In these areas, this blog is probably second to none in the realm of public historical communication.
However, I have said before and I will say again that I do disagree with the specifics of the tactical models presented in this series for how the Roman maniple and the Macedonian speira operated, how they interacted when confronted with each other on the battlefield, and how this led to the results of those battles.
My first objection is to the notion, repeated by other commentators, that these battles played out this way because the phalanx was no good at inflicting casualties. I think this idea that the phalanx is a “pinning arm”, not a “killing arm” is erroneous. As if a mass of heavily armed infantry equipped with 16 foot long pikes would be incapable of killing their opponents! We also know full well from the more recent experience of pike warfare in the age of pike and shot from the 15th to the early 17th centuries that well-trained, pike-armed, infantry are a formidable offensive tool.
I also disagree that the Phalanx was intended only as a support arm and was not a decisive element within the Hellenistic armies. In the battles of Alexander, we repeatedly see that the decisive attack is undertaken not by a cavalry charge alone, but by a combined attack of both cavalry and phalanx working in close concert. Alexander’s decisive attack at Gaugamela was prosecuted both by his Companion Cavalry and by units of the phalanx together, what modern military writers might call a “mixed strike package”. At the Battle of the Hydaspes, Arrian tells us, Alexander orders his phalanx to stand back and wait for his cavalry attack to disorder the Indian ranks first before the phalanx advances to engage. The intention there seemed to be that the cavalry would create the opportunity for the phalanx to rout the enemy, which would seem to disagree with the “Phalanx pins and cavalry wins” model. I don’t think that the battles of Alexander show us a “pinning” phalanx clearing the way for a decisive cavalry attack, but rather Alexander using his phalanx and his cavalry in combination, with either able to create circumstances for the decisive success of the other, or of both able to work together in mixed strikes as at Gaugamela.
The battles of the Diadochi after Alexander all seem to demonstrate that when this system fought against itself, decisive victory could only be obtained by the destruction of the opposing phalanx. A well trained, well equipped phalanx is an exceedingly durable core of heavy infantry. We often see Hellenistic battles where one side prevails with their cavalry or light troops, only to lose when their phalanx loses the central clash or their opponent’s phalanx is able to withdraw. This is what happened to Antiochus at Raphia. Likewise at Ipsus, Demetrius’s cavalry success was of no avail when the Allied phalanx defeated the Antigonid phalanx. At Gabiene in 315 BC, Antigonus and Demetrius win the cavalry fight brilliantly, but are unable to exploit this victory when Eumenes’s phalanx routs their own, and then retires in good order off the battlefield, similar to what the Seleucid phalangites were doing at Magnesia prior to their elephants panicking.
Now what about the Roman maniple?
Dr. Devereaux has previously posted about his view that the “revisionist view” of Roman battle behaviour, advanced by Philip Sabin and others, is not correct. I would summarize these two models thus:
Thesis: Roman legionaries quickly volleyed their pila, and then fought primarily with swords (Dr. Devereaux and many others)
Antithesis: Roman legionaries gradually skirmished over long periods of battle, and used their swords mostly only for final decisive charges (Philip Sabin and others)
So I would instead propose this synthesis: Roman legionaries sometimes did a quick “volley and charge”, and other times skirmished in a more prolonged fashion, as opportunities and circumstances dictated. We sometimes hear of legionaries routing their opponents by a quick volley and charge, and other times we hear of prolonged skirmishing (Caesar’s account of the Battle of Ilerda is key here, 5 hours of combat before he tells us his troops drew their swords), so the “both” model seems best evidenced to me.
What does this tell us about the battles between the legion and phalanx, and the very low losses the Romans took in these battles? The most probable explanation to me is that most of the maniples never came within sarissa-reach of the phalangites in the first place. Even well armoured as legionaries were, flinging yourself against the formed sarissas of a phalanx is suicide. I think instead they hung back at range, pelting the phalanx with pila and other missiles, and gradually giving way before their advance. They can’t stand against a phalanx’s attack, but they can skirmish and withdraw slowly and trade ground for time. Few Romans died in these battles because few Romans ever came to hand to hand combat against the phalanx at all, I think. The interaction of phalanx against maniple was mostly a matter of stalling for time until events elsewhere on the battlefield decided the affair.
In the particular case of Pydna, I also think it likely that the phalangites of Perseus hastened their own demise by breaking ranks to pursue the fleeing legionaries, falsely believing themselves to have routed the opponents. I think that like the Saxons at Hastings they perceived a retreat as a rout, and broke their own formation to pursue, only to be turned upon by the still fighting Romans and cut to pieces. To me, Pydna is a victory of the Roman “triplex acies” and their ability to gradually withdraw under pressure without breaking entirely.
The shared tactical error of the Hellenistic generals in all their battles with the Romans appears to be their misconception that repelling the legion in the centre would certainly mean victory. I can see why they believed this: In the Hellenistic wars, the side who prevailed with the phalanx invariably were the winners of the day, and those who could not defeat the phalanx did not win even if they prevailed elsewhere. Unfortunately for them, the triplex acies as a battle array is very well designed for taking and sustaining frontal pressure. Although I agree with Dr. Devereaux that Alexander would have had a very hard time fighting against the armies of the Successors, I also think that Alexander would likely have had more success against the Romans than he did. His use of mixed cavalry-infantry striking columns as at Gaugamela would I think be much likely to have created a decisive frontal break in the Roman lines than the more ponderously paced advance of phalanxes did. Perseus’s really inexcusable error at Pydna was not committing his cavalry together with the phalanx.
Then again, the Romans were very, very good at dealing with frontal pressure with the triplex acies, so perhaps not. Perhaps Hannibal had the right idea and the only really decisive way to defeat a Roman republican army is by encirclement, as at Cannae.
This seems like the most sensible answer to me.
The examples of the Swiss and many others testify to the shock and casualties inflicted by a pike array when on the offensive and composed of spirited and aggressive infantry. Fundamentally the pike is an offensive weapon; I think the image of spear and pike infantry as purely static, defensive formations owes a lot to wargames and computer games. There are certainly historical examples of the latter, but they tend to be infantry who are not terribly well-motivated or culturally expected to do more. Given the pride of place afforded to the phalanx within Successor armies, and the many examples you cite of phalanxes deciding the issue themselves on the battlefield, it seems hard to imagine this applies.
Equally, the image of a Roman maniple forcing their way through a wall of spears strains biomechanical and martial credulity, no matter how impressive their armour for their era. There are basic physical and anatomical limitations at play here; unless the guys in the first rank are expected to literally throw themselves upon the waiting shafts in the hope of fouling their wielders. It is worth remembering that even medieval men at arms in full plate harness were not capable of doing this against the Swiss – and this despite being armed cap-a-pied in steel, a level of personal protection which so far eclipses that of the Roman soldier of any period that it is like comparing a modern tank to a Ford Escort.
Incredible acts of personal bravery and sheer suicidal courage might have impelled Roman legionaries to dare the spear wall – the case of Salius at Pydna throwing the Pelignians’ standard into the midst of the phalanx and daring his men to get it back comes to mind here. But such rare cases where a properly formed phalanx was broken into from the front are noted in the sources as exceptional, and cannot be a sound basis for reliable battlefield success. Indeed even the heroics of the Pelignian allies were ultimately for nought, for as Livy writes:
“`On this a prodigious conflict was excited, whilst on the one side the Pelignians strove with all their might to recover the standard, the Macedonians on the other to retain possession of it. The former strove either to cut through the long spears of the Macedonians, or to repel them with the bosses of their bucklers, or in some instances to turn them aside even with their naked hands, while the latter drove them firmly grasped with both hands with such force against the enemy, who rushed on with rash and heedless fury, that, penetrating shields and bucklers, they overthrew the men transfixed in like manner. The first ranks of the Pelignians having been thus defeated, those who stood behind them were also cut down, and the rest retreated towards the mountain which the inhabitants call Mount Olocrus, though not yet in open flight.“`
Rather I think it is the incredible resilience and sheer depth of the Manipular array, with its three lines, practically unheard of in Antiquity, along with the Roman soldier’s confusing nature as both heavy infantry and skirmisher in one, which provides the answer here. The Romans could not defeat a phalanx from the front and we have essentially no record of them doing so except in instances where the phalangites had dropped their pikes or the phalanx had broken up. But the Romans could lose for a long time, skirmishing and gradually giving ground and occasionally working themselves up to small charges, until other forces were able to win the battle, or the phalanx could be encircled or gradually broken up and encircled as happened at Pydna.
In this light the three lines of the maniple could almost be thought of like the crumple zones of a modern car – they provide an incredible defence in depth.
How does a Macedonian phalangite unit compare to a Swiss pike block indeed? One difference is that the Swiss pikeman may be quite better armored but the emphasis here is on may after all we are told the poorer pikemen often lacked armor not unlike phalangites. But the more important difference seems to me to be that a Swiss pike square despite the name is not actually completely consisting of pikemen. It also includes a varying number of halberdiers (and zweihandlers), in some cases as many as the pikemen and a smaller number of crossbowmen, later arqebusiers. In a similar fashion the Spanish colunela mixes pikemen with sword and buckler troops.
Soo are the Swiss, their German emulators and the Spanish, effectively institutionalizing Pyrrhus articulated phalanxes? And is this perhaps the reason of more persistent tactical success?
That might have something to do with it, though AIUI the halberdiers didn’t really fight in an articulated fashion, but as a kind of reserve, to either outflank the enemy, exploit a breakthrough, or plug gaps in their own line, as necessary. Aside from anything else they’d be helpful in a Pydna-type situation, where the pikemen have become disordered and are at risk of being cut to pieces by enemy swordsmen.
Briefly, I thought that swiss Halberds generally phased out in favor of pikes rather then persisting as a reserve? I may be misremembering that. I thought the Swiss were expected to make do with side swords by the time the pike squares was fully evolved.
The Landsknect absolutely used halberds this way though, along with engineering Pydnas by giving soldiers extra pay, a big sword, and telling them to get stuck in. Disrupting Pike formations was an art form by then.
Briefly, I thought that swiss Halberds generally phased out in favor of pikes rather then persisting as a reserve? I may be misremembering that. I thought the Swiss were expected to make do with side swords by the time the pike squares was fully evolved.
They were phased out as the main infantry weapon, although the Swiss kept around 20-25% (IIRC) of their men armed with halberds during the Italian Wars.
For example, Duerer’s “Bad War” shows men with halberds fighting in the foreground, on the flank of the main pike blocks: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Bad-war.jpg
It’s actually simpler, the Swiss pikes were notably shorter and the formation both smaller and drilled separately. Phalangites weren’t drilled to move in companies, swiss pike squares meanwhile are precisely the right size for that. This lets them fight different and maneuver more. Basically it’s not the weapon, it’s how the formation uses it.
(Aside; we can see similar results with small arms machine gun tactics in the world wars. Germans tended to use machine guns as the killing weapon more than the allies, although this is overblown to an extent. It was still true to a degree and informed tactics and how they deployed, leading to perceptions of machine guns as defensive or offensive weapons in different armies).
We actually have sources saying that swiss formations were generally uniform; they used some supporting arms, but it really was primarily a pike block. Of course the Landsknect absolutely loved specialty troops, but killy pikemen were a thing just by themselves.
After reviewing the overall thread I’ve done to the following conclusions; a bunch of people are way to certain of their conclusions and the lack of period definition is hampering discussion. It’s clear that there were shifts in tactics and load outs over time, hence why pre gunpowder swiss formations have crossbows and halberds and later formations have primarily pikes and firearms.
Id hesitantly volunteer this likely had to do with how armor changes as soldiers stopped walking around in full plate as much, partially because of gunpowder, which meant it was less likely to have the formation infiltrated by someone pushing through with weight of armor. Halberds would be better here, not because you can necessarily punch through plate (good luck…) but because the halberd or bill can and was used to pull or draw men off balance, and once down you can execute even an armored man.
As pertains to this debate, I stand by unit size and drill being decisive.
It is worth remembering that even medieval men at arms in full plate harness were not capable of doing this against the Swiss
It is actually worth noting that the Swiss were instead defeated at Arbedo by the dismounted Milanese men at arms, and that at Marignano the French held out for a day and a half before the Venetians arrived.
The Swiss at Arbedo were armed with halberds, not pikes, and the French at Marignano had pikemen of their own. So, not the best counter-examples.
The OP generically mentioned the Swiss without specifying their armament but, given that halberds are a much better weapon than against armour, I’d say that Arbedo it’s actually a good counter-example. Also, chronicles detailing the Marignano battle tend to emphasise the role carried out by the French (and Venetian) cavalry.
The OP mentioned the Swiss in the context of talking about infantry trying to force their way through rows of pikes. Arbedo and the French cavalry at Marignano are only good counter-examples if you wilfully ignore this context for the sake of trying to look clever.
Given that Swiss forces did notoriously use other weapons in addition to pikes, your own point (and the OP’s) is kinda moot.
I could also easily reply that Arbedo and the French cavalry at Marignano are not good counter-examples only if you wilfully ignore what I’ve said so far, all for the sake of trying to look sassy with your passive-aggressive tone.
Given that Swiss forces did notoriously use other weapons in addition to pikes, your own point (and the OP’s) is kinda moot.
I could also easily reply that Arbedo and the French cavalry at Marignano are not good counter-examples only if you wilfully ignore what I’ve said so far, all for the sake of trying to look sassy with your passive-aggressive tone.
If you have any actual examples of dismounted men-at-arms forcing their way through rows of Swiss pikes, feel free to share them. If not, “what you’ve said so far” is irrelevant to the point being made.
If you have any actual examples of dismounted men-at-arms forcing their way through rows of Swiss pikes, feel free to share them. If not, “what you’ve said so far” is irrelevant to the point being made.
Seriously, are you trolling me ? Three times I have mentioned Arbedo, where dismounted men-at-arms DID actually force their way through rows of Swiss pikes, but you’ve kept ignoring the clear fact; “what I’ve said” is irrelevant only if one’s too busy stucking his head up where the sun doesn’t shine.
Also, since as I have already mentioned (but you just chose to ignore again the obviousness) the Swiss didn’t fight with pikes alone, but with halberds and other weapons too, your demand is simply illogical: if you want an example where “dismounted men-at-arms forced their way through rows of Swiss pikes”, I’ve already given you one that you chose to ignore (mmh, I begin to see a pattern here…); on the other hand, if you want to add the provision “through rows of Swiss pikes and pikes only” you cannot have one, since the Swiss simply didn’t fight that way. Your argument doesn’t make any sense, anyway.
Seriously, are you trolling me ? Three times I have mentioned Arbedo, where dismounted men-at-arms DID actually force their way through rows of Swiss pikes,
Ahem:
“The Swiss were mainly equipped with halberds and were initially successful in repelling two Milanese cavalry charges. Carmagnola then brought up his crossbowmen on the Swiss flanks and ordered his men-at-arms to dismount and fight on foot with their lances, which outreached the halberds.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arbedo
Oh my, an unreferenced quote from Wikipedia. Seriously ?
Anyway, I checked the main sources listed below in the article, Pieri and Mallett, and guess what ? They do not mention halberds at all. Not that I doubt that the Swiss used them, mind you: I know it’s superfluous to mention it buuuut, as I’ve said before (it’s becoming a catchphrase), halberds are more effective than pikes against armoured enemies. Not that you would care about that, right ? It’s quite clear that you’re more than willing to grasp at any straw you can clutch, rather than face the facts.
But you’re lucky ! In Pieri’s book I actually found two other battles in 1487 where Italian (or Milanese to be precise) infantry defeated a Swiss square: a failed Swiss assault on Domodossola, on the 20th of April and the battle for the Crevola bridge, on the 28th.
Oh, I forgot to add this:
Also, since as I have already mentioned (but you just chose to ignore again the obviousness) the Swiss didn’t fight with pikes alone, but with halberds and other weapons too, your demand is simply illogical: if you want an example where “dismounted men-at-arms forced their way through rows of Swiss pikes”, I’ve already given you one that you chose to ignore (mmh, I begin to see a pattern here…); on the other hand, if you want to add the provision “through rows of Swiss pikes and pikes only” you cannot have one, since the Swiss simply didn’t fight that way. Your argument doesn’t make any sense, anyway.
Oh my, an unreferenced quote from Wikipedia. Seriously ?
If you’d prefer, I can point you to Medieval Warfare, which says the exact same thing:
“Up until the time of the Battle of
Arbedo, the main weapon of the Swiss
was the halberd. After their defeat, they
developed a new tactic, protecting their
halberdiers with a cordon of pikemen… After the defeat
at Arbedo, in a Diet (assembly) held in
Lucerne, it was decreed that all cantons
should greatly increase the number of
pikemen among their infantry. The Swiss
pike, up to 6m long, greatly surpassed the
reach of every mêlée weapon it encoun-
tered, including the lance.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/48578019?seq=2
Not that I doubt that the Swiss used them, mind you: I know it’s superfluous to mention it buuuut, as I’ve said before (it’s becoming a catchphrase), halberds are more effective than pikes against armoured enemies.
Apparently the Swiss didn’t think so, given that they responded to the defeat by increasing the number of pikes in their army. But even if halberds were more effective, so what? We’re discussing the feasibility of pushing your way through rows of pike heads, not whether the pike was the best weapon overall.
If you’d prefer, I can point you to Medieval Warfare, which says the exact same thing
No, I do not prefer an unreferenced assertion in a non-scholarly article published by a non-academic journal, which you clearly found while frantically googling in search of anything to grasp at. Wikipedia was frankly better.
We’re discussing the feasibility of pushing your way through rows of pike heads, not whether the pike was the best weapon overall.
I’ll repeat myself again, in the vain hope that this time you’ll begin to reason: your argument is simply illogical.
If you want an example where dismounted men-at-arms defeated Swiss forces armed only with pikes you won’t find one, since the Swiss didn’t fight with pikes alone, as you yourself are forced to admit.
I have one question, though: why are you so obsessed with all this ? Do you have some kind of fetish for Swiss mercenaries ? I’m puzzled by your insistence to ignore sistematically all evidence and logic contrary to your notions.
I have one question, though: why are you so obsessed with all this ? Do you have some kind of fetish for Swiss mercenaries ? I’m puzzled by your insistence to ignore sistematically all evidence and logic contrary to your notions.
“Obsessed”? I’m simply talking military history, on a blog dedicated to talking about military history, just like everyone else commenting here. And I don’t think I’d accuse other people of having unhealthy obsessions if I lost my composure as easily as you.
“Obsessed”? I’m simply talking military history, on a blog dedicated to talking about military history, just like everyone else commenting here.
As I’ve said (sigh) before, your insistence in sistematically ignoring all evidence and logic is anything but healthy.
@Paolo, I can’t read Italian. Could you provide a bit more info about these 1487 battles that Pieri writes about? The year is 1487 so that’s before the French invasion. Is there some more formal name for this particular conflict? Were the Swiss fighting as “Swiss” or as mercenaries for someone else?
Mr. X, Paolo, please knock it off, or at least be more polite.
Paolo, Mr. X can be annoyingly pedantic but please adopt the spirit of charitable interpretation, think of these as requests for clarification on a point you may have overlooked.
Mr. X, Paolo is right about Arbedo. My wargaming sources, which I trust more than Wikipedia, say that at this period the Swiss were using pikes but not the majority, 40%.
But Paolo, Mr. X is also right in that since the main post is about pike phalanxes vs other infantry, men-at-arms defeating majority halberd armed infantry doesn’t tell us much.
I know I can rude sometimes, I apologize.
Mr. X, Paolo is right about Arbedo. My wargaming sources, which I trust more than Wikipedia, say that at this period the Swiss were using pikes but not the majority, 40%.
I don’t know which sources you’re using, but Military History puts the figure much lower:
“While Milanese crossbowmen dis-
tracted the Swiss by shooting into their
flanks, Carmagnola ordered his cavalry
to dismount and attack on foot. When
the two forces collided, not only did the
Milanese soldiers greatly outnumber the
Swiss, but their lances also outreached
the Swiss weapons. Most of the Swiss
were armed with their primary weapon,
the halberd, which was usually about 2m
in length. Even though some Swiss troops
were carrying the much longer pike, these
soldiers amounted to less than a third of
the entire force. The dismounted Milanese
knights made good use of their lances,
which were almost twice as long as the
Swiss halberds.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/48578019?seq=2
But anyway, the question wasn’t whether armies involving pikemen were ever beaten by men-at-arms, but whether men-at-arms were able to push through rows of pike heads, and nobody’s been able to give any source for that happening at Arbedo or anywhere else.
Incidentally, Charle’s Oman’s Art of War in the Middle Ages implies that the figure was even lower:
“The enemy, a body of 4000 men from Uri, Unterwalden, Zug, and Lucern, were mainly halberdiers, the pikemen and crossbowmen forming only a third of their force.”
Mr. X, Paolo is right about Arbedo. My wargaming sources, which I trust more than Wikipedia, say that at this period the Swiss were using pikes but not the majority, 40%.
Paolo certainly isn’t right about anything relevant to the discussion, since all participants of this discussion agree that the dismounted men-at-arms at Arbedo fought with their lances, thus making the scenario miles distant from any interaction of Roman legionary and pike phalanx — the men-at-arms were themselves effectively armed with pikes, and would have no incentive to push through enemy pikes into the effective range of their utterly non-existent gladii.
That does not change regardless of what the Swiss were using.
I admire your spirit of mediation but in this instance it is clarity itself that Paolo is argumentationally toothless; particularly as the mask begins to crumble over the course of the exchange and he resorts to flat-out ad hominem in addition to the misdirection and strawmanning.
Paolo is argumentationally toothless; particularly as the mask begins to crumble over the course of the exchange and he resorts to flat-out ad hominem in addition to the misdirection and strawmanning.
I’m not the only one who resorts to “flat-out ad hominem in addition to the misdirection and strawmanning”, apparently. As I’ve said before I know I have little patience and I can be rude and confrontational, and for that I’ve apologized, but seemingly it’s ok if others do the same. By the way, what would the strawmanning be ?
Anyway, I am “argumentationally toothless” only if you keep ignoring that:
– the argument about halberds is pointless, as it’s rather lapalissian that dismounted men-at-arms aren’t Roman legionaries and Swiss squares aren’t Macedonian phalanxes. Also, cavalry lances aren’t certainly pikes; please note that the original OP didn’t say anything about the men-at-arms’ weapons, only their armour. Who’s strawmanning here ?
– there are other battles, one of which I’ve clearly detailed below, where Swiss squares are defeated by infantry.
The major problem is that the Swiss pike phalanxes, not the earlier majority halberd armed Swiss, fought against Burgundians, French, Italians, and Germans where all the men-at-arms were fighting mounted.
So for plate armoured infantry (dismounted men-at-arms) vs pike we have in Europe only Arbedo (1422) and St Jacob-en-Birs (1444), where the Swiss were still majority halberd.
We do have a couple of battles in Britain, where English knights maintained the tradition of fighting on foot.
At Stokes Field, 1487, the Yorkist invasion had one or two thousand Swiss and German mercenaries, probably pikes. They were defeated by dismounted English men-at-arms backed by longbows and artillery.
At Flodden, 1513, the Scots infantry had switched to pikes and the front ranks wore enough armour to be largely longbow proof. The big “phalanxes” did manage to push back the dismounted English men-at-arms on initial contact, but couldn’t break them and the English eventually won the melee and inflicted heavy casualties. But, the Scots were advancing over very muddy ground and slightly uphill, so maybe they would have broken the English with more momentum?
@scifihughf
I don’t think anything has ever been written in English about that campaign; it doesn’t have a name as it’s only one among many border conflicts between Milan and the Swiss in the XVth and early XVIth centuries, which have been mostly forgotten.
I’d never heard about it before, and the only Italian monograph that I know of is from Mario Troso and Maria Luisa Picchetti, Crevola 1487. La battaglia. Ossola e Ticino tra ducali e invasori, 2019, which however I haven’t read.
Piero Pieri, Il Rinascimento e la crisi militare italiana, 1953, writes that on the 18th of April 6’000 Swiss crossed the border on the way to Domodossola, capital of Val d’Ossola (Ossola valley); the Amazon preview of Troso’s book states that the invasion was spurred by the bishop of Sion Jost von Silenen.
According to Pieri, Domodossola was defended by 6-700 provvisionati (i.e. mercenary/professional infantry in permanent employ), a few mounted crossbowmen, and, I translate literally, “the usual shoddy local peasant levies”. On the 20th the Swiss attack but they are repulsed; I can’t find any mention of a ducal castle, fortification or garrison in the town, neither in Pieri nor in Teresa Zambarbieri, Castelli e castellani viscontei, 1988; it refers to the first half of the XVth century but, given that the Sforza didn’t build many fortifications and that the northen border of the Duchy was traditionally left unfortified, I think it’s still valid). Pieri makes no mention of Swiss losses (nor Milanese), but I think they must have been very light as they retire pillaging the country; on the 25th 1’000 Swiss detach from the main corps to pillage val Vigezzo.
Meanwhile, the Milanese army is gathered under Renato Trivulzio: 112 men at arms, 100 mounted crossbowmen, 25 stradiots and 3’000 infantrymen (presumably provvisionati too, I’d say); they assemble in Vogogna, the only ducal stronghold on that side of the Lago Maggiore (see Zambarbieri).
The main Swiss army is deploy around the Crevola bridge, on both sides of the Diveria river, near the confluence with the Toce river; on the 28th the other Swiss detachment approaches Domodossola again but is massacred by the Domodossola provvisionati and the light cavalry from the main army.
On the same day Trivulzio attacks the bridge, but is wounded by a handgun; however the light cavalry is back from the previous engagement, crosses the Toce and blocks the Swiss line of retreat: a group of 100 chosen infantry fords the Diveria and does the same on another side. The Swiss are surrounded and destroyed: Pieri lists almost 2’000 dead and wounded, plus a lot of prisoners. “A certain number” manages to escape, so the Milanese ring mustn’t have been very tight, however at least some of them are captured and killed by the locals, enraged for the previous pillaging.
The Milanese suffer 150-200 casualties; Pieri further states that the battle at the bridge was won by the 3’000 infantry and 100 mounted crossbowmen against 5’000 Swiss.
The Amazon preview of Troso’s book further states that there were other engagements that day at Preglia and Trontano/Masera, but I can’t comment on that; I’m thinking about buying the book, anyway.
I hope I’ve been of some help, I’ve followed Pieri as close as possible !
Thanks Paolo for more effort than I expected. Interesting and I’ll try to do some reading of my own (but not right away).
Also interesting in that this is a Swiss-Milanese conflict. The usual narrative among us English non specialists is that the Swiss band together to gain their independence from external feudal oppressors, then fight as mercenaries in other people’s armies. We don’t think of now independent Switzerland as a state among other states, and thus involved in the same sorts of border disputes and state vs state conflicts as everyone else.
I think there are two main reasons why the tactical model suggested by Philip Sabin is not widely accepted or ignored in discussions such as take place on this blog. First and most important is insisting that Roman legionaries are “skirmishing”. I do not think it means what you think it means. The second, possibly arising from being ignored, is over-hyping this as some radical new view that overturns existing wisdom.
Start with “skirmishing” and why this is confusing and counter productive in discussions about ancient (and medieval) warfare. Skirmishing in the 20/21 C defines a battlefield role or tactic, not equipment or formation. All modern infantry carry much the same gear, and all modern infantry fight in dispersed scattered formation because it’s suicidal to clump up. “Skirmishers” engage the enemy but are not trying to push through (although they can exploit weaknesses) and if the enemy launch their own determined attack the skirmishers fall back.
Rewind to late 18/early 19 C, time of Napoleon, “skirmishing” now describes formation as well as role. Skirmishing infantry fight in a dispersed formation with a similar role. But most infantry fight in close formation, and these different formations are for a different style of combat. Over-simplifying, infantry in close formation many ranks deep are relying on the morale effect of a forward advance and bayonet charge. If they can carry through the charge, the enemy infantry will usually break before contact.
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiic-morale-and-cohesion/
Infantry in shallower and wider lines are relying more on firepower. They hold position close to the enemy, and if they can inflict enough casualties with firepower to make the enemy become disordered and lose cohesion, then they charge.
Rewinding further back to ancient and medieval times, “skirmishing” describes role AND formation AND equipment. From Greek psiloi to medieval French bidets, skirmishers are infantry in dispersed formation with missile weapons, little or no armour, small shields. Any infantry in close formation have as much armour as they can afford and the biggest shield they can carry. Even if they have missile weapons, from Achaemenids to Janissaries, in close formation they don’t skirmish, they stand and fight.
So when someone writes that Roman legionaries are “skirmishing”, that may be sort of correct if the intention is 20/21 C usage, but my immediate reaction is that for ancient warfare this is nonsense. Legionaries are in the wrong formation, with the wrong armour, and the wrong shield.
My understanding of what Philip Sabin writes is that legionaries are not skirmishers, the difference according to Sabin is that legionaries didn’t automatically throw pila and charge. They could fight more like Napoleonic line infantry, throwing pila and only charging if the enemy were disordered. And against a pike phalanx that does seem to be an interesting and reasonable suggestion worth discussing. But they’re not skirmishers.
And the second problem is hype. Academics can be competing for attention just like anywhere else, and suggesting that maybe legionaries didn’t automatically charge after throwing pila is less dramatic than Conventional Wisdom Is All Wrong And Everyone Needs To Adopt This Radical New Paradigm. What Philip Sabin is actually suggesting isn’t an antithesis.
Scifihughf,
I feel like this disagreement is principally a semantic matter.
I would in fact actually agree that “line infantry” is a fair good descriptor for how I think the Roman legionaries functioned in combat. The line infantry of the Napoleonic era sometimes routed their opponents with one volley and a bayonet charge, and sometimes they stayed at range and endured more prolonged exchanges of fire. Opportunities, circumstances, and the opponents encountered could strongly affect how Napoleonic infantry behaved in various battles, and I think that the same is true of the Roman legions and indeed of all soldiers of history.
And yes, it is true that within the republican Roman military system, the legionary was not a skirmisher in role per se. There is indeed a difference between a veles and a hastatus in terms of equipment, expected role, and battlefield behaviour.
However, I’m using the term “skirmish” here as a verb, not a noun. I’m interested in skirmishing as an action, not “skirmisher” as a particular role. I’m interested in what the legionaries were doing when they didn’t throw one volley and immediately charge. I’m interested in the “prolonged exchanges of fire” sort of battles, when one gladius charge didn’t or couldn’t immediately break the enemy.
In the battles between the manipular legions and the Macedonians or Seleucids, there were repeated instances where a legion could evidently give ground, even give ground over quite significant distances on the battlefield, while not being routed or broken. The losses they took are by all indications quite light in these battles, so it doesn’t seem likely they were in hand to hand range with the phalanx. They were able to retire in good order, in the face of frontal pressure from the advance of the phalanxes, which is no small feat.
The most likely explanation of this, to my mind at least, is that they were remaining engaged while avoiding hand to hand combat. Move forward, throw some pila or other missiles (rocks from the field, javelins picked up from the wounded or the dead, etc) or even insults, then back off again and retire, remaining out of range and avoiding a full commitment to hand to hand combat.
Even though the tactical role of a hastatus is not that of a skirmisher, I’m not sure how to describe this mode of combat other than the word “skirmishing”. Now Philip Sabin himself if I recall correctly describes his model using terms like “Lull and clash”, or referring to the instances of close combat as an “intermittent pulse” in longer lulls of missile exchanges at distance. But what would you call throwing missiles at the enemy while remaining out of hand to hand distance during these lulls? “Skirmishing” seems an accurate enough word to me.
I’m dubious of the proposition that the legionaires of the main line were expected to spend most of their time hurling javelins, because they only had two apiece. The troops who are expected to do that, the velites, had a lot more lighter javelins. And while javelins can be thrown back, phalanxes in particular seem unlikely to do that; dropping their pikes to pick up pila would disrupt their wall of pikes.
That said, I doubt they just ran straight into the pikes and impaled themselves; I suspect “close contact” was mostly at pike length as they tried to force the pikes out of the way. It would then be relatively easy to give ground; just take a step back and you’re out of range. The phalanx has to pursue slowly or risk breaking up, at which point the next line or adjacent maniple can get to grips with them.
Guy,
Livy 22:38:
“Up to that day there had only been the military oath binding the men to assemble at the bidding of the consuls and not to disband until they received orders to do so. It had also been the custom among the soldiers, when the infantry were formed into companies of 100, and the cavalry into troops of 10, for all the men in each company or troop to take a voluntary oath to each other that they would not leave their comrades for fear or for flight, and that they would not quit the ranks save to fetch or pick up a weapon, to strike an enemy, or to save a comrade. This voluntary covenant was now changed into a formal oath taken before the tribunes.”
Livy tells us that the traditional soldier’s oath taken during the Punic Wars was that the soldiers would not leave the ranks except for certain permitted acts, one of which is to retrieve or pick up a weapon.
Now I suppose it is possible that your sword may break in combat and you need to go pick up something else from the battlefield. However, the legionaries also throw their javelins. It seems pretty likely that this oath could also just as much mean picking up another javelin or other kind of missile for use during a ranged combat phase of the battle.
You are correct that the legionaries only carried two pila per man and the velites carry more. But every javelin thrown by the velites or by the enemy skirmishers that misses or hits the ground becomes a potential missile for either the legionaries or their enemies to use later. Every veles who is wounded or killed in the skirmishing will be dropping their javelins. The same goes for any legionaries wounded or killed or otherwise disabled: A wounded man making his way to the rear to get away from the battle is not likely to be hauling his heavy pila with him.
Livy even tells us of battles where Roman soldiers disrupted their enemies’ ranks by throwing rocks! (Livy 9:35).
And two pila per man might be more ammunition than you think. It may seem like little if the whole formation volleys all their pila all at once, but I’m not sure they always did that. For one thing, if the maniple is deployed in any kind of depth, I suspect that only the front ranks can really throw their pila with any kind of proper force or aim. It takes some space to make a good javelin throw, and lofting it above your comrades’ heads from the rear of a formation seems like a waste of an expensive weapon to me. If only the front-fighters and maybe the second rank can actually throw these weapons with proper effect, then in a prolonged exchange the ammunition supply of a maniple may be depleted gradually as some soldiers move forward and throw and then are replaced by others from behind. That is, of course, only my supposition though.
So in summary: 1. The battlefield is covered in potential ammunition, and 2. In situations where a maniple may need to stay at range for some time and is unable to close immediately (As in, when engaging a formed phalanx), I think they could modulate how quickly they use up their pila, not necessarily having to volley them all at once.
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek proposal: did the Romans perhaps space their files that widely in order to allow the infantry to caracole? (First rank throws a pilum, moves to the back, formely-second rank throws a pilum and moves to the back, etc.)
Basil Marte,
A “pilum countermarch” is technically possible in a Roman maniple, but I don’t think there’s any real evidence indicating that they did this. It’s an interesting suggestion, but I’m not aware of any texts or other evidence that might support it unfortunately.
Another possibility is that a maniple in a prolonged missile phase may have behaved a bit like a pack of modern day rioters throwing bricks or bottles: Some individuals dash forward and throw their missile, then return back to the mass of the group. Other individuals breaks out of the group and repeats the act, and so on and so forth.
I suspect the modern rioter is a better comparison to undrilled hunters pulled into combat, as you might see in hunter-gatherer battles. It’s not terribly effective against riot police, and I don’t think it’d work much better against ancient heavy infantry. Plus it breaks the formation, which can be a problem if the enemy heavy infantry they’re harassing put on a sudden burst of speed.
I do think that “prolonged exchange of fire” seems unlikely when the legionaire is only carrying two pila. OTOH, even later on soldiers weren’t neccessarily carrying that much ammunition. (there are examples of early-modern soldiers having a dozen shots or so and presumably not expecting to use more)
I suspect that the Romans had comissary staff who’d carry fresh pila to the legionaries, since even on the “volley and charge” model, you might need your hastati or principes to carry out more than one charge over the course of the battle, so you’d want a way of replenishing their ammunition. I don’t think the “prolonged exchange of fire” model applies to most battles, since the pilum isn’t very good for that sort of combat, but given the Romans’ apparent ability to be pushed back a long way by enemy phalanxes without suffering heavy casualties or a catastrophic breakdown in cohesion, I suspect that it does apply for their battles against the Hellenistic armies.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but it seems many people assume that each Roman soldier must have necesssarily thrown his pila by himself. Is there a reason why couldn’t just the first two or three ranks in each maniple throw spears in a prolonged fashion, each man stopping to catch his breath every now and then, while the men in back pass on their pila to front when they need more to throw?
@T
Honestly if they’re going to do that it seems more likely they’d just have the front ranks back up through the holes in the formation and the next ranks advance.
@guy
I think the question is, do we know if legionnaires were trained to the extent that they could do something like countermarching (without the maniple becoming disorderly)? Even though many were veterans, I don’t think this was yet a standing army made of professional soldiers at this point?
If they had the training, then there’s nothing strange about the idea of each man coming up to the front to throw his pila, no further explanation needed. But if they were still mostly part-time citizen soldiers (just very experienced ones) and could not be expected to have the training to perform such maneuvers, then they could still accomplish basically the same thing by just handing a pila to the next person in the file when asked, which is easy to do without any additonal training at all.
@Eric Dalshaug, “the tactical role of a hastatus is not that of a skirmisher” is exactly why I suggest not calling what they’re doing “skirmishing”.
The Roman army has velites, who are definitely both skirmishers in equipment and formation and skirmishing by role. I agree with Humpty Dumpty that we should be the master, not words, but using “skirmishing” for legionaries as well as for velites does nothing but cause confusion. We already have “lull and pulse” or “intermittent pulse” thanks to Philip Sabin, so why not just use those?
I agree with Humpty Dumpty that we should be the master, not words, but using “skirmishing” for legionaries as well as for velites does nothing but cause confusion.
On the contrary, if legionaries happen to be doing the same thing as velites, using the same word illuminates the situation.
We already have “lull and pulse” or “intermittent pulse” thanks to Philip Sabin, so why not just use those?
Because neither of them specifically describes the process of irregularly and intermittently engaging an enemy at significant standoff; said process being a significant modern colloquial usage of the word “skirmish”.
Said process does not strictly imply any form of pulsed operation. Low-intensity missile combat does not need to form the basis for any variety of high-intensity massed melee, though in the Roman case it quite often did; but just because it was in that context intermixed with another activity does not signify that a name for it is unnecessary, since the proportion of battlefield action which it occupied was clearly highly variable.
Ignoring it entirely is how one gets the volley-and-charge model, which is blatantly flawed to the point of total unworkability in many historical scenarios, including many of those described over the course of this series.
“As if a mass of heavily armed infantry equipped with 16 foot long pikes would be incapable of killing their opponents!”
You present this as absurd but it doesn’t seem that way to me. A 16 foot long pike is extremely difficult to aim and a dense mass of infantry means the back ranks could see extremely little of the enemy. It seems like the Macedonian formation was much denser then the swiss and spanish formations in the early modern period.
Yeah, I’m thinking that a four metre-long spear isn’t exactly well suited to balanced thrusting, especially against an opponent with a shield. I picture what the phalanx might have looked like, and I see either something that presents a hedge of points that are a formidable obstacle for an enemy formation that is determined to fight through them to the soldiers, or something that presents a wall that can keep pushing back an opponent on the defensive.
I’d hate to see that hedge of points heading straight towards me, although admittedly I would feel happier in armour and with a shield to hide behind.
Isator Levi and AiryW,
“The Romans, when they attacked the Macedonian phalanx, were unable to force a passage, and Salvius, the commander of the Pelignians, snatched the standard of his company and hurled it in among the enemy. Then the Pelignians, since among the Italians it is an unnatural and flagrant thing to abandon a standard, rushed on towards the place where it was, and dreadful losses were inflicted and suffered on both sides. For the Romans tried to thrust aside the long spears of their enemies with their swords, or to crowd them back with their shields, or to seize and put them by with their very hands; while the Macedonians, holding them firmly advanced with both hands, and piercing those who fell upon them, armour and all, since neither shield nor breastplate could resist the force of the Macedonian long spear, hurled headlong back the Pelignians and Marrucinians, who, with no consideration but with animal fury rushed upon the strokes that met them, and a certain death. When the first line had thus been cut to pieces, those arrayed behind them were beaten back; and though there was no flight, still they retired towards the mountain called Olocrus, so that even Aemilius, as Poseidonius tells us, when he saw it, rent his garments. For this part of his army was retreating, and the rest of the Romans were turning aside from the phalanx, which gave them no access to it, but confronted them as it were with a dense barricade of long spears, and was everywhere unassailable. ”
Plutarch, Life of Aemilius Paullus.
“Neither shield nor breastplate could resist the force of the Macedonian long spear”.
A sarissa is a long pike haft with a small, sharp point. In kinetic penetration terms, it’s an extremely deadly weapon. You would not want to take a blow from this thing, even if you are a legionary with a shield and a coat of maille.
A polearm like a pike can also prove deceptively nimble, at least in relatively linear movements. You can’t easily turn around with one levelled, but you can dip and raise and circle the point to avoid an opponent’s shield or disengage around an attempted beat against your pike.
And of course there’s also rows and rows of these when you fight against a phalanx. You, the legionary, may have all your attention occupied with the pikeman to your front, only to find yourself getting thrust through the lungs by pikeman from another row or position within the phalanx. The fighting order of the phalanx does have space for individual movement within it, and one of the advantages of polearms in formation fighting is that people can track their weapon to left or right and strike at targets of opportunity.
You can’t actually fight rows of sarissa with a sword and a shield with any hope of success. Quite wisely, most of the Roman army at Pydna avoided coming within reach of the thing. That sort of shock effect and ability to create and take space on the battlefield was why the phalanx was a crucial tool within the Alexandrian system. It wouldn’t have worked if the sarissa was not a weapon to be respected.
Would you happen to know if anyone’s ever done medium-size re-enactments of a sarissa phalanx? Say, roughly 1024 people, in 16×64 array?
I suppose the main equipment cost would be 1024 sarissas, of the correct wood and properly tapered, with heads and butts. 64 aspis shields would be easier to mock up, for the front rank to strap on. With even a few hours of drilling, something like that seems like it would go a long way toward answering a lot of questions.
It is extremely clear that neither you, nor Plutarch, have ever held a 15-foot pole.
What a pike wall does is create a situation where an opponent must devote all or nearly all of their attention to avoiding stabbing themselves accidentally. The length of the pike does not increase the force with which it can be stabbed, if anything the need to use both hands decreases the freedom of motion for the wielder resulting in less force; a longer spear simply has a point that is further away and thus harder to control, which is why you don’t see pikes in formalized dueling. A longer pike does have a greater overall weight, so when used vertically to stamp a downed opponent with the butt it does impart more energy than a shorter weapon…that may be what Plutarch is garbling, the use of the heavy end to kill soldiers who had already wounded themselves by charging carelessly.
Go get yourself a pole three broom-handles long and try to write your name on a wall with it.
a longer spear simply has a point that is further away and thus harder to control, which is why you don’t see pikes in formalized dueling
Pikes were, as far as I recall, in fact used for dueling. But the whole question is rather dubious to begin with, since the weapons chosen for a duel have little to do with effectivity — the duelists employ precisely the same equipment as their adversaries and there is therefore not a competitive dynamic between different weaponry.
The length of the pike does not increase the force with which it can be stabbed
This is erroneous. The length of a pike contributes necessarily (attending to the impossibility of compensatorily decreasing the shaft’s diameter without rendering it structurally unsound) to its weight, and therefore to its momentum when at velocity.
if anything the need to use both hands decreases the freedom of motion for the wielder resulting in less force
To be clear here, your hypothesis is that employing better leverage and twice the muscle tissue to perform a thrusting motion results in less force?
A longer pike does have a greater overall weight, so when used vertically to stamp a downed opponent with the butt it does impart more energy than a shorter weapon…that may be what Plutarch is garbling, the use of the heavy end to kill soldiers who had already wounded themselves by charging carelessly.
This is certainly the first time I’ve seen someone apply the sauroter spiel to pikes, so kudos for originality. But stabbing people has likely never been a principal role of ferules; in Greek contexts at the very least, their counterbalancing utility seems to have been far more central.
This is certainly the first time I’ve seen someone apply the sauroter spiel to pikes, so kudos for originality. But stabbing people has likely never been a principal role of ferules; in Greek contexts at the very least, their counterbalancing utility seems to have been far more central.
Aside from anything else, a large number of surviving sauroters are blunt.
A pike block is absolutely capable of killing people who stand there and let it. A Macedonian pike block seems to struggle with killing people who don’t. The catch is that a slow advance by troops who are themselves very hard to get at and hurt will usually force the enemy’s line to bend and then break. At which point the Macedonians’ light and medium-heavy infantry and their cavalry start ripping your army up, which means winning the battle.
So “not letting the phalanx kill you” usually means “losing the battle.”
The Romans were remarkable in that their formation was flexible enough that they could avoid death at the points of Macedonian pikes while still presenting a cohesive enough front line that the successor states’ other combat arms couldn’t start killing them in great numbers.
Whether this makes them “good at pinning, bad at killing” is to some extent relative. Against the legions, the phalanx was good at pinning and bad at killing. Against another phalanx, good at both. Against the relatively lightly arrayed troops of the Achaemenids, Alexander’s phalanx was no doubt good at killing.
In relation to “killing people who stand there and let it”:
I am thinking that the vulnerability of the pikes ought to make the formation more aggressive. We’ve talked much about the various things an enterprising Roman might do to a plodding pike formation – try to cut at a spear, moonwalk infront, lever it with a shield etc.
But all of that flies out of the window if the pikeman is running at you. You probably can’t afford to stand your ground and try to cut at the pike or do other fancy things if the spear points are charging at you (as opposed to slowly advancing and periodically thrusting).
Whether the deep, cohesion-reliant Macedonian pike formation could charge in good order is a different question..
We’ve talked much about the various things an enterprising Roman might do to a plodding pike formation – try to cut at a spear, moonwalk infront, lever it with a shield etc.
And, as the ancient sources seem to overwhelmingly point out, none of that works. The Paeligni try it, and get slaughtered for it because it’s physically and biomechanically hopeless regardless of their volition.
But all of that flies out of the window if the pikeman is running at you. You probably can’t afford to stand your ground and try to cut at the pike or do other fancy things if the spear points are charging at you (as opposed to slowly advancing and periodically thrusting).
As above, you can’t afford to stand your ground anyways; the main thing that a reckless charge does here is dramatically break up the formation, which is very bad.
At Pydna the Romans fell back and baited the phalangites into charging after them, and the result was one dead phalanx. If they wanted to stand their ground then they certainly could have in that battle, and both their decision not to and the result of that decision incline me to believe that trying to melee the iron hedgehog was a terrible idea and everyone at the time knew it.
To add to that, I would say that a Macedonian phalanx could kill Romans just fine if it could keep them at the correct range for the first and possibly second ranks of the formation to use their pikes effectively.
The Romans have shields and good armour but, without pikes of their own, they will nevertheless succumb eventually; should the Macedonians thrust their pikes into the Romans enough times, they will begin to make hits and the Romans have no way to reply at this particular range.
The problem for the *Macedonians,* however, is that the Romans have absolutely no reason *at all* to stay at that range.
If the Romans can’t penetrate the wall of pikes, perhaps having taken some casualties in the attempt, they can simply back up beyond the range of the pikes. In this case, you might see the Roman formation give ground as the Macedonians advance after them, such as at Magnesia, but the Macedonians are unlikely to catch the Romans as their smaller formations are more mobile. The Macedonians have to move more slowly to avoid disrupting the aforementioned wall of pikes protecting them from the Romans.
The Romans also have the means to engage the Macedonians from beyond the range of the pikes, thanks to the use of pila. Should the Macedonians be unable to advance fast enough to pressure the Romans, the Romans can pelt them with javelins from relative safety. This is likely to inflict some casualties, but more importantly it might disrupt the wall of pikes. Macedonians taking hits, or moving to avoid hits, will likely see their pike-points bounce about or even perhaps strike the ground.
The wall of pikes that kept the Romans at bay thus begins to crumble. The Romans, just out of range and seeing gaps in pike coverage, may then step into those gaps and use their shields and swords to *keep them open* and to widen them further. A Roman who managed to put his sword in contact with the head of a pike, for example, would have no trouble at all pushing it downwards to the ground and stepping on it, or otherwise directing it out of the way. Then his fellows might step through the hole he had opened, relying on their shields and armour in case some Macedonian tried to close it.
The Roman reliance on larger numbers of smaller formations lends itself perfectly to this, because it allows them to much more easily take advantage of localized breaks in the line than a larger formation would.
And once the Romans are through the gaps in the wall of pikes, they can get in contact with the Macedonians at a range where Dr. Devereaux has very comprehensively explained their advantages.
“A Roman who managed to put his sword in contact with the head of a pike, for example, would have no trouble at all pushing it downwards to the ground and stepping on it, or otherwise directing it out of the way.”
Stepping on it would be a bad idea most of the time. It’d be a good way to trip and get your legs tangled. Those shafts were made to be strong, so they weren’t going to break under your weight. Not saying it won’t be done, just that it’s not a great idea.
Contact with swords is generally a bad idea–you need that for killing people with. If I’m stopping your blade my options for murdering you are somewhat limited. They aren’t eliminated, but making use of those options takes a bit more training. I’ve done it, and using a disengage against a polearmsman who’s not expecting it is really, really satisfying, but it’s still harder than just stabbing someone in the face while their weapon is off stabbing clouds.
What I was trained to do was contact with my shield and ride the shaft of the weapon up as I closed distance. If I’m making contact with my shield I know exactly where the weapon is, after all. And since the guy I want to kill is on the other side of that weapon, I don’t even need to see him in this case, he guides me right to him (useful in a melee). In single combat you can push it wherever you want. In small unit combat, generally you want to push it up (unless you’re on the side of the unit and know there’s no one coming up beside you), because you know your friends aren’t up there.
The problem with all that is that there’s not one guy with a spear in front of you. There are a bunch. You need to deflect ALL of those spears. Which isn’t impossible–generally once you start deflecting a few the rest get deflected by those first ones, if you take advantage of it fast enough–but it does change the equation somewhat.
What you don’t want to do is get too far ahead of your unit. The pikemen carried short swords, daggers, and the like, and those can make for a really bad day if you’re a lone shieldman in the middle of the pike formation.
Regarding Livy 44.41.4, you quote the same passage in an earlier article of yours (Ancient ‘Tanks’?), but there you translate it as describing the elephants themselves (rather than the elephant-fighters).
Ah, I need to go back and fix that. Translators have differed as to how to read the passage, but I think it is the elephant-fighters, not the elephants, that are useless.
Over the last few posts, I’ve been wondering about the light/medium/heavy infantry distinction– how is this defined? I get light=skirmisher I suppose, but what distinguishes medium from heavy? If Roman legionaries are “heavy,” how do they stand in relation to say medieval men-at-arms? What makes a unit “heavy” in pre-gunpowder armies? Just amount/weight of armor? Tactical doctrine?
If I remember an earlier post right, medium infantry in this context means infantry with enough protection that they can stand in the battle line like heavies, but who are still mobile enough to fight as skirmishers. Generalists as opposed to the more specialized light and heavy infantry
In practice it mostly refers to people who are outside the main system of arms used by the leading force of the army, usually allied or mercenary forces who expect to serve the ‘heavy’ role in their home culture but are too lightly armored to be used for that purpose in a wealthier context. They end up being ‘good enough’ as part of a broad attack and sometimes even advantaged because of slightly greater mobility, but a liability when on defense, and less likely to still need paying after the battle in both options.
Examples of medium infantry are Saxon fyrd and most Celtic infantry. They are fighting in close formation rather than dispersed to avoid missiles, they will fight hand to hand in formation rather than relying on shooting and staying out of reach. They probably have the same primary weapon(s) as the “heavy” infantry, eg spears and swords, and shields.
What they don’t have is good body armour and helmet. Anyone who can will have some kind of helmet, but more likely a pot helm or skullcap rather than say with brow reinforcement, cheek and neck guards. A few may even have some metal armour, but it’s going to be a mail vest for the upper body instead of almost everyone having elbow and knee length mail.
All else being equal heavy infantry will defeat medium infantry in melee by being better protected and harder to seriously wound or kill. Since all else frequently isn’t equal, and you go to war with the army you have not the army you want, there’s still a place for them on the battlefield.
So I’d say body armour is mostly what makes a unit “heavy” in pre-gunpowder armies.
How Roman legionaries stand in relation to medieval men-at-arms is a question that tabletop wargame rule writers have been thinking about for a few decades.
General opinion is that European medieval plate armoured men-at-arms are the ultimate in armoured infantry. I don’t know if anyone has tested pilum against plate, but knights would be largely immune to most weapons carried in the Roman era or before. (We have some independent confirmation in 16th C Japanese warlords, who were damn good at warfare themselves, buying European steel plate armour for their own use.)
So there’s at least two ways of looking at it. One is that knights are absolutely better armoured to legionaries and thus are “super heavy” or something like that. The other is to say that what mattered in historical battles was protection relative to other soldiers, and while knights are the best armoured on a medieval battlefield, everyone else is generally wearing more protection (and has more high quality steel weaponry) too. So relatively they still have the same role, the expensive heavy infantry who should be able to beat anyone else in melee combat.
You see something similar with cavalry. By the end of the middle ages, most “light” cavalry in Western Europe would, armour-wise, qualify as heavy cavalry in a Roman or Hellenistic army. Later, during the Napoleonic period, the “heavy” cavalry cuirassiers often had less armour than their “light” counterparts four hundred years earlier.
AIUI, Heavy Infantry are intended to close with the enemy and rely on shock action. Light Infantry are intended to keep their distance and send missiles towards the other lot. “Medium” Infantry would be capable of both.
So a man with a pike would be Heavy infantry, a man with a musket would be Light Infantry, and a musketeer with a bayonet would, presumably, be Medium Infantry.
So a legionary with throwing spears and a sword should be Medium Infantry, however much armour he was wearing. Note that armour and shield would protect him whether he was engaged in a missile duel or close combat. Of course, the weight of the armour might make it harder for him to keep his distance from the enemy, but the point of armour is to eliminate the need to do that.
Generally, there’s a sense of “heavy is as heavy does.” The practical definition of heavy infantry is that they can hold a line against pretty much anyone else’s infantry barring some kind of extreme technological advantage. The practical definition of heavy cavalry is that they will be able to successfully deliver a cavalry charge against anything other than an intact infantry line.
“Medium” infantry isn’t necessarily “any melee-capable infantry that also has a ranged attack” or “like heavy infantry but with less armor.” The role is doctrinal. Roman legions are almost universally considered to be heavy infantry because they are always, always capable of line combat and they effectively never just shatter at the point of contact. Not even against the phalanx which is the other touchstone of heavy infantry in the classical Mediterranean/European world.
I think the best way to think about it is in comparing their role. Their equipment obviously changes with culture and available gear. A medival man-at-arm was probably a lot heavier armored then a hoplite, but he filled the same role.
Light infantry can have ranged weapons or not, but they are not expected to keep standing in front of an charging enemy. In exchange they are relativly mobile and nimble. They are supposed to fill suport roles, like screening, support fire, and flank cover.
Heavy infantry is supposed to be able to stand in the way, of anything the enemy might throws against it, take it and push through anything in front of them afterwards.
Medium infantry is anything in between those two roles. They can stand in front of a enemy charge, though not as good as the heavy guys, and they can fill support roles, like flank cover, but are less mobile as the real light infantry.
As far as I can see, “medium infantry” normally refers to infantry who are expected to stand in the main battle line but aren’t as heavily armoured as heavy infantry. Some medium infantry can also skirmish, but this isn’t necessary for them to qualify.
Minor typo – “contentus modico successu” *is* a complement, just not a compliment
Since it came up in a casual conversation I had, I was wondering if you could expand on this aside you had:
>(who are, contra Sekunda, sarisa-phalanx troops, not thureophoroi)
I’m inclined to agree with you that the leukaspides are a proper sarisa-phalanx but I noticed even wikipedia also mentions the idea that they were not. I don’t have access to Sekunda’s The Antigonid Army, but I’m more curious why you explicitly don’t agree.
Thanks for the whole series, it’s been a fun read!
In brief, the textual evidence suggests they are part of the phalanx (given the numbers we get for the strength of the phalanx appear to include them), their title is leuk-ASPIDES rather than leukothuroi, implying the weapon they wield is an aspis and they deploy in a position where you’d put the sarisa-phalanx, not where you’d put some thureophoroi.
I’m remembering the Askhistorians post where Iphikrates (Roel Konijnendijk) said that pre-modern generals didn’t use any maps when planning. Whereas I (and I suspect many others) have to constantly refer back to the maps just to keep track of what’s going on and where everyone is.
Which makes me wonder, how exactly would have ancient generals (and ancient people more broadly) have conceptualized of the spaces they were operating in, particularly when making operational/logistical decisions? When a general was considering the different ways to get around Mount Olympus, would he have imagined a “first-person” view of what it would look like to take a particular path, or something else entirely?
“contentus modico successu; this is not a complement”
Neither a compliment, I suppose.
I do rather like getting a strategic breakdown of how an ancient war like this can function over the course of many years.
Thansk for the great and insightful article, as usual! One thing I don’t get yet: When the Romans try to get arount Mount Olympus to get into Macedon, couldn’t they have used their naval superiority to just move the troops around the mountain by ship? Why didn’t they?
BTW, I’ve stopped getting any emails from the blog, from any post, as of April 6th.
I’m late to this party, but:
“Macedonian phalangites … were a pinning force, not a killing force.”
Speaking as someone who has (FWIW) read, thought and written ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Macedonian-Phalanx-Equipment-organization-Alexander/dp/1526748150) quite a bit about the Macedonian phalanx, I do find the repetition of this assertion quite surprising. Neither our host’s posts nor any of the comments offer any support for it, and it seems obviously, demonstrably wrong. Yet it does keep getting trotted out. Perhaps our host could devote a post to justifying it?
Simon Jester: “Against the legions, the phalanx was good at pinning and bad at killing. Against another phalanx, good at both. Against the relatively lightly arrayed troops of the Achaemenids, Alexander’s phalanx was no doubt good at killing.”
That does at least make a lot more sense (though the pinning ability v. legions is more to do with the legion’s avoidance tactics than the phalanx’s limitations, but generally, yes I agree).
Otherwise, I find myself in furious agreement with the comments of Eric Dalshaug above, who seems to me to have it spot on, both about the phalanx and the legion. I think it is clear that the picture of the legion as just a sort of phalanx with swords (or sometimes a phalanx with swords and gaps) must be wrong, and whether we see Sabin’s ‘dynamic standoff’ as a radical new departure or not, and whether ‘skirmisher’ is the right word or not, I think something along those lines must be closer to how the legion really operated than the traditional view. With usual caveats – situations varied, and legions, like phalanxes, did not always fight in exactly the same way.
I’ve struggled with how to say this without sounding like I want to undercut your credentials, because I don’t–I’d much rather be lectured to than give a lecture! I also imagine you live in a place where a person cannot simply carry around a giant weapon throughout a day to get a feel for it casually.
People do not assert that it is hard to deliberately kill someone with a pike in formation because of the “kill” part, it’s because of the “deliberate” part. Even controlling for training and aptitude, it is harder to poke a small target with the tip of a long pole than it is to hit the same target the same distance away with a bow-and-arrow or even a javelin. There are other good arguments too I bet, but that’s the one I know. I guess I’m just saying ‘please hit more things with sticks.’
Endymionologist: “I also imagine you live in a place where a person cannot simply carry around a giant weapon throughout a day to get a feel for it casually.”
You are right about that, I’m happy to say! Though I do have a little experience with wielding a pike. I think practical experience of something can be valuable in understanding it, but I find “I have carried a pole around so I know how a phalanx fought” as perplexing and unconvincing as you, perhaps, find “I have read a lot of ancient texts so I know how a phalanx fought”!
Neither of us know for sure, but I think you are making a mistake in conflating ‘difficulty to hit a small target precisely’, with ‘ineffectiveness as an offensive weapon when used en masse”. Note – en masse. I quite agree that a pike would be almost useless as a duelling weapon (and there is an ancient text, the duel of Dioxippus and Coragus, to demonstrate that). As a possibly unhelpful analogy, it is easy to demonstrate the inaccuracy of the Napoleonic musket, its inability to hit a target of a given size beyond a given range, its slowness to reload and so forth. But it would be an error to conclude from this that Napoleonic infantry were ‘a pinning force, not a killing force’.
You are also (I think) conflating ‘a pinning force’ with it being ‘quite difficult for individual soldiers to kill their immediate opponents’. It might have been difficult for individual phalangites to score what Christopher Matthew calls a ‘kill shot’ with a pike, but this doesn’t materially affect whether the phalanx formation, as a whole, is used tactically as a strike (‘killing’) force or as a pinning force. To me, a pinning force is, tactically, one that seeks to engage or delay an opposing force, without seeking a decisive encounter with it. That is the exact opposite of a pike phalanx, which was all about decisive encounters (as was the hoplite phalanx before it) – and decisive encounters were achieved by driving back and breaking up enemy formations, not necessarily by killing individual enemy soldiers.
There are training drills one can do to up their accuracy with a pike, same as with any weapon. My wife used to use a variant of one–three tennis balls on a string, hit the balls with the tip of your weapon. Okay, they didn’t have tennis balls, but it’s not terribly hard to paint some fabric or even a stick.
Second, as Richard Taylor says, the en mass part is the issue. If I’m going to against one pikeman, as a shieldman, the pikeman is going to have a very, very bad day–if I can block his first shot I’m going to walk up his spear and hit him until he stops moving. Add a few score friends to each side, however, and this becomes far more problematic. First, there’s a lot more sharp bits of metal coming at me that I need to block. Even if they don’t kill me, they’re going to hurt a lot, and it’s really hard to fight when your sword arm is severely wounded (I speak from experience here). Second, any move I use to block the first spear either opens me up to attack from others, or prevents me from attacking; either way, the guys with the pikes are winning. The person in front of me is my least concern; it’s his friends on either side, who are looking for opportunities. I was a good shieldman, probably in the top quarter , but I can only handle 3 people at once before they totally overwhelm me (I had a knight that loved to put me in that situation, on the grounds “I knew you could handle it”…). And with pikes, there’s like 20 that can concentrate on you.
And remember, it’s not ME that has to succeed in doing this blocking–it’s WE. Those fellows with the pikes also carry swords. And if I manage to push through the kill zone in front of the unit, I’m now inside the unit, surrounded by people who are quite upset with me and who have weapons that work really well at close range (again, speaking from experience here). If there are a handful of you you can literally just punch through (accepting losses on the flanks on your way through), but you’ve got to get multiple people in good order through those spears in order to do ANY damage. Not impossible–I’ve done it, in SCA combat, and even a small unit can do a lot of damage before the enemy can respond–but it’s not easy.
But there’s a another issue I think you undervalue. I can stop the force of one blow fairly easy. Two, even. But eventually the shear force of the enemy hitting me is going to become a factor. It’s going to push my shield out of alignment, or it’s going to push me over, or the like. The “pointy” bit doesn’t matter here; you’re being struck with a weapon, and that force is going into you somehow. Ever been cracked in the head with a stout branch several yards long? Or had a dozen people push you with brooms? Doesn’t really matter how big and tough you are, eventually your capacity to resist the physics of the situation is overwhelmed.
Why romans didn’t utilize phalangites as auxiliaries later on? I imagine with roman armor they would be quite useful against parthian heavy cavalry or germanic infnatry
Rkeykey,
For what reason would the Romans employ phalangites as auxiliaries? They had excellent line infantry of their own in the legions, and had quite decisively won all their wars with the Hellenistic powers in spite of not using the phalanx themselves.
And the phalanx, for all its power, is a profoundly expensive formation of infantry: The sarissa is an expensive and specialized weapon. Phalangites require extensive training in the handling of the pike and in drill as a formation to be effective with it. You essentially need a standing army of paid professionals to make proper use of it.
When the Romans defeated the Hellenistic powers, they were still levying their armies as temporary militias drawn from the citizenry, not full-time professional soldiers. Although uniquely in the case of the Roman Republic, her constant wars meant her citizen’s militia rivalled a professional force in experience and ability. All the same, a Roman army would be raised and almost immediately march off to campaign: No time for the elaborate training to bring them up to snuff as a body of pikemen.
Well why not hire auxiliaries from among the conquered Macedonians or Greeks? This would be contrary to the very aims of the Macedonian wars which Rome fought. If Macedon was still able to provide useful phalangites for Rome’s wars, that would mean that Macedon would need to maintain a standing force of professional soldiers to train in the phalanx, as well as the necessary industries of war to equip a phalanx. It would in short mean that Macedon would retain the capacity to be independent and to war against Rome, which was not politically desirable.
And what would the Romans need from a phalanx anyways? Their military system prevailed against all comers. They seem to have been confident, with some good cause, that it had no major deficiencies. What role would a phalanx play in a Roman legion? The unique value of the phalanx was that it was a body of infantry capable of standing their ground against anything up to a rival phalanx, as well as capable of prosecuting shock attacks to rout enemy units and break apart enemy battle lines. Well the Romans already had that in their legionaries, albeit they accomplished it in a different way, so why would they need a phalanx?
In short: The sarissa phalanx was too expensive, irrelevant, and potentially politically troublesome for Roman use.
It makes sense from perspective of roman statesman, but I imagine roman general would be quite grateful if he can use couple of thousand pikeman when he tasked to take down parthian army with heavy cavalry in it. Last Hellenistic kingdoms were annexed into Roman empire roughly at the same time when Craasus famously meet his fate at battle of Carrhae. Romans happily used numidian light cavalry, gallic medium cavalry, sarmatian heavy cavalry and syrian archers etc, so why they didn’t use some greek hoplites/phalangites at least as counter measure against parthians when flemish and swiss pikes partially contributed to decline of medieval knights?
Rkeykey,
1. During the Republic, Roman generals WERE Roman statesmen. Every Roman general was also an elected Roman politician. So if Rome had political concerns about the military capacities of a certain group of people, they were unlikely to employ them as auxilia even if it might have been advantageous.
2. When Roman armies were inferior in cavalry to their opponents, they didn’t see out more heavy infantry. They sought out more of their own cavalry. An example of this might be the Second Punic War: Hannibal’s superiority in Gallic and Numidian cavalry caused the Romans no few headaches. The remedy to this was to find Numidian cavalry of their own, via inducing a Numidian leader, Masinissa, to change sides from Carthage to Rome.
Probably they just thought legionaries were better heavy infantry; they can stand up to shock cavalry just fine if they maintain formation and their shields provide better protection against archer cavalry. In light of logistics and monetary limitations, it just makes sense to demand auxillia that shore up their deficiencies in cavalry and archers and supplement their replacement-level light infantry rather than get worse local heavy infantry.
It’s worth noting for this discussion that at Carrhae the cataphracts didn’t just up and charge at the legionaries. They had horse archers fire at the Romans until they formed testudo, then the cataphracts started to charge and broke off when the Romans broke out of testudo to prepare to engage the cataphracts. It wasn’t until the Romans broke up their formation going after the horse archers that the cataphracts engaged.