Collections: Roman Infantry Tactics: Why the Pilum and not a Spear?

Collections, Weapon Studies 30 Minutes

This week’s post is intended to answer a question which came up in response to the last post looking at the most common type of Mediterranean spear, which to put it simply is: what is up with the odd Roman heavy infantry kit built around a sword and two javelins (albeit two javelins of an unusually heavy type, the pilum)? How did that work and why did it work? How were the javelins, which evidently replaced the ubiquitous thrusting spear, used in combat and what did that mean for how the Romans fought?

And this is actually a pretty good question, because the Roman infantry set is, in fact, very unusual. Overwhelmingly, by far, in effectively all periods prior to the advent of gunpowder, the most common way agrarian infantry fight is with a shield and a one-handed thrusting spear. The sword figures into this system, but the sword is a backup weapon, for use if the spear breaks, not the primary weapon.

Now I do want to note something right off: this unusual Roman system is often framed as the Romans using a sword – the famed gladius Hispaniensis – over a spear. And that’s not quite right – spear infantry the Mediterranean over carried swords too, often very similar swords to the Roman gladius. The Romans haven’t replaced the spear with the gladius, they’ve replaced it with a pair of the unusual Roman heavy javelin, the pilum. So our story here is less about the gladius – we can do a post another day on the gladius – and more about the pilum.

Which of course makes it extraordinarily odd that the most military successful Mediterranean polity in antiquity – indeed, arguably ever – did not use this very standard shield-and-spear-with-backup-sword as their primary infantry kit, but instead used a sword as the primary contact weapon, supported by a pair of heavy javelins (again, called pila, sing. pilum).

Our approach to this question is going to necessarily need to proceed in stages. First, we’re going to take a brief look at what we can know about the period where the Roman tactical system we see in the Middle and Late Republic emerges (and the pilum, it seems, with it). Then we’ll discuss the pilum as a weapon, before moving to the implications that weapon has for tactics. And then finally we’ll loop back to the original question of why the Romans opted for this unusual weapon and tactical system over more typical ones.

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The Emergence of the Roman Tactical System

I’ll not bury the lede here: what we can know about Roman warfare before c. 218 (264 on a good day) is frustratingly limited and the uncertainty is great. The Romans only started writing their own history relatively late – Fabius Pictor, the first Roman to do so, wrote around 210 B.C. or so – and while some of their official records reached back further than this (and while lost to us now, were available to our sources), they provided at best limited information. Archaeology can fill in more information, but as discussed before, it can only answer some questions and in any case the archaeological record of early Rome can be frustratingly patchy. And to note here at the start, I am going to lean quite heavily in this section on J. Armstrong, War and Society in Early Rome: From Warlords to Generals (2016), which I recommended in last week’s fireside.

Our information on early Roman warfare is spotty at best. We are heavily reliant on literary sources writing much later who often do not understand their own sources or lack information entirely. We have descriptions of the Roman military system under the semi-legendary king Servius Tullius (r. 578-535) – called the ‘Servian Constitution’ – by both Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Livy 1.43; Dion. Ant. Rom. 4.16), but substantial elements of that description must be wrong, given that the wealth requirements for the classes of infantry are based on a monetary standard, the sextantal as, which was only introduced in 211. Livy offers a second description of the Roman army (Livy 8.8) in c. 340 B.C., but is clearly deeply confused by his sources and the text itself appears to be at least partially corrupt (that is, the text we have doesn’t seem to perfectly reflect what Livy originally wrote).

Instead, the first fixed point at which we get a contemporary witness to the Roman army describing it in his own day actually comes quite late: Polybius, writing probably c. 146 B.C., though he places his description of the Roman army earlier, around 216 B.C., (Polyb. 6.19-56). That said, Polybius is more or less a contemporary of this system (he would have observed it in mid-second century, but places his description in 216), seems to have primary source access and his description accords well with our archaeological evidence.1 And he describes the legion you probably know: the Romans have an initial screening line of light infantry skirmshers (velites) unarmored and armed with light javelins, then three lines of heavy infantry. The first two lines (the hastati and the principes) wield a sword (the gladius Hispaniensis), a large, curved oval shield (the scutum) and two heavy javelins (pila), while the third line (the triarii) trades the pila for a one-handed thrusting spear (the hasta). Each line has 1200 men in it except for the triarii who are 600.

This is admittedly a strange configuration. It features multiple lines of battle instead of the more typical single line and the heavy infantry use a sword as the primary contact weapon instead of a thrusting spear, which is very unusual indeed. So it is a not unreasonable to ask how the Romans came to use such an unusual system – but of course that leads us back to the problem of our evidence.

Our sources think that at first the Roman army under the kings (753-509) and the early republic (509-390) worked a lot like a Greek hoplite phalanx. That seems to be both a bit right and a bit wrong. On the one hand, Greek-style military equipment does show up in elite contexts in Italy (especially artwork) in that period, suggesting that the wealthy members of Roman society might have equipped themselves a lot like a hoplite (which is what both Livy and Dionysius think in the so-called Servian Constitution mentioned above). But the kind of warfare we associate the phalanx with in Greece is civic-centered and assumes a relatively uniform phalanx of hoplites, whereas in archaic Italy what we’re seeing is more clan-based warfare (the Roman term for clan is gens, so this warfare is often termed as gens-based or ‘gentilical’) organized around aristocratic warrior bands, where perhaps only the elite have the full hoplite kit. So hoplite gear, but not a hoplite phalanx.

At the same time, the gear isn’t entirely the same either. The circular shields we see in Latium in this period often don’t have the typical strap-grip (porpax/antilabe), but instead a single central grip (like the later scutum), which is a pretty big difference that may imply a different fighting style. And while the Greek hoplite phalanx is often defined by its lack of integrated missile weapons, in Campanian tomb paintings we see warriors wearing hoplite armor, but using javelins alongside swords and thrusting spears. Still, what we might be seeing here is still so far fairly typical spear-and-shield fighting; hard to say if it was loose order or tight order (like the phalanx).

At some point two transitions need to happen here: the first to a state-organized citizen militia under the clear command of elected generals (generally Rome’s consuls) and second the shift to the unusual Roman kit and presumably unusual Roman tactics, so that we land by 216 on the army Polybius describes. Livy’s description of the legion in 340, however garbled, strongly suggests the process is well along by that point, but we must be on guard for anachronism from Livy. The traditional solution, which still retains currency among historians (though with many caveats regarding uncertainty), is to see the Gallic sack of Rome in c. 390 B.C. as the trauma which motivates both changes, although it is possible they were already in process before or continued to develop for some time afterwards.

In particular, Livy associates the introduction of pay for soldiers with the shift to an oval shield. Now we would normally be quite on our guard here – this is the same passage of Livy (8.8) which is such a mess in other regards – but we can use archaeology to date shifts in equipment and it makes sense if the shift to the oval shield (somewhat cheaper than the aspis) is coming at the same time as the introduction of pay and the shift – probably gradual, not sudden – to a more state-run military.

In fact, our evidence does a bit more than this: it suggests that the fourth century sees a comprehensive overhaul of Roman equipment.2 The preference in sword designs shifts, with Greek-style xiphe (a straight, double-edged sword) and kopis (a forward-curving, single-edged sword) replaced by early La Tène swords, seemingly quickly adopted for local production. Likewise, the Montefortino helmet, an Italian adaption of La Tène knobbed helmets (produced in both bronze and iron in the La Tène cultural sphere, but exclusively in bronze in Italy – there is a clear divergence between the types), shows up in Italy in the fifth century and by the end of the fourth is astoundingly ubiquitous and will be by far the most common Roman helmet through the first century BC.

And just as Livy might have us suppose, our evidence supports the adoption of the scutum somewhere in the fourth century too, though perhaps not as neatly and as suddenly as Livy would like.3 Now the shield shape here may actually be Italic – particularly the curved edges of the scutum and its large size, but the metal ‘butterfly’ boss at the center and the central wooden ridge (the spina) were clear borrowings from the La Tène oval shield (which was generally flat, rather than curved, but oval in shape and large).

And while we can’t know why the Romans picked these weapons to adopt, it sure does seem remarkable that evidently in the decades immediately following a – at least, according to our sources – traumatic military defeat at the hands of some Gauls, the Romans seem to have centralized their military system, expanded recruitment down the socio-economic ladder, and done so while adopting almost a complete Gallic military panoply. This also seems, by the by, to be the period where Rome commits to a system of expansion in Italy which maximizes military power, enabling broad mobilizations of large amounts of heavy infantry.

(As an aside, those who know my research may note that nearly all of the things I am interested in documenting in the third and second centuries seem to emerge in this period in the fourth. If you are wondering then why I am so focused on the third and second centuries instead of this clearly important formative period, the answer is, for lack of a better way to phrase it, uncertainty tolerance. To work on Rome before c. 264, you have to be willing to tolerate a lot of uncertainty and I tend to want to be a lot more sure than the sources for the fourth century let us be sure.)

So what about the pilum, the last piece of our equipment puzzle? And here, the earliest evidence is profoundly frustratingly unclear.4 A number of quite early objects in Italy might be pila – we’re looking, as we’ll discuss in a minute, for distinctive long-shanked javelin tips – but the first really clear cluster of such finds are in Northern Italy, what the Romans would have called Cisalpine Gaul, in the fifth and fourth centuries. The earliest pila we can point to and say, ‘Roman’ are those from Talamoaccio, generally dated to the Battle of Telamon (225). We also see examples of the weapon showing up in Etruscan contexts in the late fourth century.

So what does that evidence suggest? The weapon probably comes from the Cisalpine Gauls; it certainly doesn’t spread out into the broader La Tène material culture sphere – when we see pila in Gaul and Spain, they seem pretty clearly to be local copies of Roman models, with other javelins (small-tipped javelins in Gaul and the soliferreum in Spain) continuing to dominate in indigenous contexts. The Romans clearly have it by 225, but of course may have adopted it much earlier, perhaps in the fourth century or perhaps in the early third. Javelins are pretty central in Italic warfare throughout this period, so just about any date makes sense. Jeremy Armstrong has made a pretty strong argument,5 that a date in the mid-fourth century makes the most sense, and I think he’s probably right. That puts the adoption of the pilum right alongside the scutum, Montefortino-helmet, and La Tène swords.

For the curious, the Romans will, probably in the very late third century, change out those La Tène swords for a Spanish sword – the famed gladius Hispaneinsis – which was itself a variant of early La Tène swords. So the Romans trade an Italian variant of the early La Tène sword for a Spanish variant of the early La Tène sword (while in the actual La Tène material culture sphere, they’ve moved on to what we call the Middle La Tène sword, a longer, parallel-edged variation of the earlier design). And the best part is, if you wait long enough (well into the imperial period) the Romans are eventually going to adopt the spatha (which had been in use among Roman auxiliaries for a long time) which seems to be yet another variant of the La Tène sword (though in this case, of the late La Tène sword), which in turn becomes the ancestor of the lion’s share of the European sword tradition. So it’s basically all La Tène swords, all the way down.

The Pilum

So now we have the Roman adoption of the pilum. By c. 200, the first two ranks of Roman heavy infantry have dropped the hasta (including, ironically, the hastati who were named for it) and instead are carrying a pair of pila. At some point before the end of the first century, the last rank of Roman infantry, the triarii, will also drop the hasta for some pila (though note that Roman light infantry, the velites, do not use the pilum, but rather seven lighter javelins called the hasta velitaris).

That said the pilum is an unusual javelin. The most common form of javelin we see in the ancient Mediterranean is what I’ve taken to calling the ‘small tip, wooden haft’ javelin. It has a light wooden haft; these don’t generally survive so it is hard to be exact on how much they’d weigh, but javelin-tips have thinner sockets than spears, suggesting a narrower haft (and probably a shorter one). That’s tipped by a small iron spear-tip usually a miniature version of the local thrusting-spear shape (though often with a less pronounced mid-ridge). The whole assembly probably going to around half a kilogram, though again there’s probably a fair bit of range here (the Roman hasta velitaris, that lighter javelin for the velites, probably had a total mass of around 200-250g).

The pilum is…not like that. Instead of a narrow wooden haft, it has a thick, heavy wooden haft with estimated masses typically around 1kg instead of maybe 200-400g. And that’s topped not with a c. 50g javelin-tip, but with a tip that has a long iron shank connecting the point (which can be ‘arrowhead’ shaped or ‘bodkin’ (square-sectioned pyramidal) shaped) to the haft and massing 250-350g. Thus a pilum altogether has about the same mass as a thrusting spear, but it is very much not a thrusting spear. The whole thing tends to be around 1.25-1.5kg; this is a hefty weapon.

Via Wikipedia, Roman soldiers on the Tropaeum Traiani carrying pila. In this case, these seem to be the ‘flat tanged’ variants, as that’s the type with that distinctive triangular bulge at the top of the haft, which is where the flat tang is inserted and then secured.

The Romans end up using a few different systems to connect the iron shank to the wooden haft. The most common was actually the ‘socketed’ pilum, in which the shank (which is square in cross-section) terminates into a socket (round in cross-section) that fits on to the haft. This type is what we see in Cisalpine Gaul before the Romans, its the version of the pilum that ends up being locally copied in Spain and Transalpine Gaul in response to the Romans and it occurs in basically all periods. It’s a very simple, straight-forward sort of design, which makes it a bit funny that it is almost never how pila are shown.

Instead by far the most common depiction of pila is of the ‘flat tanged’ type, where the square-sectioned shank is hammered flat at the base, with two holes for large rivets. That is then inserted into a cut in the wooden haft and secured by the rivets. Through the first century AD, these pila are very common, so this is not some minority type, even if it is less common overall than socketed pila. It’s also distinctively Roman: this type basically only shows up in Roman contexts and so appears to be a Roman or at least Italian innovation on the design. Finally, there’s also the later spike-tanged pilum you can see up there; this comes in well after the period of adoption, so we can leave it aside for today.

In all cases, the pilum tip features a long iron shank, although length varies a lot, with some types being as long as 100cm, but others being around half this length. The shank is frequently square-sectioned, regardless of the tip or method of joining (square sections become more common over time, but are common from the get-go). As noted, there are a range of point-shapes seen. Perhaps the most striking are the square-pyramidal ‘bodkin’ points, which may have been intended to have more shield or armor penetration capability than the more traditional ‘arrowhead’ points.

How would this perform in combat? Older testing by Peter Connolly and newer testing by Tod Todeschini both seem to confirm a maximum effective range of around c. 25-30m or so; as ranged weapons go, these are relatively close-in ones. The shield and even armor penetrating potential of the weapon is considerable: once the point has punched through a shield (or armor), the long shank is thinner than the hole the point has created, allowing the weapon to continue moving with the momentum (and if thrown in a relatively high arc, the weight) of the heavy wooden haft pushing it forward. With long shanks anywhere from 50 to 100cm, that’s enough length for the weapon to potentially punch through a shield and then keep going to strike the man behind it and experiments with reconstructed versions generally seek to back up this application.

One thing of note is the question of bending; it is often asserted that the purpose of the long shank was to bend on impact, making the weapon impossible to throw back. Which is tricky because our sources don’t quite actually say this. Caesar (BGall. 1.25) comes closest to saying this, noting bent pila fixed into Gallic shields, but his point is not that the pila bent, but that they pierced multiple shields. We’ve discussed Plutarch’s probably-made-up Marian pilum before. Meanwhile, Polybius’ comment about bending javelin heads (6.22.4) is often taken to mean the pilum, but he’s clearly referring to the lighter and thinner hasta velitaris. Testing has produced variable results. Peter Connolly6 in a series of tests wasn’t able to produce a bending action. On the other hand, the recent tests by Tod Todeschini did produce bending actions on ground-impacts.

My own view is that bending was possible, but was not the purpose of the long-shank design and that most pila would not have bent dramatically on impact. Instead, the long-shank design is both shield penetrating (it can strike a man behind a shield) and shield disabling (the weapon is really heavy and quite hard to get out of a shield easily even if it doesn’t bend). In short, this is a weapon designed to disrupt shield-using infantry; with the addition of the square-sectioned point, it may also have had armor – especially mail – penetration value too.

Via Wikipedia, some modern reenactment pila, showing the long shank and heavy metal haft.

But of course the consequence of this was that this is a heavy weapon. At 1.25kg, it is probably about three times as heavy as a normal javelin and twice as heavy as the formidable Spanish soliferreum. That weight is part of its striking power against shielded targets, but also limits how many of these you can carry and what else you can carry. In short, if you are carrying a pair of pila, you really don’t have the hands (remember you have a shield too) or weight capacity to also carry a traditional thrusting spear, especially if your shield of choice is the large and relatively heavy Roman scutum. That means ammunition for this weapon is limited: you get two shots. And that has implications as we go to:

Roman Infantry Tactics

Our actual topic, at last!

There has actually been, for the past two decades, something of a debate among experts as to exactly how the pilum fits in to Roman infantry tactics and what that means for how we should understand a legion engaging.

There are a few things our sources are relatively clear on. The legion is organized into three primary heavy infantry lines (hastati, principes and triarii), with the last line at half-numbers compared to the other two. These lines are broken into units called maniples (manipuli, ‘handfuls’) of 120 men with intervals between them. Those maniples in turn are split into centuries (centuriae, ‘group of 100’) consisting of sixty men,7 one in front and one behind. That leaves an interval between the maniples, creating a kind of checkerboard formation we call a quincunx after the symbol for ‘five’ on a die. Out in front of all of this there is a diffuse screen of light infantry, the velites, who are differently equipped (no armor, small shield, seven light javelins and a sword for close-in defense). The standard way this army fights then is that each line attacks in sequence, falling back through the gaps of the line behind it if it cannot defeat the enemy. Formations other than the three-line quincunx (called the triplex acies, ‘three battle lines’) are used sometimes, but the triplex acies is standard.

The question is what does it look like when the first two lines – the hastati and the principes (who make up the main force of the army) – engages.

The traditional view is what we might term ‘volley-and-charge.’ Here the assumption is that when the hastati engage, the rear centuries move to close (or at least shrink) the gaps and then the whole line advances (six men deep) and at c. 25m or so, hurls their pila before drawing swords and charging. This was the axiomatically accepted position of basically everyone.

Then in 2000 in an article in Historia – the standard journal for arguments about the Roman army – Alexander Zhmodikov tipped over the apple cart by arguing that if we looked closely at battle narratives from the fourth to the second century what we see were much longer missile exchanges.8 Zhmodikov rejects the notion of infantry in melee contact being able to withdraw through the lines of the infantry behind them, and so assumes these ‘change outs’ must be happening during prolonged missile exchanges or not at all. He also notes that Roman battles could be long – a short engagement might run two hours and a long one more than four – and doubts, not unreasonably, that a shock action could last this long. The image that emerges, though he never quite sets out a clear ‘model battle,’ is one of long missile exchanges, punctuated by short shock contacts.

In my experience, Zhmodikov’s article continues to bounce around a fair bit among enthusiasts and reenactors, and so continues to have a lot of impact in that community, which is odd to me, because on the balance I do not think Zhmodikov has held the field.9 His core body of evidence, which are descriptions of Roman generals getting hit by javelins, is particularly weak, because of course those are, conspicuously, not Roman javelins hitting them. And it would be quite odd for Roman generals to get hit by anything that wasn’t a ranged weapon, given that Roman commanders did not fight in the front lines!

To me, the larger problem with Zhmodikov’s thesis is that the pilum is a terrible weapon for the combat he describes. It is very heavy, remarkably heavier than basically any other available model of javelins. And if we take a moment to think about what it would take to use that weapon, we can fairly quickly, I think, both explain why the Romans dropped the thrusting spear and also why Zhmodikov’s revision to their tactics is probably not right.

On the battlefield, the Roman soldier has one c. perhaps 7kg shield (the scutum), two pila (c. 1.25kg each, perhaps one somewhat heavier than the other), and a gladius sheathed at his side. He also, as a rule, has two arms, each with one hand. Evidently, his shield is going to occupy one hand and because Roman shields are horizontal-center-grip (that is, you hold the shield by a single metal bar at its center-of-mass which runs parallel to the ground), that hand is pretty busy. That said, it is possible to hold the scutum and a pilum in one hand, pinching the latter with your thumb. It’s not comfortable and you wouldn’t want to do it for very long (if for no other reason than that’s a lot of weight on that hand), but you can do it.

And then you have the other hand. On the march, that hand is going to be occupied by your two pila, an entrenching stake (if it wasn’t carried on the mule), any large tools (like the dolabra, the ubiquitous Roman military pick-axe), and probably the furca, the forked stick used to hold the Roman marching pack (though the introduction date of this device is unclear; there is no reason to associate it with Marius though). And that’s not too hard to carry either all together in your hand.10 Presumably in a battle, you can get rid of all of the non-combat gear and at least advance initially with both pila held the same way (hold at the base, balance on the shoulder, like a musket).

What you do not have space for is a thrusting spear! With a lighter, thinner javelin, you might well carry the spear and the javelin both in the right hand on the approach, shift the spear to the shield hand to throw the javelin, and then switch back to the spear. And it seems no accident that archaeologically and in artwork, we tend to see these lighter javelins, when carried by shield-and-spear infantry, show up in a one-spear, one-javelin formation. But with two pila, each probably slightly heavier than your average thrusting spear (c. 1kg or so) and with a haft every bit as thick, it would be really hard and quite awkward to add a long spear.11 I’m not saying carrying both would be impossible, but certainly that it would be awkward and awkward is not what you want in a fight.

Now we come to the problem of ‘battle pulses’ punctuated by pila exchanges: once you draw that gladius, you are down a hand, because the sword completely occupies the hand carrying it (the design of the guard and pommel of the gladius, which hug the hand to provide good leverage, essentially ensures you can’t carry anything else, even awkwardly). What that means, to me at least, is that if you are going into a close-combat fight, you are going to drop any remaining pila: you need one hand for your gladius and the other to use your scutum and you sure don’t want any extra weight there when in close-combat.

Instead, it seems to me that the only way that works, mechanically, given a Roman soldier possessed of exactly two arms, is that he advances with both pila in the right hand, and the scutum in the left. As he approaches throwing range, he transfers one pilum (we might suppose the ‘thicker’ or ‘heavier’ type reported by Polybius, Polyb. 6.23.9) to his shield arm for just a moment and then throws the first pilum. Then a quick shift to get the second pilum in his right hand – so it has only spent a few moments in the left hand with the scutum (because, again, you can do it, but its heavy and awkward) – to be discharged at close range just before the lines come together.

Which is to say, ‘volley-and-charge.’ J.F. Slavik has argued,12 that what probably covered for the change-out in battle lines was the presence of the velites. I think that makes a fair bit of sense. At the very least, an enemy would be very foolish to launch into a pell-mell rush to chase hastati who were falling back, given not only the velites but also the presence of a second line of Romans (the principes) who are waiting in good order for just such an opportunity. Meanwhile, Michael Taylor,13 has shown that some intervals between the maniples would have remained even with the ‘rear’ centuries shifted over the gaps. That seems like a weakness, but small gaps of that sort would be quite hard to exploit: if you charged into them, you’d just be putting yourself between two large bodies of Romans (with yet more Romans in front of you). But that means that the velites would always have some space to operate, throwing their lighter javelins, the hasta velitaris. And notably, where the heavy infantry has just the two heavy pila, the velites carry seven light javelins, so they could potentially keep peppering enemies throughout even a longer engagement.

So that brings us back to volley-and-charge, albeit volley-and-charge screened and perhaps supported by screening and harassment ‘fire’ from the velites. So in that context, what does the pilum do for you?

Why the Pilum?

Naturally, this part has to be a bit more speculative; no Roman source tells us why the pilum was preferred over the spear; the shift for most Roman heavy infantry in any case happens earlier than our sources provide that kind of granularity.

But I think that the pilum fits into a Roman system of combat which expects to win with infantry in the center and also which aims to disorder and disorient the enemy army.

We can start with what we might call a Roman tactical ‘theory of victory,’ that is how a Roman army expects to win a battle. In short we need to ask, “what is the infantry’s role in producing a victory here.” In Achaemenid and even earlier Assyrian armies, in open field battles, the infantry’s job seems to have been acting as a pinning force as well as creating a supporting base of fire for decisive cavalry actions and you see infantry well-suited for that role: neo-Assyrian shield-bearer and archer pairs eventually merged into the Achaemenid bow-and-spear troops. Hellenistic armies generally expect to pin an enemy with the phalanx in a shock action to enable decisive maneuvers by cavalry, exploiting either a gap or a flank; consequently the Macedonian phalanx is deep-set, with heavy pikes that allow it to push forward to create that pinning pressure without taking overwhelming casualties. Of course for hoplite phalanxes, there is the famous rightward drift that creates a proclivity towards flanking actions.

While Roman armies are often shown in popular culture employing hammer-and-anvil tactics like Hellenistic armies – and they certainly sometimes did so – that wasn’t the dominant mode of engagement. Instead, the Romans concentrated their theoretically best troops – the citizen legions – in the center of the line, flanked on either side by the alae of socii. Roman generals did not hang out with the equites on the flanks, but ‘drove’ one of the two legions in the center, which is also suggestive of where they expected the decisive action to be. In short, the Romans seem to have concluded that the shortest way to an enemy’s vulnerable rear was through their front.

And the legion is then built for that approach, hammering the enemy’s front-center with successive waves of attritional attacks in order to weak it to collapse. Compare for a moment that the ‘normal’ depth of a hoplite phalanx was usually something like 6-8 men. The famously deep Macedonian phalanx is in 16 ranks. Now the Roman fighting line is just 6 men deep, but they have three of them (the last being at half-depth), plus a light infantry screen, so each enemy file is actually facing 15 (6+6+3) heavy infantrymen; if we distribute the velites evenly, there will be six more of them for every heavy infantry file of frontage too, bringing the total to twenty-one. That’s a lot of concentrated combat power! And unlike other deep formations where perhaps only the first few ranks engage, the Roman system of successive attacks by these lines means you really will need to fight most of those guys.

The Roman legion thus aims to wear down its opponent to a point of ‘rupture’ where the line fails. And the pilum seems ideal for that, offering a lot more attritional utility than a thrusting spear would in its place.

In particular, as noted above the heavy weight and narrow point of the pilum give it shield-disabling ability, a point which has been demonstrated with modern reconstructions and is attested in the sources (Caes. BGall. 1.25). But key to that function is the greater weight of the weapon, which gives it the momentum to punch decisively through a shield and then weighs down the shield once it has done so. The long shank, expensive to make (that’s a lot of iron and a fair bit of labor), also lets the weapon potentially offend a target behind their shield. That wound might not be lethal, but it could be disabling or at least hindering. Latin has this phrase, ‘exhausted’ or ‘worn out by wounds’ (confectus vulneribus, e.g. Liv. 24.26.14, 31.17.11, Caes. BGall. 5.45); it can sometimes mean the fatal accumulation of multiple wounds, but more often describes soldiers still very much alive but incapable of effective resistance and I think the phrasing suggests less one debilitating injury so much as a steady accumulation of smaller cuts, bruises, etc., until the combatant is combat ineffective (keep in mind that javelins are not firearms; shields, armor and even clothing (e.g. Polyb. 2.30.1) can meaningfully limit the damage of an impact). Those wounds and disabled shields can then progressively add up as a single enemy battle line is forced to confront a series of Roman battle lines in sequence.

And the volley of pila before impact is disorienting. Both in a very literal sense – your enemies are being knocked around quite hard by a bunch of quite heavy javelins slamming into shields, breastplates, helmets and of course also bodies – and in the sense of disordering the formation. Combatants whose shields have suddenly been disabled need to stop to pull the pilum out, or drop the shield; in the later case, those fellows probably would rather not be in front anymore and might try to fall back. The sudden Roman onset might then exploit that disorder to inflict casualties and possibly rout the enemy line, akin to later gunpowder volley-and-charge tactics like the ‘Swedish volley‘ or the ‘highland charge‘ – a single volley of gunfire followed by a determined immediate charge.

And those various effects become quite important if you are expecting the infantry not to just hold their ground but to produce the decisive effect in the center. There’s a mentality contrast with Greek hoplites that seems notable; our sources for hoplites value most a man’s ability to stand steadfastly in place in line. But that’s not good enough for a Roman legion, which needs not just to hold its position but to advance and punch through the enemy; Roman martial values match, with the tension of virtus (aggressiveness, courage, valor) and disciplina (discipline) matching that more decisive, offensive spirit.14

Finally, I think the pilum also spoke directly to the combat environment emerging in Italy in the fourth and third century. As I’ve argued elsewhere, compared to the rest of the Mediterranean, Italy seems to have been becoming a relatively ‘high armor’ environment. We see evidence for relatively greater investment in body protection there than in Greece (indeed, Greek-style armors in Italian contexts tend to be heavier than when they show up in mainland Greece) and much more than among the typically very lightly armored warriors of Gaul or Spain. Meanwhile, the Italian shield tradition in that period is, of course, moving towards the scutum, marrying the structure of the La Tène oval shield with a generally somewhat larger, curved body-shield that offered a lot of protection. A heavy javelin with armor- and shield-penetration ability due to its narrow point, long shank and heavy weight (and thus higher momentum in impact) seems well-suited for that environment.

And all of that, I think, also explains why the Roman choice to drop the hasta for the pilum also remained unusual. Relatively few pre-gunpowder armies treated their infantry as the decisive offensive arm of the army, for both tactical and socio-cultural reasons (elites like to believe that elites – on horses – win battles), especially with such an attritional focus as the Romans seem to have.15 And of course it comes in Italy, where there is both a robust tradition of heavier armor and shields (for the pilum to disable) and a robust tradition of javelin-armed close-combat warriors going back quite a ways, as Jeremy Armstrong16 I think demonstrates well.

And the Romans don’t seem to have been the only ones. By the time we can see them, it seems fairly clear that the ‘Roman’ style of fighting is also the socii-style of fighting and we can’t be sure that these weapons and tactics were only adopted after these communities were subordinated by Rome.17 Either by imitation of the Romans or simply a response to the same pressures, it seems like other peoples in Italy responded to the same pressures Rome faced with the same shifts in weaponry and tactics, such that by the time we can see them clearly, the alae of the socii are tactically interchangeable with Roman legions.

And this attritional, multi-stage way of battle into which the pilum fit well could clearly be very effective, when paired with experienced troops in heavy armor (who could thus come off better in the extreme close-combat – sword-reach being less than spear-reach – after the volley and the charge). But it did seem to require a bit more experience and training to make this work; Michael Taylor has noted how clearly the edge seems to have come off the Roman gladius during the late second century as military demands slackened and so Romans are spending less time in the army and thus Roman forces have fewer battle-hardened veterans.

It’s also an expensive way to fight: you need pretty heavy armor (for the Romans post 225 or so, this will be mail) to stand up in the close-combat and the pilum itself requires a lot of labor to make, a lot of expensive iron and can’t necessarily be reused (because it can bend on impact, even if that isn’t a design intention), making it a very expensive ‘disposable’ weapon to equip your troops with. That cost may also explain why this style of fighting doesn’t ‘catch on’ elsewhere: the Romans seem to have been unusually tolerant – indeed, exceptionally so – of deploying lots of expensive metal equipment on their infantry.18

But with solidly experienced troops, the Romans from 264 to 101 BC bat way above average. They’re not unbeatable, of course – Hannibal proves that handily enough – but Roman armies with this system sure tend to win a lot more than they lose, while the exceptional Roman mobilization system19 ensured that the Romans had the strategic resilience to bounce back from the odd defeat here or there.

  1. On that, see M. Dobson  The Army of the Roman Republic: The Second Century BC, Polybius and the Camps at Numantia, Spain (2008).
  2. On this, see M.J. Taylor, “Panoply and Identity during the Roman Republic” PBSR 88 (2020): 31-65.
  3. On the evidence, see M. Eichberg,  Scutum : Die Entwicklung einer italisch-etruskischen Schildform von den Anfängen bis zur Zeit Caesars, 1987.
  4. On this issue, see J. Armstrong, “The origins of the Roman pilum revisited” JRMES 18 (2017).
  5. That’s his “The origins of the Roman pilum revisited” again
  6. Connolly, “The Reconstruction and Use of Roman Weaponry in the Second Century BC” JRMES 11 (2000) and “The Pilum from Marius to Nero” JRMES 12 (2001/2)
  7. Because no numerical term in the Roman army means what it sounds like it means.
  8. Zhmodikov, “Roman Republican Heavy Infantrymen in Battle (IV-II Centuries B.C.), Historia 49 (2000).
  9. See for instance M.J. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-republic: A Reassessment” Historia 63 (2014), which is mostly concerned with formation but renders significant parts of Zhmodikov’s assumptions non-operative, or J.F. Slavik, “Pilum and Telum: The Roman Infantryman’s Style of Combat in the Middle Republic” CJ 113 (2018), which is a direct assault on Zhmodikov. Cf. also Koon, Infantry COmbat in Livy’s Battle Narratives (2010), which is more open to Zhmodikov in some respects and B. Campbell, “Arms and Armor” in The Oxford Handbook on Warfare in the Classical World (2013), which is not.
  10. Marcus Junkelmann did this in an experiment recorded in a book that it is a travesty has never gotten an English translation, Die Legionen des Augustus. Der römische Soldat im archäologischen Experiment (1986).
  11. Then why can you march with the dolabra and furca? Because they’re lighter and shorter than a thrusting spear.
  12. op. cit.
  13. Also op. cit.
  14. On these different values, see J.E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts.
  15. In contrast to, for instance, the more cohesion-and-courage focused discourse in Greece around the phalanx where the whole thing is holding together longer under the intense psychological strain. The Romans, by stacking their formation three lines deep, seem less focused on this and instead more on wearing down an opposing line.
  16. op. cit.
  17. See M.T. Burns, “The Homogenisation of Military Equipment under the Roman Republic” Digressus Supplement I (2003) and P. Kent, “The Roman Army’s Emergence from its Italian Origins” PhD Diss., UNC, (2012). And while I’m here, Patrick Kent also has a really solid A History of the Pyrrhic War (2020) well worth a read if you want to understand that war – the last Roman war to finally dominate all of peninsular Italy – better!
  18. Indeed, this is the topic of my book project – now under contract at Oxford University Press! Expect to see that in print in 2025 or perhaps 2026. Don’t worry – I’ll let you know!
  19. Indeed, this is also the topic of my book project – now under contract at Oxford University Press! Expect to see that in print in 2025 or perhaps 2026. Don’t worry – I’ll let you know!

Published by Bret Devereaux

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220 thoughts on “Collections: Roman Infantry Tactics: Why the Pilum and not a Spear?”

  1. Might this reliance on heavy armour also explain why the Romans don’t seem to use archers all that much?

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    1. What if this has more to do with all the adoptions of gallic material mentioned in today’s post?
      Checking in on our host’s overview on the Gauls, what I gathered is: 1. they relied a lot on javelins for their missile fire, and 2. mounted elites aside they relied heavily on their shields because metal armor was too expensive for their common infantryman.

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    2. I think part of the issue is that Italy just doesn’t produce lots of archers. It’s not a central part of the culture. When the Romans get control of societies that produce good archers, they eagerly pull them into the auxilia (the units are called sagittarii, ‘archers’).

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  2. Absolutely fascinating. I had never connected the Roman non-use of the spear with the use of the pilum, although it seems obvious in hindsight. One last question though; you mention that the Triarii keep their one handed spears and don’t carry pila. Is that because they were the last to engage in the normal course of things?

    At least what seems reasonable to me is that by the time the Triarii are thrown into the fray, chances are you’ll have already gotten what mileage out of your ranged weapons and you’re probably hoping for a final shock action to bring about the rout you’re hoping for. (or, in less favorable circumstances, propping up somewhere before it collapses entirely). You don’t want accumulation of smaller disabling injuries, it’s time to finish things. But my sense of reasonableness has been wrong before, and I just wanted to make sure.

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    1. Infantry wielding thrusting spears are mainly going to have more endurance in a protracted shock confrontation; since there isn’t anyone left to bail out the triarii — and they represent the older soldiers of a legion besides — it makes some sense for them to be availing themselves of equipment less physically and psychologically exhausting to use, and which can better stall for time while holding ground.

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      1. There was something I read a while ago, that the Romans would use “it’s down to the Triarii” to mean at once “things are really dire” and “it’s time for the grown-ups to step in and handle things.”

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  3. Great post! I’d watched Tod’s videos and was hoping you’d comment on them sometime.

    One thing I wonder is if when fighting a close formation with spears, they used the pila to open up a gap and charge in with swords.

    Everyone seems to assume that the Romans just randomly chucked their pila into the mass of enemy wherever they happened to be facing. But generally an organised army with missile weapons wants to CONCENTRATE their fire. Could the Romans have had a system to target a particular area area of the front, maybe running in and throwing in quick succession until they’d created a gap a few meters wide and deep that they could charge into?

    Then they would be at too close range for the enemy to bring their spears to bear. And with so many soldiers equipped withr mail and scutum, that might give them and advantage at close-in combat. Mail doesn’t have so many gaps to be stabbed, the scutum curves round and gives you a bit more protection from the sides. And in a very close range scrum, it might be harder to get in a percussive or piercing stroke that could hurt someone in mail.

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    1. It seems to me that tactic would require a lot more communication and coordination on the spot than is likely possible in an incipient clash.
      The centurion (or whoever is in charge of picking the target) has to be up front to spot the weak area and has to communicate “There!” with enough specificity to enough soldiers to hear and obey, against background noise, before they get to melee range.
      Maybe you can work out horn signals for the communication part, but you still have to spot the weakness.

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      1. Or it’s prearranged. Everyone knows in advance to concentrate fire on the part of the enemy line immediately opposite your own centre.

        And I don’t think it would be that hard for a centurion to shout something simple like “everyone aim for the tall Gaul with the trumpet” or whatever. His voice wouldn’t have to carry very far to reach the whole of the century in their 10 by 6 block.

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        1. I should think it noisy enough in the area that a message that long (or more than “Follow me!”) is likely not to be heard.
          I was part of the SCA for a while. Yes, the combat is different. My point is that I was at a few of the Pennsic War events, which include a large scale field battle (hundreds on each side). It was *incredibly* noisy. Most of the commands were given by pantomime, or horn or drum, because you could not be heard.

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          1. The centurion has javelins of his own, right?

            Maybe he could give a nonverbal order by just throwing first. His soldiers could look at where he threw and follow suit.

  4. The general trend I seem to see is that attrition-focused warfare is fairly effective when a society can employ it – but social pressures often mean a society can’t.

    Roman society had the population, the resources, and the cultural mindset to prolong attrition warfare beyond the breaking point of many of it’s rivals. I suspect that having all that is rarely the case for polities.

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    1. I’m not sure that “attrition” is a particularly good descriptive term here, or at least not with an aim of specifying Roman practices.

      The Classical Greek infantry lines are quite far indeed from Roman styles of warfare, and yet obviously were deeply focused on attrition — the attrition of slowly grinding down the adversary’s cohesion and moral with constant pressure until they ruptured like a can under a pneumatic piston; chances of victory were significantly correlated with formation depth, which afforded the most insulation for panic and incoherence to permeate through before an army could rout. The Roman fashion of lobbed missiles and glorious charges and intense duels was certainly not as grinding on an individual level.

      The salient difference, then, seems to be one of pressure and impulse — the Roman way of battle (regardless of which stance you take on precise tactics) was characterized by flares of brief but intense violence against a more passive background, as opposed to other systems involving less peaks but less valleys.

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      1. You’re quite correct that “attrition” is a weak word to use here, since what I meant by it is completely different from how you use it. Clearly, it was not a sufficiently specific descriptor here.

        I don’t consider morale/cohesion on the tactical “in-battle” level a part of what I was describing as “attrition” at all.

        Rather, what I was referring to was that the Roman system, be emphasizing “infantry push in the center” over “Infantry flaking” or “cavalry flanking” seems to slant towards more casualties among the Romans – actual physical deaths and wounding, not morale/cohesion loss.

        I may be mistaken, perhaps the Romans actually took less casualties due to better armor or tactics or whatever.

        But is seems to me that “infantry drive straight down the center” is very much the cultural mindset of a society that is less loss-averse (in terms of taking casualties) than a society that prefers “mounted strike to turn the flank.” Complexity is a costly thing in training troops – I figure that you don’t build doctrine around preferring flanking over “go right at them” unless the costs for building in that complexity are outweighed by savings in casualties-taken gained by using the tactic.

        Or perhaps, it would be more accurate to phrase my take as “the Romans seem less loss-averse with regards to their core, politically-active, population-segment than many other societies” – the Cavalry-flanking-preferring societies are using a tactic that preserves their mounted elites, not necessarily the lower-class infantry.

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        1. This all raises.. not so much questions, as a lot of factors I would love to have a better idea of. Like: What sort of casualties do cavalry tend to sustain in engagements against infantry and other cavalry? And how expensive were horses in archaic Italy, anyways?

          Greece is a very interesting foil here because it seems to share many conditions. It’s fairly rugged and mountainous, and this does seem to have lead to an anemic cavalry presence up until the Macedonian expansion. The Mycenaean elites probably fought mostly on foot, as the Archaic greek ones definitely did, and those (and at least some Mycenaeans) were heavily armoured. But then first of all it seems like the infantry started getting increasingly unarmoured the greater their specialization in shock combat, and then Macedonia came out of nowhere, gobbled everything, and suddenly it’s cavalry time.

          But getting back to the matter of casualties, I’m not sure that Roman battle was especially lethal — if I recall correctly, it slots in right around the generic 5% casualties mark.

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          1. Remember that cavalry is much more useful than chariotry BUT first you need to have strong enough horses. China stuck to chariots for far longer because of lacking pasture. Horses had to be imported.

        2. The Roman tendency to have a lot more mail than a lot of people they fought slots into the “better armor” bit of your post…

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        3. Cavalry couldn’t generally turn the enemy flanks straight away, as the enemy army would normally have its own cavalry who’d have to be defeated first. So I don’t think we can assume that a cavalry-centric set of tactics would preserve the mounted elites, or even result in lower casualties overall than a Roman-style set of tactics.

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          1. Well. not if you (assume you’re going to) win.

            I you lose, there’s a fairly obvious reason to think that Mounted elites on the flank would have an easier time escaping pursuit than heavy infantry right smack in the middle.

          2. If you lose, there’s a fairly obvious reason to think that Mounted elites on the flank would have an easier time escaping pursuit than heavy infantry right smack in the middle.

            Quite, same sort of reason the Dark Age Greek elites, fighting on foot notwithstanding, had a habit of keeping a chariot or horse nearby as a sort of getaway car if the going got ugly.

  6. What is the evidence that a Roman took both his pill into the same battle? I’ve always assumed the second plum was a spare in case he had to fight a second battle, precisely because carrying both is so ungainly, as you explain, and the range of the weapon is so short that throwing both hardly seems viable unless your enemy co-operates.

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    1. I mean, maybe you wouldn’t have the time to throw the second one if the enemy are bold enough to quickly charge in even though they themselves are disrupted by the first volley… if you are the guy in the first rank. I don’t see what would stop everyone else from throwing theirs though.

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  7. If the legionaries are carrying their own pila by hand on the march, and there’s a pretty good chance they won’t get them back after a battle, how would they replenish them between battles on a campaign?

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    2. But there is a pretty good chance they’ll get them back — the things are decently sturdy and any simple damage can likely be bent and hammered out fairly easily by the soldiers themselves or by accompanying artisans.

      Where that isn’t the case, the baggage train probably has a supply of replacements, and I’m pretty sure Caesar talks about making a few batches of them in situ in preparation for his trench-digging stalemate with Pompey.

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    3. My assumption is that salvageable pila were gathered from the battlefield when possible, and also that supply wagons carried lots of spare equipment and replacement weapons such as pila.

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      1. Yeah. It’s the converse of the pilum being hard to get out of your shield. They’re heavy, they’re by design likely to stick in whatever they hit, they tend to bend at least a little if not necessarily much.

        Recovering them after a good solid throw is often going to take a minute and really putting your back into it, and you may need to heat them up over a forge and hammer them straight afterwards.

        Neither side can spare the effort during a pitched battle… but whoever wins can absolutely do it afterwards.

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  8. Great post today! I meant to only give it glance and see what the topic was while waiting for my tea to steep, but I ended up absolutely blazing through it – resulting also in a very over-steeped cup of tea!

    I wanted to ask about a slightly different impression I’d got for how combat with the two-pilum + sword kit would work from some other source – and I’m sorry to say that I can’t remember exactly where it was, but I think it was probably either AskHistorians or some YouTube historian or reenactor…

    I think the concept was that one of the pilum might be used exactly as you’ve outlined here: to “soften the enemy up” by damaging shields, inflicting wear & tear, degrading the enemy formation, etc. – but then afterwards, that the second pilum could still be used as a (shorter versoin of a) thrusting spear in a more direct melee.

    I wonder how that concept stacks up against your understanding? If I read your article correctly, I believe you are suggesting it more likely that if soldier still had one or both of their pila by the time close-combat fighting was going to happen, they would drop those pila to draw their sword.

    Maybe the shorter length of the pilum, or something else about its construction, means this idea doesn’t hold any water? Or perhaps I am, either due to whatever source it was I encountered, or through my own fuzzy memory, conflating the role of the triarrii vs the hastatii and principes with the tactics of a single unit. I don’t think this is just a strange telephone’d version of Zhmodikov’s ideas either, but as a total outsider/non-historian, I couldn’t say.

    In any case, thanks again for all the fantastic posts!

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    1. You *can* use a pilum as a thrusting spear, but it isn’t particularly well designed for the role (weight distribution is all wrong, the long shank is fragile (bends) in ways you don’t want, etc). If the plan was to do that, you’d just do what most Gauls and Spaniards seem to do: carry one javelin and one thrusting spear. And in the event, our sources are quite consistent that when they imagine Roman heavy infantry in close combat, they are using their swords, not the pilum. So while that’s a possible use and it probably happened from time to time, I don’t think it was a normal use.

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      1. There are sources that mention use of pila in melle. Unfortunately, I can find only mentions in Plutarch’s “Lives”, and that’s not a very reliable source.

        According to Plutarch, pila were used in melee by Caesar’s legionaries at Pharsalus against Pompey’s cavalry: “the cohorts ran out from where Caesar was posted, not hurling their javelins, as usual, nor yet stabbing the thighs and legs of their enemies with them, but aiming them at their eyes and wounding their faces. … they (cavalrymen) could not endure the upward thrust of the javelins” (Plut. Caes. 45.1-3). Another case of such use is mentioned during Marc Antony’s war against the Parthians: “The Parthians … laid aside their bows, grasped their spears by the middle and came to close quarters. But the Romans, with a full battle cry, suddenly sprang up, and thrusting with their javelins slew the foremost of the Parthians and put all the rest to rout.” (Plut. Ant. 45.3). It is interesting to notice that in both cases pila are used in melee against cavalry.

        There are common mentions on YouTube that pila were also used to close combat during the siege of Alesia, but I failed o find the exact citation. Also there may be depiction of pilum used in close combat on Trajan’s column.

        But there were situations in which pila were worse then spears, for examole Polibius in “Tactics Against the Gauls” (Plb. 2.33) describes that “The Tribunes accordingly gave out the spears of the Triarii, who are the last of the three ranks, to the first ranks, or Hastati” instead of ordering the Hastati to use their pila as spears. Maybe that was because the Gauls in this case were infantrymen, or maybe if Caesar and Marc Antony had the Triarii with spears they would also issue the same order.

        And lastly, since according to my nickname I should mention it, the later Germanic angon, while quite similar to Roman pilum both in function and in construction (and maybe derived from it) was used, as far as I know, both as thrown and as thrusting weapon.

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        1. On the question of giving troops spears instead of pila versus using the pila as spears, I suspect it’s a case of *when* you know you’ll need spears- that is, if it’s a planned tactic, you’ll issue the troops proper spears before the battle, whereas if it’s something that comes up in the heat of battle, you make do with what you have.

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  9. If Romans had both heavy mobilization compared to other societies and heavy metal use per soldier compared to other armies, how did the total needs of wrought iron of Roman army compare with other societies?

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  10. Specialized javelins do seem to be rarer weapons than spears in most cultures, it is true. But what increasingly strikes me when looking into the actual evidence for various styles of warfare is that spears are not dedicated thrusting weapons. In many if not most cases, the sort of generic spear referenced in the post before last was used as a throwing weapon, often as much or more than as a thrusting one — such is the case in, to exemplify, archaic Greece and early medieval England.

    So while it may be true that the pilum is very heavy for a dedicated javelin, it does not seem as exceptional when factoring in the often heavy historical use of throwing-and-thrusting spears as projectiles, which the Roman heavy javelin does not dramatically differ from in weight or reach.

    As for the biomechanics of holding javelins and charging with the sword, the solution need not be complex: only the legionaries at the fore of the line have good opportunities to throw their projectiles; while those who will end up in the thick of combat must of course discard their missiles into the enemy first, the same does not hold true for those behind them, the rear ranks of whom will have opportunity neither to expend their ordinance nor to engage in close combat in an orthodox monolithic volley-and-charge. Once the charge abates, the line will hold those who have no missiles, those who recuperated some from the hundreds liable to have fallen between the lines at or before the onset of the charge, and those who never spent theirs to begin with. It is sensible that the latter two categories would come to the forefront, being as they are much better prepared for further combat, and thus the conflict perpetuates itself. For significant periods of time if it must — far longer than one charge from each line could take — as period sources indicate.

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  11. Now I need a companion piece on how the pilum was phased out (and another on the rise and fall of more standard javelins and throwing spears in later medieval warfare?)

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    1. Cliffsnotes, seems the Romans started to see cavalry as a very useful thing and in consequence fell into the pattern of infantry being a supporting element to a cavalry force, complete with spears and bows and pikes. The pilum survived in reduced capacity and a probable variant thereof was used notably by the early medieval Franks and somewhat by others like the Anglo-Saxons. Then things started back on the process towards cavalry armies with supporting infantry, following which plate armour and guns got involved and everything started getting a bit out of hand; the specialized heavy javelin, which had already rather fallen by the wayside, rolled most of the way down the drainage ditch.

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      1. Not only that the Romans thought cavalry was very useful; their city-centric society and citizen-militia centric armies were conquered by migrating warbands that were based on nobility, most often mounted nobility. Society changed and thus, as OGH tells us, the military changed with it. Notably important city states continued to field excellent infantry well into the Medieval period.

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        1. Well, sorta. But the change had started well before any supposed or actual “conquering” of the Western Roman Empire, and it persisted and deepened in the surviving Roman Empire for a millenia without the latter being replaced by some horse-riding people. I think history and anthropology have rather moved on from the whole “cultural change is the sole function of being murdered and replaced by another culture” thing.

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        2. Not really.

          By the time the Western Roman Empire fell, the citizen-militia centric armies had been long (half a millenia long) replaced by professional soldiers. And while Roman army remained dominated by infantry, numerically speaking, so were the barbarians that conquered the Empire.

          Cavalry in Europe did not become numerically dominant force until 14th and 15th centuries, and even there only in some areas (15th century Hungary and Croatia had basically no infantry).

          What we do see however is significant increase in QUALITY of cavalry: introduction of cataphracts and horse archers which supplemented and even supplanted the earlier Roman equites.

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          1. Heavy cavalry goes back to the Sassanid (possibly earlier) cataphract lancers, and probably diffused from there. The barbarians included some steppe groups (Alans, Iazyges, Goths) who would have had some proportion of heavy cavalry.

            The infantry component of medieval and Byzantine armies is often under-rated – the cavalry gets all the mentions in the accounts, but it was there – even in Hungary.

          2. Heavy cavalry was more limited by horses than by armor technology. First cataphracts likely appeared alongside the Nisean horse breed (first horses bred for heavy cavalry, IIRC) which is first referenced in 430 BC. This horse breed originated in Zagros mountains, which would indicate that it was Achaemenid Empire that first had the capability to field cataphracts. OTOH, however, there are indications that Neo-Assyrian Empire already fielded cataphract or cataphract-like cavalry in 7th century BC, so it is likely that Achaemenid cataphracts were simply more effective than previous variants.

            Byzantine military manuals actually devote decent portion of text to infantry, but infantry clearly plays a supporting and defensive role – acting as, fundamentally, a mobile fortification for cavalry to operate from. Mid- and late-15th century Hungarian army operated in fundamentally same way, although they also utilized wagenburg. I wrote about Hungarian army here:
            https://warfantasy.wordpress.com/2023/11/09/army-of-john-hunyadi-and-matthias-corvinus/

            Do note however that while infantry played a crucial role in Matthias’ army, cavalry was still seen as more important: Black Army in 1479 had 20 000 cavalry and 8 000 infantry. I suspect that nature of warfare against the Ottomans (raids, raids and more raids with occasional campaign) played a role, but situation in that respect was same throughout Europe.

            But in early 15th century, situation is different. Armies mentioned there are nearly entirely cavalry:
            https://warfantasy.wordpress.com/2023/11/09/sizes-of-armies-in-the-hungarian-ottoman-wars/

            And it is not just because of the “noble bias” in sources. Sigismund’s and later legislature on recruitment makes it clear that focus was on heavy and light cavalry – nobility was to raise heavy cavalrymen and/or light cavalrymen from a set number of peasant houses (one mounted archer per 20 peasant plots during Sigismund’s reign, e.g.). Rather, the reason for lack of prominence of infantry in Hungarian and Croatian accounts is simply that infantry a) wasn’t very numerous to begin with and b) didn’t have much to do in any case. Hungarian-Ottoman warfare was done mainly by raids with occasional siege. In such conditions, infantry served almost exclusively as garrisons in fortifications – but even these garrisons were primarily cavalry, specifically light cavalry, due to need to intercept Ottoman raiders.

            And while infantry does gain prominence over time, it still plays a supporting role even during the time of Matthias – possibly due to fundamentally defensive nature of warfare on the Ottoman front. In fact, cavalry forces of Hungarian border areas began to take on the character of permanent standing army as early as the reign of Sigismund, with the crown paying nobles to keep them permanently under arms (these are in fact the cavalry garrisons of border forts that I have mentioned previously – they were kept in permanent state of readiness, always able to respond to Ottoman attacks or else initiate raids themselves).

    2. It would likely be latter than normally assumed; the spiculum is either a direct continuation of or a very close descendant to the pilum with the socketed shaft and barbed head being similar to earlier, republican era pila. Vegetius makes an interesting if questionable (because it’s Vegetius) that the spiculum used to be called the pilum.

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    3. On top of the reasons other people have given, OGH points out that this is an incredibly expensive way to equip soldiers. Which works just fine when you’re Rome and have an absurd budget and logistic capacity… and less fine if you’re one of Rome’s western successor states, who didn’t have either of those things.

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    4. It seems to be during the late Roman Empire at some point — maybe during the Third-Century Crisis, maybe later. As for the reason, probably a combination of (1) anti-cavalry techniques becoming more important, and (2) the pilum-based system requires a high degree of aggressiveness and motivation, and as the late Empire was generally quite short of soldiers, they probably weren’t able to train them to as high a standard as before (plus Roman warfare generally became more cautious and risk-averse, which would favour a defensive phalanx-like formation).

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      1. The late empire didn’t have many soldiers, but those that it did have were hardened professionals — it seems to me that falling standards, while perhaps a factor, are a less likely explanation than the contemporary shift in focus towards cavalry as the primary striking arm of the military; in the presence of which, you aren’t simultaneously going to operate an infantry system geared towards being the decisive combatant in a confrontation.

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        1. The late empire didn’t have many soldiers, but those that it did have were hardened professionals

          Maybe. There’s not much direct evidence, but it would seem likely that training standards would have fallen during the chaos of the Thirst-Century Crisis. Things might have recovered during the relative peace that followed, but then there were some big losses at Adrianople and Frigidus, followed by the loss of much of the Western Empire under Honorius, which would probably tend to reduce standards again.

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  12. Really interesting post. So the Roman troops must have been coming up against troops fighting with spear and shield. After they throw their pila and advance, they’re down to sword and shield against spear and shield. Doesn’t that leave them with a serious range disadvantage if that first discharge hasn’t created enough disorder? Presumably the depth and ability to cycle the front lines helped, but it must have been pretty difficult to close with a sword against an enemy armed with thrusting spear.

    Does this mean that the Romans were much more prepared and eager to enter shock than those they were fighting against?

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    1. The Roman’s armaments help cover the disadvantage in reach. The republican scutum in addition to being rather wide was also rather tall meaning it could cover from ankle to shoulder with little effort, with the helmet and additional body armour, especially the hamata with its shoulder doublers, make trying to come in over the shield difficult to score a meaningful strike. It didn’t help against the phalangites where the shear depth and density of the sarissa they faced made making contact difficult, Pydna and Magnesia for example, at the former the Macedonians handily repulsed them until terrain brought openings in their lines that could be exploited and at the latter the Seleucid’s phalangites were avoided altogether and left for the ranged troops to whittle down. Shorter spears however that they could try and bull through to fight far more closely than the opposition might be otherwise comfortable.

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      1. Once (if) a swordsman gets past the spearpoint, a spearman like a phalangite is at a big disadvantage. He can’t withdraw his main weapon to strike again; and if he drops it to draw a sword, the phalanx as a whole is weakened, it’s whole “point” partially nullified.

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        1. Against a Macedonian phalanx there would be more than one spear point. The first five rows of the phalanx would lower their spears.

          So when you get past the first spear points you would now be between two spears limiting your movement sideways, and you would still have 4 more spear points in front of you to pass until you can attack the enemy.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarissa

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          1. didn’t the Romans have ballista and other siege weapons to break up that sort of massed infantry formation? Or am I getting the wrong impression from video games?

    2. There are effectively two sorts of shock combat in a battlefield context, though they blend into eachother: on the one hand you have intense close combat, while on the other you have cautious, conservative prodding.

      Most prolonged shock combat across history likely involved a dynamic and irregular mix of the two, balanced heavily towards the prodding side of the scale: humans are essentially incapable, both physically and psychologically, of sustaining continuous hand-to-hand combat for longer than a few minutes at a time, and death will often come sooner at the hands of whoever they’re fighting.

      Since humans care significantly about their own well-being and have a deep fear of death, it would also be very difficult to convince them to engage in prolonged close combat regardless of fatigue. And sure enough, our data on battle casualties gives no evidence of the kinds of meat grinders that would inevitably result were close combat somehow the norm.

      For fairly obvious reasons, if one group has spears and the other only has vastly shorter swords, the latter force is going to have a miserable time whenever it comes to long-distance prodding, which is to say most of the time.

      So our charging Romans full of verve and aggression have at most a few minutes of intense shock action in them, and subsequently will get battered if they choose to stay stuck in protractedly. The safe bet is thus that they didn’t, and instead pulled back for more missiles and more charging, repeat until success.

      It should be noted particularly, that as far as I know there’s no evidence whatsoever for the actual ranks of frontline combatants being cycled, just for maniples and cohorts being replaced or reenforced by reserves.

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      1. Is it possible that the Roman kit was at least partly intended to *force* the legionaries to be more aggressive? If your only hope of winning, or even perhaps surviving, lies in getting up close and personal rather than hanging back and probing with your spear, you’re more likely to charge in. (At the storming of Badajoz, some British regiments went into battle with unloaded guns for precisely this reason.) Conversely, if you’re (say) a Greek hoplite who’s used to hanging back and probing with your spear for long-ish periods of time before one side or the other breaks, you’re likely to be pretty unnerved by a charging horde of Romans who go straight for the (metaphorical, possibly also literal) jugular.

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        1. I think it’s less a matter of brute-force forcing extra aggression out of people (which is liable to fail horribly with the people in question not complying to do 150% and instead doing 0% as the only available alternative), and more a matter of pulsed and continuous operations, highs and lows.

          So instead of spending all of your time in fairly close spear-y proximity to the enemy, you spend most of it quite far away indeed watching the enemy get javelins chucked at them, and the rest right up close and personal hacking at someone with a sword.

          The total intensity is on par or even below it, but instead of being metted out gradually it’s delivered in big sudden peaks, psyched up and compensated for by spans of low-intensity combat.

          The advantage is that the shock is rendered more decisive and severe by its violent concentration, and the disadvantage is that this still applies to the people acting out the system almost as much as it does to those on the receiving end — hence, in all probability, why they were such armour afficionados.

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  13. So, the Romans have a weapon that can disable their opponents’ shields and has a decent chance of penetrating mail armor… what happens during a civil war? Is there anything a legionary can do when facing someone using the same equipment & tactics or is it just “whichever sides loses more shields loses”?

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    1. This is something I’d also like to see addressed in more depth, please! Roman civil wars during the later Republic — both sides more or less equally equipped and trained, what decides victory? How does the tactical system respond to this situation?

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      1. Well, that was a situation the tactical system was dealing with from its infancy — it was only after their consolidation of an empire in Italy that the Romans could expect to be facing entirely alien military traditions.

        It seems to me a fairly straightforward question to answer: the sides flung javelins at eachother and intermittently clashed with swords until one or the other found itself the worse off in the exchange and routed. If both sides were equal in numbers and equipment and training and morale, then it comes down to terrain and luck.

        I think I might recall something about battles of the legion-on-legion sort being often shorter than the average, which would make some sense, but don’t quote me on that.

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  14. Still a bit unclear on the mechanics of Roman infantry tactics:

    1. Even if you soften them up with javelins, charging a phalanx head-on with a sword seems like suicide. How are the Romans not getting torn to pieces by the business end of a phalanx?

    2. How does the cycling of the fromt and rear units work? How the hell do you coordinate something like that? I always thought running away from dudes you were in melee combat woth was a good way to get a spear to the back. Was it possible that the dudes in front would run in close, chuck their javelin and then move back before getting into melee like a heavier version of velite tactics?

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    1. 1. Yes, absolutely, charging a phalanx head-on with a sword is suicide. The Romans tried it several times and generally failed miserably unless the phalanx was in rather rough shape to begin with. Thankfully for them, most people they fought didn’t have pike phalanxes. If you are referring instead to a group of people armed with spear and shield, multiple factors intervene. The first is that missiles may have taken various people along the line out of the fight, permanently or temporarily, entailing gaps. The second is that a sword and shield tends to win out over a spear and shield one-on-one, so any spear-armed people who the swordsmen managed to get to will be discarding their spears and drawing swords of their own, further reducing the number and continuity of the line of spears. The third is psychological — just like tightly-packed infantry in the way of a cavalry charge are logically perfectly safe unless the cavalry are suicidal, but sometimes scatter and are mauled nonetheless, the threat of a bunch of crazies with overgrown knives charging into you may result in significantly reduced coherence and rigidity spear-wall-wise. In the best of cases, this results directly in a rout. In the worst of cases, the adversary is entirely unmoved and then either a) other disruptions and factors have intervened to make it feasible or b) retreat and try again later. And finally, the sort of people who used frequently spears and shields often weren’t arranged in some disciplined tightly-packed formation, but rather more a group of individual fighters who didn’t use spears because they’re guaranteed to stop a determined attacker from getting in close, but rather because they’re a good option for more protracted shock combat in a group, and because otherwise you can always throw them.

      2. To pull away from close combat, back away while facing the enemy. Better yet, wait until the enemy pulls away themselves and cedes ground. You should now be several to tens of meters of no-man’s-land away from the enemy. If you want a maniple or cohort changed out, keep in mind that Roman formations are fairly loose and porous. March the replacement up behind the replacee, then have the former advance through the replacee and the latter fall back through the replacement. You now have a different maniple/cohort in the same space.

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      1. A volley of pila could take out enough front rank enemies to allow advancing legionaries to effectively “double up” against individual opponents in the front lines, further weakening a line of spearmen and expanding the gaps to be exploited by a second wave of attackers.

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        1. I am somewhat less than convinced on that front. Roman lines really aren’t very dense, so in most cases where they’re going up against dedicated spear and shield infantry they’re going to be working with a lesser frontline density to start off with; whatever casualties the pila inflict (and that aren’t immediately replaced by fresh fighters from further back) are likely more going to be making up for that preexisting disparity than entirely reversing it.

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          1. Under the ‘volley and charge’ theory of how the legions fought, the holes in the front line don’t have to be permanent to matter.

            The pila are being thrown from about 20-30 yards, so infantry can charge into a gap and be there within, oh, 5-10 seconds or something like that.

            Most of the guys in the enemy line hit by a pilum aren’t instantly killed, or even mortally wounded at all. They’ve got suddenly awkward shields, or they’re wounded, and they are very likely wanting to pull back from the front rank… But remember the very point you just made- the opposing line tends to be packed more densely. That move can’t be made quickly and will cause some disarray.

            It may well be that the enemy shield wall would have no trouble recovering from a pilum volley with only moderate inconvenience (a few dents and light injuries and so on) if given a minute or two to dress ranks and so on, but they probably don’t have that minute. They have a lot less time before they get hit with a second pilum volley and then charged.

          2. Remember that if the “volley, then charge” theory is correct, then when the enemy spear/shield wall gets hit with a volley of pila, they’re about to eat another volley of pila and then be charged by the legion. Since the pila are thrown from short range (20-30 yards), that charge arrives very soon. I’d guess that it’d hit in the next, oh… 15-30 seconds or so.

            At which point the density of the formation may be working against the spear/shield guys. The front-rankers who are wounded by pila or have entangled spears don’t have as much elbow room to rotate to the rear without further disrupting the shield wall while the legion is charging them.

            If the spear/shield guys had a minute or two to dress ranks and recover from the impact of the pilum volleys, they’d be pretty much tip-top again and probably do quite well repelling the legionary charge. But with that charge coming hard on the heels of the pila, that strictly temporary disruption can be turned into a permanent disadvantage that lets the Romans get into the formation.

            This, of course, assumes that we’re talking about spear/shield wall formations in general, not a Macedonian pike phalanx.

          3. (I am very sorry for the accidental doublepost; I thought something had swallowed my first post, so I rewrote it)

          4. (I am very sorry for the accidental doublepost; I thought something had swallowed my first post, so I rewrote it)

            No, completely understandable.

            Broadly I agree with you; particularly another factor here is that irrespective of whether a rapid retreat from the front line was possible in such short periods of time[1], retreating from the front line is a really horrible precedent to set in response to someone charging you — even if there’s not a single weighed-down shield present on the lines at the clash, the line the Romans are clashing against will resultantly have just got run through the washing-machine, being now significantly disordered by all the shuffling and in all likelihood panicked by the mass of frontliners seemingly falling back in disarrayed response to the impetus of the Roman charge.

            [1]: It really depends on how dense the formation is. This is, in the overbroad category of “cluster of shield-and-spear fighters”, rather variable. On the one hand you might have something quite dense, like a 5th century phalanx in stationary defence, overlapping shields and all that, and in such a context it very well might be quite difficult as the work of a few seconds. On the other you might have something with easily enough spacing — but of course since the looser the grouping the closer to par the Romans start at, this might be a fairly balancing dynamic.

          5. It is also theorised that the different centuriae can time their throws against an advancing enemy in a way to create an almost continuous shower of pila with multiple volleys, and then counter-charge a mauled and ragged enemy line. Re-enactors can train to do that, and it seems reasonable to assume that it was one among different possible tactics.

      1. Either a standard hoplite one or a Macedonian one I suppose. I remember reading older pop history that said that Romans couldn’t take a phalanx head-on so they used better maneuverability and broken terrain to avoid taking a phalanx head-on, but it seems in your article you’re talking about throwing spears and then charging right at a phalanx, which seems like it’d be a good way to get a spear to the face even if they are softened up with pilum.

        Am I missing something?

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          1. In one-on-one combat it’s fairly easy: the sword and shield guy has to push the point of the spear/pike aside with their shield and move forward.

            But this is not how a battle formation works. Idea of a Greek phalanx / shieldwall is to have a dense mass of spears. Long enough so the second rank also contribute, and the whole formation is fighting shoulder to shoulder with overlapping shields. A pike phalanx will have even more points per square metre.

            So yes Romans are protected by their large shields, but against a phalanx in formation there are just too many spears in the way. It would be like trying to push through a fallen tree.

            Hence the volley of pila and an immediate charge. Disrupt the formation and your sword and shield guys can find a way through gaps. But as others have pointed out, on flat ground a pike phalanx is just too difficult even after throwing pila, so the Romans have to find a gap created by rough terrain.

        2. Well, the Romans did often struggle to defeat Macedonian-style phalanxes head-on (cf. the war with Pyrrhus, possibly the Punic Wars [the African heavy infantry in Carthaginian service may have been equipped as pikemen, although it’s not entirely clear]). In the “big three” Roman victories against Hellenistic armies — Cynoscephalae, Magnesia, Pydna — the opposing phalanx was disorganised in some way, either because it hadn’t actually formed up yet (Cynoscephalae), or because of broken terrain (Pydna), or because it was being trampled by its own elephants (Magnesia).

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          1. But note the chronology. The Romans struggled against the Hellenistic phalanx in 280-275, then utterly wrecked them in every major engagement from 200 to

            I’ve not seen it suggested that the Carthaginians employed a Hellenistic style pike-phalanx; rather it has been suggested that Carthaginian ‘African’ infantry seems to have been heavy infantry and may have been similar to hoplites. Hannibal, by Cannae, had re-equipped his entire African contingent in Roman style. In any case, Hannibal’s army was mostly Gauls and Iberians, not Africans and other than Hannibal, Rome tends to win land battles with Carthaginian armies pretty regularly.

            I’d suggest that the evidence would seem to indicate that from 280 to 275, the Hellenistic phalanx was new to the Romans, but that Roman capabilities at fighting it improved, so that the legion by c. 200 was decisively stronger, owing in part to its greater flexibility and maneuver capability on the field.

          2. I’ve not seen it suggested that the Carthaginians employed a Hellenistic style pike-phalanx; rather it has been suggested that Carthaginian ‘African’ infantry seems to have been heavy infantry and may have been similar to hoplites. Hannibal, by Cannae, had re-equipped his entire African contingent in Roman style. In any case, Hannibal’s army was mostly Gauls and Iberians, not Africans and other than Hannibal, Rome tends to win land battles with Carthaginian armies pretty regularly.

            The Carthaginians hired a Spartan mercenary named Xanthippus to train their army in 255. It’s not entirely clear what he did, but one suggestion is that he trained the Carthaginians in Macedonian-style phalanx warfare rather than hoplite-style. As for Hannibal, he was fighting in Italy, with lots of captured Roman equipment available and no reliable way of getting replacement equipment from Carthage. The fact that he re-equipped his soldiers to fight in Roman style doesn’t therefore tell us much about the actual merits or demerits of this style.

            I’d suggest that the evidence would seem to indicate that from 280 to 275, the Hellenistic phalanx was new to the Romans, but that Roman capabilities at fighting it improved, so that the legion by c. 200 was decisively stronger, owing in part to its greater flexibility and maneuver capability on the field.

            This doesn’t actually contradict my statement that “the Romans did often struggle to defeat Macedonian-style phalanxes head-on”. Also, I’m not aware of any new tactical innovations that were introduced by the time of the Macedonian Wars.

          3. Cynoscephalae is especially adding insult to injury in that said un-formed marching column wasn’t even defeated by legionaries — rather it got trampled by Roman elephants!

    3. I’m not a historian by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the Roman solution to facing down the business end of a phalanx would be to… not do that? They wildly outclassed their phalanx-using enemies in terms of both range (because Romans had specialized armor-piercing javelins and their opponents didn’t) and maneuverability (thanks to having a looser formation and greater command flexibility), so they effectively get to pick when the “swords vs. spears” part of the fight happens. And of course they’re going to try to only pick times when they’re practically guaranteed to win…

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  15. You said the Romans were willing to use a lot of expensive metal in their weapons – was it common to organize groups of soldiers to loot the battlefield after victories? I know the looting of battlefields generally happened pretty rapidly after the battle ended, but was there a standard procedure for doing it in order to recover all of that expensive and theoretically reusable metal?

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    1. Remember that soldiers got a share of the loot. I suspect that the bigger issue in getting the soldiers to pick the battlefield clean of anything salvageable would be getting them to turn the loot in, as opposed to getting them to loot the battlefield in the first place

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      1. If the legion’s soldiers loot something made of iron, they’re probably going to sell it off to a merchant or something; they’re already carrying plenty of equipment as it is.

        Option one is that the merchant will, in turn, either be reselling the metal items to someone else. This lowers the net demand for iron in Roman society as a whole and freeing up iron for legionary equipment.

        Option two is that the merchant sells the metal as scrap to a blacksmith and it gets reworked into something the blacksmith can sell. See previous, from a different angle.

        Thus, an ancient army’s collection of looted metal from the battlefield still on net contributes to the state of the army’s metal equipment and how much they can afford, even if the process isn’t centrally controlled by the general or the quartermaster corps or whatever.

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  16. After reading this I spent a bunch of time on youtube watching people throwing pila at targets. The first thing that it made me think was how horrifying it must have been to be on the receiving end of a bunch of them coming towards you. Even if you took a glancing blow or even if it missed you, it must have had a serious morale effect. I also found it really surprising how effective it was against shield and mail, penetrating enough to disable even after hitting both, but also if it just got lodged in the shield how impossible it must have been to remove it or really use the shield at all much after that in a battle situation.

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    1. For getting it out of a shield, it’s not like it’s stuck in there — by design it isn’t. So you just slide the iron out up to the wider tip and thin finagle that through the hole it left behind on entry and you’re golden. But of course you aren’t going to be doing that without some good few seconds of free time, so if you receive such a shield-ornament right before a charge then you’re definitely slipping back and letting someone else take your place in the front line.

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      1. I doubt pulling the javelin out would be that easy. The shield isn’t metal that would leave a clean hole. It has wood fibers that bend when the tip passes through and straighten back to close the hole a bit. In the Tod’s Workshop video they have real trouble to remove the pilum from the shield.

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    2. There’s also a non-zero chance that a tossed pilum might just break your arm even if your shield does protect you, simply because they’re so heavy, which can’t have helped your morale.

      Also, a javelin that “ignores” shields was probably an incredibly nasty surprise for anyone who was fighting the Romans for the first time, since as a general rule you’re carrying a shield because (among other things) it’s good at protecting you from ranged weapons.

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  17. I’m thinking the flat-tanged pilum would be far easier to manufacture by a metalsmith. The design is simpler. Less skill would be required to shape the iron. That should make it cheaper as well.

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    1. I wouldn’t be so sure. It looks like less of a complicated shape, but there’s more processes. To form a socket you either need to start with a blank and hammer a form tool into it to splay it out and create a socket, or start like that then thin the metal out. More work than producing a flat tang certainly.

      However, to mount the socket all you need to do is carve a wooden haft roughly to shape (easy) then heat it up nice and hot before forcing the haft into it to get the shape close enough for a snug fit (at least that’s how I understand things like this are done). If the wooden haft is snug enough without the last step that’s even easier.

      For the flat tanged one you need to forge out two rivets, punch holes in the flat tang, drill matching holes in the wood then forge two rivets into place.

      I don’t think it would necessarily be a lot more time consuming, but they’d probably be closer in time than you’d expect just by the structure of the metal end. I’ve done a bit of fabrication (less blacksmithing, but still creation of multiple copies of something using multiple processes). Switching between different processes can add a lot of time to an otherwise simple job, even if each process itself is quicker once you’re set up.

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  18. Excellent article! You mentioned in passing that the grip on the Roman shield was a single bar parallel to the ground, and I’m trying to imagine how the soldiers actually held it. Was it underhand, like somebody lifting weights, or overhand? Either way, it seems like a really awkward way to hold a relatively heavy object, since you have to twist your wrist around to grab it, and it sounds exhausting if you’re moving it around the block strikes and you have to keep it up for battles that potentially last multiple hours. Unless I’ve completely misunderstood the mechanics of the thing, I can’t see what advantages it holds over the straps that you usually imagine when you think of a shield grip.

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    2. As a longstanding HEMA practitioner, yes, a single-grip shield like a scutum is indeed more tiring than a strapped one. I’ve pondered myself on why the Romans (and not just them) would use such a shield, but the only answer I can give is that it changes the way you handle a shield; however it’s not something that can be explained without a practical demonstration.
      As a rule of thumb, I’d say that when equipped with a short weapon such as a gladius shields favour an active use, while they’re used in a more passive way when handling longer weapons such as spears, Renaissance side-swords, etc.; having a single-grip may make this active handling slightly easier.

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      1. If I understand correctly, the most important advantage of boss-gripped (=center-gripped or single-gripped) shields for the Romans probably was the fact that it puts shield farther away from the person, so if a javelin pierces through the shield, there is less chances that the person (and especially the shield arm) will be wounded.

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        1. Mmh…maybe. Please keep in mind that a scutum is kept at an angle of 45° ca: the upper part lays on the shoulder, while the lower one protects the leg without touching it. I know I’m not very clear, but as I said it’s hard to explain with words alone.

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      2. Do you know why the grip is horizontal rather than vertical? It seems like vertical would be easier to hold.

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        1. I wondered that as well. It doesn’t fit with my understanding of how centre-grip shields are usually used in fighting (you use the shield as your primary method of jockeying for position, by extending it out in front of you to cover yourself and your strike).

          Perhaps with such a large and heavy shield as a scutum the Roman style was less about moving the shield around you and more about moving yourself around the shield. Perhaps it’s designed to be almost planted on the ground with the soldier fighting around the shield (to a degree). It’s certainly large enough to allow someone to manoeuvre behind it effectively.

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          1. The curve of a scutum makes it unsuitable for a lot of the Viking-shield tactics, at least as reconstructed today. You couldn’t effectively “flip” it on the vertical axis the way those guys do, so having the grip aligned with that axis would offer little or no advantage.

            It’s also heavier than Viking-style shields, and the horizontal grip lets you tuck your elbow into your hip and help support that weight when you’re not in immediate combat. Horizontal handles are generally an easier way to carry heavier weights, hence why you rarely find vertical handles on luggage or the like.

            My guess is that offensively, the scutum is going to be used three-ish ways:
            1. To cover the body while passing through spear-range. If you’ve got a little stabby sword, and those guys all have spears, you need to get past those spearpoints to make it a fight.
            2. To try and control a longer thrusting weapon, either by punching out and trying to get the point to stick in the plywood long enough for you to enter and gut them, or by deflecting it to one side and using the body-sized scutum-hole you’ve just made to enter, or if you’re really lucky, by deflecting downward so you can trap the weapon under the shield/your boot.
            3. For a covered strike, either a simple punch with the shield boss, or a body check by putting your shoulder into the shield, or by letting the bottom of the shield drag back a little, then punching the upper rim into their face.

          2. 2. To try and control a longer thrusting weapon, either by punching out and trying to get the point to stick in the plywood long enough for you to enter and gut them, or by deflecting it to one side and using the body-sized scutum-hole you’ve just made to enter, or if you’re really lucky, by deflecting downward so you can trap the weapon under the shield/your boot.

            Alternatively, try and get the point to stick into the plywood long enough for you to hack through the haft of the enemy spear.

          3. Alternatively, try and get the point to stick into the plywood long enough for you to hack through the haft of the enemy spear.

            Good luck with that! You might do a lot of damage to your valuable sword bashing it repeatedly into a 3cm diameter hardwood pole, but thankfully you’ll get stabbed to death by your adversary quite quickly.

          4. @GJ The ‘cutting through the haft of the spear’ thing is very much a Hollywood trope. Spear hafts aren’t totami mats, they’re usually something very hard and tough like 1″ thickness ash heartwood.

            That’s not exactly a quick and easy thing to cut through with a dedicated wood-cutting tool even if both ends are rigidly supported and stationary, let alone with a mediocre wood-cutting tool while it’s held from one end a long way away and actively moving.

          5. That’s not exactly a quick and easy thing to cut through with a dedicated wood-cutting tool even if both ends are rigidly supported and stationary, let alone with a mediocre wood-cutting tool while it’s held from one end a long way away and actively moving.

            Though the Persians supposedly managed to break the Spartans’ spears at Thermopylae, presumably using their swords (spears and bear hands being even worse for the job).

          6. Though the Persians supposedly managed to break the Spartans’ spears at Thermopylae, presumably using their swords (spears and bear hands being even worse for the job).

            Considering the physics of ash staves and human arms haven’t particularly changed since Thermopylae, I’d be willing to bet that’s either artistic license, metaphor or both.

            Honestly. Find an old broom (which is likely to be pine and thus softer, and not an inch diameter). Find a hatchet (a much better tool for cutting through wood than a sword of any variety). Hold the broom in one hand with the other side unsupported and try to cut through it. If you find it difficult to get the angles right for a strike, have someone else hold the broom while you strike at it. Really, really difficult. And you’re not trying to actively kill each other while doing it!

        2. With a vertical grip it is certainly easier if it’s a smaller shield, but not with a scutum: it must be kept angled, with the lower part that does not touch the forward left leg.

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      3. VERY roughly (follow links suggested by other HEMAists), with a strapped shield your shield is more still and you attack around it. With a center grip shield you stay still while attacking and move the shield to parry. The unusual thing about the scutum is that it is a center grip shield which is very large and heavy. There is probably something that we are missing about their actual fighting style once in melee, and that it’s much harder to reconstruct than their overall tactics.

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      4. I’ve seen that argument made. I’ve also seen a number of people using heater-strapped shields quite actively. The “Gumby” fighters (the ones that seem to bend around the blade as you swing it, with extremely active fighting styles) that I’ve met seem evenly divided between heater shields and center-grip round shields. So for my part, I don’t really buy the argument.

        (That said, there are a LOT of myths and misconceptions floating around the Medieval Martial Arts world, and I’m no more immune to them than anyone else–please take my comments as attempts to contribute to the conversation, not necessarily counter-arguments.)

        Plus, while such shield work is useful in one-on-one fighting, the Romans weren’t engaging in one-on-one fighting. There simply isn’t room for such fancy shield work in a well-ordered unit, at least not in the relatively tight formations I’ve been in. Either your shield will smack me in the face, or you’ll deflect the spear into my face/sword arm. Shield-bashing is not the safer option, either; many modern takes on Medieval martial arts ban shield-bashing because it’s too dangerous. I’ve taken a few to the face myself (accidents happen), and it’s better than a spear to the face, but not by much. Regardless of whether your shield is center-grip, strapped, or horizontal-gripped, once you’re in a unit with a few dozen of your new best friends the shield is necessarily going to be mostly static.

        One disadvantage of a horizontal grip is that pulling that I mentioned in another post. You can disrupt a shield wall by pulling a shield forward, which exposes the shieldman to your attacks. A horizontal bar is particularly weak against such tactics, as the bar forms a natural pivot point and your body has no real way to counter this pull via the arm. You can put a leg in the way, but if they pull hard enough that means taking a hard blow to your shin. You can use your forearm to brace it, but at that point why not add a strap for extra support?

        I really can’t think of any advantages of a horizontal bar that aren’t also offered by a vertical bar or strapping.

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    3. I was wondering on this as well. Could it be easier to drop the shield in combat with a grip? Possibly, if javelins or pilums are weighing shields down, and that’s an expected part of combat, dropping your shield might be crucial for maneuverability. A strap might be too complex if your other hand has a sword/spear.
      Have historians considered the grip and discovered anything?

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      1. If you have a shield, a spear, and a sword and you need to drop one of them, drop the spear! Do NOT drop the important piece of defensive equipment that keeps you alive.

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    4. I’d recommend heading over to youtube and watching a couple of HEMA videos of people that really know what they’re doing with centre-grip shields. They offer you a lot more ability to jockey for position in a fight than strapped grips. You basically direct the fight with the shield on an outstretched arm, which then covers a strike from your weapon. So the ‘reach’ of your shield is essentially your arm’s length plus half the width of the shield. With a strapped grip, it’s at most just your arm’s length, and to do a good job of it you need to hold it even closer to your chest than that.

      It’s a lot easier to watch it in action. This video is particularly good for explaining the mechanics, and how the shield is used in concert with the weapon to create an opportunity to strike.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueXkNo95jlI&ab_channel=AlcestedeT%C3%B4tesG%C3%A6iRulfR

      Where strapped grips come into use is when you’re fighting in a way that means you can’t jockey for position with your shield. Things like a phalanx (where the jockeying is done through multiple interlocked shields acting in concert), or by cavalry (where you really need the hand free to guide the horse, and your ability to personally manoeuvre is limited by communications lag to your horse). Otherwise they’re largely inferior.

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      1. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that western swords started to get big T-shaped handgrips at the same time as the (strapped) kite-shaped shield (think Norman knights) became popular — because you could no longer use your shield to cover your sword hand, you needed better protection from the sword itself.

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        1. Nah, that’s not it: you can perfectly cover your sword-hand with almost any kind of shield. As a matter of fact, to always keep your hand behind a shield is a cardinal rule for any kind of shield-fighting, at least up to the 17th century: Medieval and Renaissance fencing treatises take it for granted that you should always do so, and they use shields (such as bucklers, rotelle, targhe, targoni/imbracciature, adargas) much smaller than a Norman or kite shields.

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          1. I’m talking about battlefield combat, not fencing. There are plenty of medieval battle depictions showing men waving their swords around whilst holding their shields close to their bodies, and whilst it’s possible these are all examples of artistic licence, I doubt it. As for “they use shields… much smaller than a Norman or kite shields,” that’s precisely the point. A smaller shield can be held out away from the body to cover the sword-hand, whereas a Norman-style kite shield would be too tiring, too slow, and would limit your own line of attack too much.

          2. It is it.

            The shields you’re talking about are all centre-grip shields designed to be used in a similar way to viking-era shields: in concert with a melee weapon to protect your arms (and the rest of you) from counter-strikes while you’re striking.

            The thing to think about is ‘if I strike out with my sword at the full reach of my right hand, can I get the edge of the shield to cover that hand?’. A bit of kinematic testing yourself should give you the idea. Stand at a diagonal with your dominant-handed side forwards. Now extend your dominant hand out as if you’re at the apex of a strike. Then, put your shield-hand up next to your striking hand. You’ll see that it only reaches to somewhere between your elbow and the middle of your forearm (a good 10″ or so away from your striking hand).

            To get the edge of the shield to effectively protect that striking hand, you ideally need a shield of >10″ in radius with a centre grip (like all of the shields you mentioned). If you had a strapped shield, you’d need a truly huge shield of >20″ radius which is much heavier and gets in the way a lot more (note that the Norman kite shield is not 40″ broad).

        2. Going from videos by Scholagladiatoria, the T-shaped handgrip is mostly to stop you crushing your own sword hand against a shield when you are striking a blow. Notice that a T-shaped guard offers no protection against an enemy weapon coming down the flat side of the blade.
          There are Chinese swords with disk guards, and later western medieval/renaissance swords with basket- and cup- shaped hilt guards, which are designed to protect the hand. If early medieval warriors had wanted a guard to protect the hand, they wouldn’t be using just a T.

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          1. Funnily enough, I was basing my comment on a Scholagladiatoria video (about 8.00 on for a discussion of T-shaped hilts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlr_SF7OWmM

            But I will say that “the T-shaped handgrip is mostly to stop you crushing your own sword hand against a shield when you are striking a blow” strikes me as implausible. After all, people had been using shields for millenia by this point, so why should bashing your hand against an enemy shield have become such a big concern c. AD 900?

        3. Yeah absolutely. You also see a lot more gauntlets and other hand armouring happening around then as well.

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      2. Phalanxes don’t function by by jockeying with interlocked shields. Phalanxes do not generally involve interlocked shields, save when stationary and on the defensive. Furthermore, no phalanxes existed in the late 8th century where Argive shields start showing up.

        Here’s the rub: (9th-8th century) Geometric art generally depicts warriors wielding dipylon shields, two spears (or a bow), and a sword. Those spears are throwing spears — each warrior has two of them, identical in length, and that sword bit isn’t just supposition: the artists clearly drew swords; considering that this is Geometric art we’re talking about, this indicates some fairly keen emphasis — and indeed, warriors in close combat are often seen with swords but not with spears. We have absolutely no idea whether their shields were centre-gripped or strapped.

        Likely somewhere in the mid-8th century, the Homeric epics were transcribed, and the picture they paint of battlefield conflict is essentially one of loosely-organised ranged skirmishing with intermitent closer clashes between the better motivated and equipped participants; among such participants narrated in the epics, spears are used interchangeably for throwing and thrusting with equal frequency, and spear thrusts are more common in descriptions of hand-to-hand action than sword blows. The epics make reference to a variety of shields, including some explicitly characterised as having strapped grips.

        Moving on, the mid-7th century Chigi vase depicts groups of fighters armed with strapped round Argive shields, two spears, and no observable swords. The spears are absolutely and definitively throwing spears, because the artist has been kind enough to very clearly paint their leather throwing straps, but are also very clearly painted as being of unequal length — one about head-height, the other about a spearhead higher than head-height. No significant information can be visually inferred regarding the disposition of combatants, as they are arranged abstractly.

        Complicating things, in the early-to-mid-7th century, the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus appeals to warriors to become — and remain as — promachoi or front-fighters during battle, and separately appeals to others with throwing spears and bows to fight alongside and behind their more heavily-armed allies. This implies organisational continuity from the Homeric epics, and also a distinction between light and heavy-armed combatants which may be interpreted as being one between those providing “fire” and “shock”, to use the modern terminology, but while heavy-armed combatants are encouraged to advance to close combat, that doesn’t mean they were expected to do so exclusively.

        So in conclusion, we know for fact that strapped shields were used — with massive popularity in the specific case of the aspis — for at the very least a century in conditions ranging from spear-tossing, to sword dueling, to loose spear melee, and quite probably in any and all of those consecutively and alternatingly. What it certainly wasn’t used for, was formation combat. In light of those details, I opine that we’re going to need a more nuanced theory of strapped-grip pros and cons than the one you have laid out.

        P.S. Curiously, the small bit of Anglo-Saxon battle description I’ve seen reads strikingly similarly to that of the Iliad: a focus on specific individuals advancing from their host, throwing spears at specific adversaries, receiving thrown spears from specific adversaries, closing the distance and stabbing someone, etc. — all with shields that differ substantially from anything we know to have been in Dark Age Greek use. It may, as wretched as it is to say it, be possible to overanalyse shield morphology.

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      3. There’s a few issues here:

        1. Roland Warzecka’s reconstruction of shield fighting is contentious within HEMA owing to its overreliance on the bind resulting in the question of what happens when someone refuses to engage so. Roland also has a personal contention about the shield wall not being a thing without concave shields despite evidence otherwise.

        2. Roland (and much of HEMA for that matter) focuses on using round shields with vertical grips; the size, weight and grip are considerably different here meaning so are the dynamics. An easy example here would be that a scutum could be braced by knee and shoulder making it impossible to twist in someone’s grip like a round shield. HEMA cobbled together an organized means of fighting with vertical centre grip shields by amassing a hoard of visual evidence and marrying it with the use of duelling shields from the late medieval (see Stephen Hand’s paper for details), a similar system does not exist for horizontal grip ones and leans heavily into conjecture and trial and error.

        3. HEMA is largely focussed around one on one duels (a limitation stemming from their sources) it’s applicability to fighting as part of a formation is limited; Alfieri felt it necessary to have an entire bit in La Picca defending fencing with pikes as being useful for war and even then it was limited to granting weapon familiarity. Twisting your shield every which way is asking for the person behind or beside them to jab you with a spear while you aren’t covering yourself.

        It is probably worth casting a larger net and getting the opinions of reenactors and the SCA who also have experience here and moreover with the appropriate item.

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        1. Roland also has a personal contention about the shield wall not being a thing without concave shields despite evidence otherwise.

          Okay so first of all, what all is that contention based on? But secondly, really depends on what a “shield wall” is. I only ever see the term applied with any regularity to early medieval battle, and I’m half-convinced that the conventional interpretation of it in that context is significantly bogus.

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  19. > “also lets the weapon potentially offend a target”

    That’s a usage I haven’t heard before. Is it common in the field? Is it a bit of Latin peeking through?

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    1. Pretty common, I’d say. Pretty sure it’s a more general bit of military vocabulary, not specific to any given field of history.

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  20. I have a couple of questions regarding tactics at the point of contact.

    1) Did the Romans checkerboard maniples line of battle cause a single line of battle to break up on impact? In the tight mass of men, the empty spaces between maniples would provide less resistance than a unified front – did that cause havoc to the enemies formation?

    2) WRT the pilum volleys, I’ve always seen that described as happening before contact with the goal of fouling the shields of the enemy’s front line. But it has occurred to me that the pilum would have been effective after an initial contact if they were targeted at the ranks following the first rank. Especially against a Phalanx in the “scrum” stage. The loss of pressure from later ranks dropping off (due to pilum injuries) would be panic inducing and help woth breaking up the phalanx formation.

    Have either of these possibilities been considered?
    X

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    1. This comment is actually pretty unique, in that I’ve never before seen anyone attempt to speculate on the interactions between the old-orthodox othismos hoplite battle perspective and anyone else save the Persians, who hardly count really what with discussion of the matter mostly coming down to the regurgitation of millennias-old stereotypes.

      To continue on that course, here’s a question: how would a phalanx opposing a roman force be in a “scrum” stage? The scholars who entertain that bit of fancy generally affirm or imply that mutual consent is a necessary prerequisite; are you suggesting that Roman legionaries also practiced literal othismos? In that case, how do you reconcile the significant divergence in equipment and tactical disposition between Roman and Greek military traditions of the 2nd and 5th centuries BC respectively? And, as that last question might lead one to consider, a) the phalanxes that get subjected to old-orthodox speculation are specifically the Classical 5th century variety, not the Hellenistic pike phalanxes which the Romans would have faced, so b) do you interpret pike phalanxes as also engaging in literal othismos and/or c) do you interpret any or all of the other military traditions — Iberian, Gallic, Germanic, Dacian, etc. — which the Romans faced as engaging in “scrums” as did Classical Greek hoplites under the old-orthodox perspective, and d) how do you interpret the variance between the materiel and tactics of the aforementioned opponents and the Classical Greek panoply and array with its supposed optimization for the style of combat under discussion?

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  21. Dr. Devereaux,

    I really enjoyed this article overall and found that your thinking on the Roman method of infantry combat mostly matches my own, but with some differences of opinion as well.

    I tend to favour Zhmodikov’s and later Philip Sabin’s line of thinking that battle must necessarily have mostly a standoff outside of striking distance, with hand to hand combat featuring only as relatively short pulses or clashes. We might call this the “pulse and lull” model, roughly. There’s many reasons why I favour this theory, primarily to do with the physiological and psychological limits of a human combatant.

    But I would like to focus more on the sources and their evidence. Principally I want to bring up the example of the Battle of Ilerda that Caesar accounts for us in his Civil War. According to Caesar’s account, two forces of legionaries at this battle engaged in combat for five hours before the Caesarians used up all their throwing weapons, drew their swords, charged the Pompeians, and routed them. How do you reconcile this accounted length of battle with your model, which seems to imply that the Romans close distance, throw both pila in rapid succession, and then are essentially swordsmen for the rest of the combat?

    Ancient troops frequently picked up javelins from the battlefield and re-used them. Polybius says that the velites’s javelins were so sharpened as to bend on contact to prevent them from being re-thrown, and Caesar accounts for Gallic troops picking up Roman javelins and throwing them back during the Gallic Wars. Could not a legionary in a lull in the battle simply sheath his gladius and pick up a javelin again?

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    1. That would require the enemy to reliably throw back the javelins instead of charging to contact themselves, and do so despite the measures, intentional or otherwise, taken to keep them from being rethrown. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, but I have a hard time seeing, say, a pike phalanx engaging in javelin dodgeball instead of staying a pike phalanx.

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      1. I mean you are correct that pike phalanxes are probably not re-throwing javelins, but the phalanxes would have had skirmishers of their own who likely would have. Plus of course every Roman veles or hastatus who goes down killed or wounded without having thrown his javelins is just leaving more ammunition on the field to be used or re-used. And there are also accounts of troops even picking up rocks from the field to throw.

        Human beings generally much prefer to strike from a safe distance rather than face the considerable risks and terrors of hand to hand combat. So I would be unsurprised if battles involved quite a lot of posturing and lagging at distance, hurling objects and insults back and forth. Similar to what we see with modern rioters hanging around throwing bricks and bottles at the riot police instead of charging to contact, even when they considerably outnumber the police and would if they all charged en masse presumably easily be able to overcome them.

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        1. With regards to the javelins landing among the phalanx, skirmishers wouldn’t be retrieving them as that would entail going into the phalanx and breaking up its formation.

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      2. Sure, but you must recognise that pike phalanxes are not the best — or, well, to good of an — example here: they most certainly did not play javelin dodgeball and this is clearly evidenced by how they pushed Roman infantry around like a rambunctious American pushing a shopping cart on Black Friday. It doesn’t take much to see what all those episodes of phalanxes shoving the legions halfways off the battlefield would entail on the ground level, that is, the Romans constantly retreating to maintain distance.

        Most of the people Rome went up against used javelins plentifully themselves, and normal spears (which can also be thrown). They too could have taken the aggressive agoraphilic route, but consider for a moment what the latter entails:

        If we have the Romans and their spear-wielding adversaries staring eachother down and exchanging insults and diverse missiles, and the adversaries decide to make a charge for it, they are going to end up at the (potentially countercharging) Roman line as a disordered cloud punched through with javelins; the Romans are probably going to have a decent shot at this brawl, and the adversary if worsted is going to be dropping back out of the melee and giving the ground they took, so things have a quite decent chance to remain stationary. If the Romans are just now retreating from a charge of their own, same thing applies — a disorganised pursuit is going to be ripe pickings. If the adversary have the fairly rare ability to walk steadily into contact and keep order while getting pelted all the while, this is starting to get into phalanx territory — but sans pikes, the Romans can at least still retaliate effectively, and push their opponents back in charges and close combat.

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      3. Actually, all talk of phalanxes aside, there’s an important nuance to your premise:

        If a Roman line throws pila and charges, then a few minutes later falls back to its previous position — keeping in mind that many if not most pila are going to miss and undershoot, falling to the ground — this means that it’s highly likely that the Romans involved will be charging over hundreds of pila on their approach, and more importantly walking over the same on their retreat soon after. All that’s required for a significant number of pila to be restocked is for members of the line to snag a pilum or two off the ground as they fall back — indeed, the rear members of the line are at perfect liberty to do so even as the fore members are engaged in hand-to-hand fighting!

        In addition to the above, the first two Roman lines are six ranks deep. Not all ranks need to volley, and indeed it would be exceptionally difficult for the rear ranks to volley theirs to any productive effect. If only the first two ranks — close enough to the enemy to have sufficient battlefield awareness, aim their fire, and risk little friendly fire — cast their missiles, then the line has capacity at hand for three full volleys without involving any means of restocking.

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  22. Did they actually carry two pila into battles? I always assume they only used one each battle, and the other was for the second battle.

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  23. I often wonder, as a hypothetical, what the ‘ideal’ way of tactics and organization would have been for this social-technological scenario. Pre-modern battle systems seem to be very stable once established, only changing when some other technological or political shift forces it. There are probably other, much better ways of doing warfare that went undiscovered out of simple (though entirely understandable) risk aversion.

    If you had to device an entire tactical and organizational system from first principles with no preconceptions, operating within the social and technological limitations of 300s Italy, what would you come up with?

    Not necessarily a definitive answer, but consider that the Roman army described above is comprised, in terms of equipment, mostly of generalists. The majority of the fighters have the two javelins, sword, shield, and moderate-to-heavy armor. Cavalry plays a secondary role if that, and archers are *conspicuously* absent from Roman armies, despite clearly being aware of the concept.

    Imagine a hypothetical army comprised of specialists in formation, modified from a phalanx. The front row of soldiers have very, *very* large shields but *no* weapons, the next several rows back have long, two-handed spears, very long and thick, reaching over the shield bearers in layers. A kind of ultra-phalanx.

    Behind a few layers of spear-carriers are some number of archers, shooting over. They cannot see where they are aiming, but they do not need to- they already know roughly where the enemy lines are just from knowing the shape of their own formation, so they can fire blind and still probably hit something. Since they do not need to worry about carrying other weapons or even armor, they can have lots of arrows (and possibly have even more stockpiled further back and brought up as needed), and thus fire as long as they need to.

    The ‘victory condition’ is this context is either A) outlasting the enemy in either morale or mortal attrittion, or B) keeping the enemy forces occupied long enough to get a smaller, secondary force maneuvered for either a cavalry charge or secondary archer barrage from the side, which could potentially be devastating.

    Thoughts? I know no-one likes armchair generals, but is this at least conceptually interesting?

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    1. If I understand correctly, you describe tactic somewhat similar to the one used in ancient Sumer and Akkad. They also had some type of phalanx with large shields and long spears and quite a lot of missile units, mostly archers. That was a good tactic for warfare between agrarian city-states on the plains of Mesopotamia. But I do not think that it is suited for rough mountainous terrain – the phalanx will become broken quickly, making both itself and archers wulnerable to attacks. And since Italy is quite mountainous, I am not sure that such a tactic will be popular there.

      And then the chariots arrived, and because of their high maneuvrebility they were able to attack both archers and the flangs and rear of the phalanx without significant risks. I think, cavalry, armed with javelins (such as Tarentians and Numidians) will be even better than chariots in that role.

      That’s the point of Romans being generalists. They were able to fight good enough both on flat and on rough terrain, both against cavalry and against phalanx. They were also useful during assaults or naval battles, while specialist troops may struggle in such situations.

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      1. I don’t think that necessarily aligns with the evidence; the main differentiation between flat open land and rough mountainaous terrain is that the latter is less suited to cavalry, and thus approaches to warfare in such regions have a tendency to be more infantry-centric.

        Say what you will about terrain “breaking up formations”, but the fact of the matter is that the popularity of pikes in Europe — pikes being almost synonymous with ordered, tight, collectivist infantry easily disordered by rough terrain — is essentially directly correlated with how mountainous a territory is: thus they came to fame first in the phalanxes of Greece (which is majority mountain), and then in the schiltrons of Scotland (the most mountainous country in the UK) and the pike squares of Switzerland (no comment needed).

        Infantry just isn’t particularly affected by rough terrain, at least not significantly enough for it to exert any appreciable influence on military tradition; humans are very well adapted to movement on all sorts of land. Where there is a correlation between lighter infantry and mountainous landscapes, I would argue that the causation is more indirect: rough land is agriculturally suboptimal, thus can sustain smaller populations and less surplus, and therefore peoples inhabiting such terrains are generally poorer; wealth, I would argue, is a driving factor behind materially and organisationally intensive styles of warfare.

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        1. I think people tend to overestimate just how open most “flat, open land” really is. If you’re an agrarian army fighting another agrarian army, it’s quite likely that any flat country you fight in is going to be used for farming, which means there will be barns, cottages, hedges, drainage ditches, groves of trees, and other things to disrupt your formation.

          Conversely, armies fighting in mountainous terrain didn’t usually fight on the mountains themselves. Instead, they’d march and fight in the valleys in between, which are generally… flat and open.

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    2. > I often wonder, as a hypothetical, what the ‘ideal’ way of tactics and organization would have been for this social-technological scenario.

      I think this is fundamentally a mistaken approach, it’s modern 4x strategy game thinking. As my friend Adam has very succinctly put it, “Armies weren’t built from the top down, they were recruited from the bottom up”.

      The famous Clausewitzian maxim is that “war is a continuation of politics by other means”, but it’s just as true that “war is a manifestation of society in other circumstances”. Arguably this starts to change with modern professional deracinated armies, but I think you could partly consider this a representation of a society that treats warfare as something other or separate from social life (instead of integrated into it).

      So you cant just restructure everything arbitrarily, because the army your society produces is an expression of that society, and in turn an influence on it. That’s why there’s so much path dependence and stability in military systems. They can change, and obviously they do change over time, but that change is mostly slow and evolutionary. If you’re an autocratic ruler with a strong civil service you can maybe centralise things more abruptly, but that in itself is a social structure which has certain implications – getting the large scale social buy in you need for widely recruiting committed shock infantry will be a difficult matter, for example.

      For your specific suggestion, I think it’s worth remembering that people aren’t automata either. Your front rank in particular is a challenging sell: “go into the front rank of the battle with absolutely no weapons and trust in your comrades” is not an easy thing to convince people of. That psychological factor is likely to be a serious difficulty in implementing something like it.

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      1. Arguably this starts to change with modern professional deracinated armies, but I think you could partly consider this a representation of a society that treats warfare as something other or separate from social life (instead of integrated into it).

        To be fair, “professional and deracinated” is a good way to describe a lot of modern life — we don’t really have much of a culture of generalists or gentleman amateurs any more, and it’s considered quite normal, even expected, to move across the country, or even abroad, in order to get a (better) job.

        For your specific suggestion, I think it’s worth remembering that people aren’t automata either. Your front rank in particular is a challenging sell: “go into the front rank of the battle with absolutely no weapons and trust in your comrades” is not an easy thing to convince people of. That psychological factor is likely to be a serious difficulty in implementing something like it.

        The closest I can think of is the British army at Culloden, where the infantry were trained to bypass the enemy’s shields by thrusting at the man to their right, trusting in their own left-hand comrade to deal with the man directly in front of tham. I’ve always thought that must have required an *incredible* amount of trust and cohesion to pull off successfully, but apparently they managed it.

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        1. The reason why the army at Culloden managed it is because each regiment was raised in a particular area (usually a specific county) and trained together.

          Not to mention that the British regiment was mostly veterans of previous wars, so they had considerable experience, particularly compared to the Jacobins, who had a severe lack of experience, to say nothing of a severe lack of enthusiasm (the Jacobins had serious trouble recruiting soldiers to the point of having to rely on what was essentially conscription (there was an ancient right of a landlord to mobilise their tenants for military service which the Jacobins resorted to)

          So yeah, it’s less surprising in that situation they managed it- it was roughly analogous to an experienced professional military coming up against troops that at best were equivalent to troops that hadn’t even finished boot camp yet.

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          1. I think you mean the Jacobites — Jacobins were pretty much their polar opposite, and wouldn’t exist for several decades. Also, I think you’re exaggerating the Jacobites’ lack of experience — they weren’t long service professionals, but they had fought and won several battles in the course of the ’45 Rebellion, so we’re not talking about an untrained rabble here. Plus, ignoring the guy swinging a broadsword at your head and trusting in the man to your left to deal with him is still going to require an enormous level of cohesion and discipline, even if the broadsword guy hasn’t finished basic training yet.

    3. I think the problem with this is that it requires a lot of organization and centralized authority to set it up and keep it producing the right troops in the right proportions. And it may work well when nothing goes wrong, but it fails and fails badly when things go wrong. And something always goes wrong, war is like that (not least because lots of people on the other side work hard to make things go wrong for you).

      I think it is also analogous to the questions in OGH’s farming posts asking “But why do they farm in those weird strip fields? Why grow half a dozen different crops instead of using rectangular fields monocropping whatever grows best in that soil and climate? Then they can trade for other stuff and save in the good years to trade in the bad years.”

      And the answer was that their goal isn’t to produce as much as possible, it is to make sure that there will always be something to eat. Diversity in land and crops to protect against disasters is more important than maximizing bumper crop years.

      And the “trade and save” idea requires something like a safe and stable banking system and reliable trade, which you don’t get without a lot of organization and and a stable and orderly society.

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    4. I know Han Chinese armies used mixed units of polearm (ji), sword, spear and missile troops. But while Hollywood loves shield-only-troops, they do not exist historically. ‘Shield-bearers’ are invariably shield-and-spear troops.

      The battlefield is too chaotic a place for fighting styles which can only ever function in neat, perfect formation and coordination.

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      1. I think Italian communal infantry actually had a formation like that in the XII-XIV centuries: a first line of men called “pavesari”, holding big “pavesi” shields, and a second line of “lancieri”, holding long spears to keep at bay enemy cavalry. It was a static formation though, and I should check some sources to be sure.

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    5. Sounds like a good system if everything goes right and you can meet the enemy head-on and not have to worry about flanking.

      If things go wrong and you can’t meet the enemy head on and you do have to worry about flanking though…

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    6. Charles the Rash tried this – recruiting the best units of each type from around Europe (so English longbowmen, French cavalry, German pikes and so on). He lost several times to the Swiss pike/crossbow or handgun combination – the last time fatally.

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    7. The problem with that specialized formation that immediately springs to my (similarly arm-chair general) mind is: what happens when a few of that first row of shield-carrying dudes go down? If a front-row Roman soldier goes down, no big deal: there’s another identically-equipped one behind him with his own shield who can step into the gap. If the only people in your army who have shields start to go down (and it WILL happen eventually to at least some of them, from ranged attacks by the other army), now the people behind them are left with no shields and an opening the other force can exploit.

      It’s certainly fun to theorize about, though.

      (Also I think I remember somewhere on this blog mentioning how archers blind-firing in vertical arcs was effectively not really a thing, historically; I think the idea was that it’s just too ammo-inefficient, even against massed troops. People have a much smaller cross-sectional area from above compared to from the front, after all.)

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      1. (Also I think I remember somewhere on this blog mentioning how archers blind-firing in vertical arcs was effectively not really a thing, historically; I think the idea was that it’s just too ammo-inefficient, even against massed troops. People have a much smaller cross-sectional area from above compared to from the front, after all.)

        Perhaps even more importantly, the arrow would have lost all its initial momentum on the upward trajectory. Coming down again, it would just have its own weight to give it momentum, and since arrows don’t generally weigh very much, it wouldn’t be able to do much damage even against a lightly-armoured opponent.

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  24. About the Zhmodikov’s hypothesis: I do not think he is completely right but I do think that there is some merit in it. While the hastati and the principes (or later legionaries) weren’t javelin-throwes akin to the Greek peltasts, but that doesn’t mean that missile exchanges were impossible.

    There were some short battles, that were decided after one mass volley-and-charge, but there also presumably were longer battles with several volleys-and-charges (either at different part of the battle line, or by changing lines of the formation, or even by the same unit). Also, probably not all volleys-and-charges were followed by melee combat, either because the enemy was routed before the lines clash or because the charging unit stopped without reaching the enemy. And lastly, between those volleys-and-charges there might be shorter or longer periods of standoffs, when two lines were standing within throwing range and some pila might be thrown. Obviously, during such standoffs skirmishers such as the velites were throwing their javelins and other missiles, but that doesn’t mean that some hastati weren’t able to throw their pila as well – for example at the enemy skirmishers who came too close.

    If I am not mistaken, this hypothesisy of ancient warfare is known as “dynamic standoff model” or something like this and developed by Philip Sabin (“The Face of Roman Battle.”, Journal of Roman Studies 90, 2000, pp. 1-17), and it seems to me that this hypothesis is the most realistic and better supported by the availible sources.

    Reply

    1. My thoughts exactly.

      One interesting bit of evidence I came across by chance pretty much immediately before reading your comment is an account of an engagement between Zulus and Ndwandwe in 19th century Africa, both fighting with the Zulu-popularised equipment and doctrine: to wit, large oval shields and very short, long-bladed spears adopted for intense shock combat, with forces arraying in a line with two flanks and a reserve, the most experienced combatants being placed in the centre.

      The Zulus advanced cautiously to within aprox. twenty meters of their adversary, and both sides charged into a clash which lasted for about three minutes. Subsequently the two parties withdrew and assessed their losses, which were going on even, before committing to another, slightly longer clash which proved to the Zulus’ advantage. On the third clash the Ndwandwe began to give ground and eventually routed, pursued by the victors.

      This episode seems relevant as interdisciplinary support for Sabin’s theory, particularly considering the commonalities that can be drawn between the referenced warriors and those of Classical Italian extraction — both traditions of warfare involved charges into close combat with large shields and short weaponry, the disposition of forces in posterior reserve positions, and the concentration of force at the centre of the line; should those resemblances be treated as significant (although it should be evident that they are far from total) we might be in possession of a glimpse into how certain elements of legionary combat played out, and in particular a quite recent base to extrapolate from onto the further past and reenforce Sabin’s viewpoint.

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      1. Yeah there just has to be a whole lot of lulls in a long battle, intense melee combat is INCREDIBLY tiring. I’m a (very) mediocre amateur boxed and a somewhat decent marathon runner and during sparring my thinking was originally, “I’m a freaking marathon runner, I can just charge in and the other guy will get tired faster than me.”

        LOL, no, I got incredibly winded during just one round of boxing unless I worked hard on conserving my energy.

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  25. Since the curve of the scutum meant it could stand up on its own – at least on relatively flat ground – would it be worth just putting it down to make throwing the pilum easier?

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  26. Can you add names to your “op cit” citations please? As it stands, following things up is a real faff – in the text you have the name and the footnote “op cit”, but no easy way to track down the referenced text. In the footnotes you have just a big list of “op cit” with no way to link them back to the corresponding name and text that’s listed somewhere just above.

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  27. I think the short answer is that the Roman legion consisted of soldiers rather than warriors; its arms and tactics emphasized a well-oiled military machine rather than individual prowess. That should explain intuitively why they favored the short sword/gladius over the long sword, and the heavy javelin/pilum over the spear. For the long answer, see above.

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    1. The gladius Hispaniensis is not a short sword. It’s 75-85cm in length generally, only slightly shorter than La Tene II and III swords, which tend to be 75-90cm in length. Later imperial era gladii types are somewhat shorter, but the swords the Romans adopt and conquer the Mediterranean with were decently long. For comparison, the average length for one-handed medieval swords is around 90cm.

      Also, quite a lot of ‘soldier’ armies used spears.

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      1. I appreciate the response! In my defense, the spatha tends to be longer than the gladius. I was also mainly comparing the legionnaires to Germanic/Celtic armies, who leaned more in favor of the warrior ideal. Certainly, it’s true that the Greek phalanx were disciplined soldiers, relying on long spears in tight formation — I believe the Romans defeated them by breaking their ranks and outmaneuvering them. However, my point stands that Roman arms (pilum/heavy javelin, scutum/shield, gladius/sword, etc) should not be considered individually, but as components of a military system.
        But yea, criticism is helpful, especially when pop culture depictions of the period tend to distort our perception.

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        1. The Roman arms absolutely should be considered as components of a military system, but that’s what the original post our host made was already doing, and what we’ve all already been doing.

          Importantly, the claim that “the Romans were disciplined, coordinated soldiers, not ‘warriors,’ and this intuitively explains why they fought with short swords and not long swords and with the pilum and not the thrusting spear” is what you originally made.

          So if the Roman swords are not particularly short in fact, and if there are plenty of very disciplined and regimented ‘soldierly’ armies that fought with thrusting spears quite effectively… Well, you’re left with a situation where your intuition has led you to draw a mix of conclusions. Some of those conclusions are outright false, as if you had attempted to sit in your armchair and reason that the sun must surely rise in the west and set in the east, when in truth it is not so.

          And others of these conclusions break down if we try to apply them universally. Claiming “a soldierly army uses pila and not thrusting spears, and the more soldierly the army is, the more pila-like its spears will become” doesn’t work when one’s reference pool starts to expand outside ancient Rome itself. The Romans might not have used the pilum if they weren’t disciplined, but that doesn’t mean their discipline was the direct primary cause of them using the pilum.

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          1. As I said, I was comparing the Romans to Germanic & Celtic warriors, because I had the impression that the latter favored longswords and spears, those weapons being more conducive to the warrior ethos. But as you pointed out, soldier-type armies used spears too, such as the Greek phalanx and the Persian Immortals. Then again, the Thracians used early polearms like the falx and rhomphaia, and they were more of the warrior-type, I think.

            So, while warriors may have leaned towards heavier weapons, and soldiers towards lighter weapons, there were numerous exceptions both ways, so that my original statement was oversimplified or even inaccurate. I should’ve specified that certain weapons would be favored by soldiers, others by warriors, but there was plenty of overlap and it’s not cut-and-dry.

            As I alluded earlier, there’s also pop culture depictions of the period which permeate our subconscious, and can make it easier to slip into inaccurate framing.

          2. As I said, I was comparing the Romans to Germanic & Celtic warriors, because I had the impression that the latter favored longswords and spears, those weapons being more conducive to the warrior ethos.

            I’m not sure what you mean by “warrior ethos”. I’ll assume you are referring to the general trends of more decentralized forms of warfare.

            The main pedantism here is that absolutely nobody used longswords in Antiquity. Longswords evolved in Central Europe around the mid-14th century, at the cusp of the Renaissance, in reaction to the rapid proliferation of heavy armour in that period. If a sword from two millennia prior happened to be somewhat longer than some other examples we know of, that doesn’t make it a longsword any more than it makes it a French epée, or an 1860 cavalry saber.

            Swords and spears are indeed the weapons we could most easily correlate with the “warrior ethos” as interpreted above. The existence of swords on that list is far from surprising, since everyone had them, but they do tend to get more emphasis in more decentralized societies, where the looseness of combat lends more opportunities for their use; the spear is emblematic as about the most generalist weapon obtainable — keeping in mind that this is the default throwing-and-thrusting spear, not a specialized javelin, thrusting spear or pike.

            Roman equipment is revealing in the comparison — not at all the collectivist optimization of Hellenistic pikes, it resembles far more the decentralized equivalents, but molded and sharpened by higher-level coordination.

          3. Melanoc3tus: Yes, by “warrior ethos” I meant decentralization. Point taken, the term “longsword” should not be used for a longer-than-usual sword in Antiquity, since it refers to a much later development, as you said. Yes, swords are more individualistic — the Romans were well-coordinated, but more individualistic than pop culture might express. I read somewhere that a legionnaire would throw the pilum, bash with shield, then attack with the sword as the typical combat routine.

            I realize this is not my best showing, but as an intellectual, there are different areas you delve into, some more, some less, and weapons/fighting styles from Antiquity is something I’m a bit patchy on. I should’ve known that barging in here with half-baked thoughts would lead to this sort of thing — however, it led to some very informative responses, so I guess it works out in the end.

          4. I read somewhere that a legionnaire would throw the pilum, bash with shield, then attack with the sword as the typical combat routine.

            I think that’s by far too simplistic and abstracted a strategy to have much resemblance to the complexity and chaos of real combat. That said, if that does originate from statements of source material, it would have corollaries in, for instance, Zulu warfare: the theory of combat in the latter system being that a fighter would hook their enemy’s shield with their own, twist it out of the way, and then stab them under the shoulder. One explanation for these simplistic tactics advertising instant and efficacious results is that whatsoever their actual relevance to combat, they provided combatants with a compelling theory of victory, the effects thereof on morale having concrete effects on their combat efficiency regardless of how applicable the techniques actually were — the promise of a free lunch can also be seen ubiquitously in modern advertising.

          5. As to “theory of victory,” it’s important to observe that if everyone in an army tries the same gambit at the same time, they don’t all have to succeed for the gambit to be effective.

            Furthermore, an action in combat doesn’t always have to be optimal if it’s something you’ve practiced a lot and are good at. As Bruce Lee put it, “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks, but the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.”

          6. Those are valid points. While it is a simple template, it can provide a “theory of victory” as you said, as well as a general guideline for how to engage, even if real combat often doesn’t cooperate. As Moltke said, “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” or as Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

    2. TBH the Romans probably emphasised individual prowess more than the Greeks or Macedonians, for whom keeping your place stoically in the battle line was the main priority.

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    4. Armies that emphasise coordination above individual prowess rely on spears and pikes. The sword is in comparison a strongly individualistic weapon, reliant on individual prowess. The Romans trained soldiers in single combat much more than in drill, and idealised victory in single combat as the most signal accomplishment for a Roman combatant.

      In other words, that pop-history well-oiled machine gag is so much bunk, and if you want to see an actual oiled machine then look no further than the Hellenistic phalanx, which instead of turning a bunch of heavily-armoured swordfighting warriors into a bunch of heavily-armoured swordfighting warriors that all charge at the same time, turns a bunch of levied peasant farmers and 18 foot long sticks into the world’s most formidable infantry shock tactic.

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  28. “the Romans seem to have been unusually tolerant – indeed, exceptionally so – of deploying lots of expensive metal equipment on their infantry.”

    Reminds me of the stereotype of the “American way of war” (although it works rather better with long term volunteers).

    1. Equip your soldiers well. Requires a rich society to pay for it – including the maintenance on all that equipment
    2. Train them to use all that equipment well
    3. Teach them that the way to win is to mess up the other guys instead of trying to ambush them. An ambush can be seen as “Well we weren’t ready for them”, but when you punch a hole right through their best troops when they’re as ready as they can be, it can’t be seen as other than a direct loss.

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  29. Here’s what I’ve always wondered: what the heck does a “charge” of heavy infantry look like anyway? Having played lots of Rome Total War and lover of movies like Gladiator and HBO Rome … I’m aware they got so very much wrong. Does heavy infantry even charge at all? Would they exclusively advance in step and purposefully?

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    1. Heavy infantry absolutely charges, especially Roman heavy infantry.

      As far as I recall there’s no evidence that Roman legionaries of the period in question were trained to keep time and advance in step at all, save perhaps as a marching rhythm; since the legionaries would have wanted to capitalize on any missile-induced disruption as rapidly as possible, and Roman ranks seem to have deployed with about an arm’s-length between each soldier, it’s probably going to look like more or less exactly like a diffuse crowd of people all running in the same direction.

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      1. TBH I’m not sure there’s evidence for many heavy infantry troops marching in step before the modern period. The Spartans famously marched to the sound of the flute, although the fact that this is specifically pointed out by our sources suggests that they were unusual in this regard, and I’m not aware of any evidence for dark-age or medieval infantry doing any sort of step drill. Getting everyone to march in step is handy for making sure your formation doesn’t break up, but not, it seems, strictly necessary.

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  30. I feel like this left out an important point: The heavy pila doesn’t work as a very good thrusting spear, but it *can* work as a bad one. So if taking the objective requires them to wield spear-shaped objects, here’s a spear-shaped object they can wield.

    A musket with a bayonet isn’t necessarily a one-to-one replacement for a pike, but pikes tended to go away once they became common.

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  31. So, basically, The ancient Romans went into battle with the functional equivalent of a two shot pistol? The armor piercing capability of the pilum is completely new to me–this changes everything about how I envision Roman warfare.

    So this is what I imagine now: Volley and charge, or alternatively, volley and advance slowly (as the maniples get change out), or volley and retreat slowly (as the maniples get changed out). With the Velities standing by to rush in and pepper any enemy who looked like they might advance into a gap in the Roman lines. Do these in various combinations, as seems appropriate, until the enemy collapses.

    Do I more or less have this sort of right?

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    1. One of the tactics I was trained in was the “three-step charge”. The idea of running for half a mile screaming at your opponent is pure Hollywood. A well-drilled unit will advance at a walk until just before they charge, for a few reasons. First, this allows everyone to stay in formation. If you run people will trip, or someone will fall behind, or someone will get ahead. I’ve been in all those positions, and none are fun, even when the people are trying to smack you not kill you. Second, it conserves energy. Shoving sharp metal through flesh is not the most relaxing of pass-times; it takes effort. Third, unless you’re dealing with a particularly stupid opponent they are throwing stuff at you while you advance, attempting to disrupt your formation. If you’re in good order you can handle that; if you’re not, you fall apart before you even make contact. Finally, it’s a lot easier to move a unit that’s walking if (when) conditions change than it is to move a running unit.

      This makes the short distance for the pilum useful. Save your shots until just before you charge (“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes”, in other words). That way, the enemy doesn’t have time to fill in any gaps or adjust their shields to compensate for losses. By the time I’ve got my shield back where it’s supposed to be you’re already on top of me or even past me (remember you don’t necessarily need to kill the person to defeat them–see the German longsword manuals on that). So you only have two shots, but if you time it right that’s all you need.

      Plus there’s a psychological advantage. If I’m used to fighting people with longer-range, lighter javelins, the pilum will be a very rude shock. The waiting as we approach each other will get to me (I HATE that part), and when it does come seeing it pierce my shield is going to be unsettling. Remember, wars are fought by people on the edge of panic at the best of times; it doesn’t take a lot to make a person flinch. And it doesn’t take a very big flinch to disrupt a formation.

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      1. Oh I didn’t mean “The only had two shots”, I meant “Wow, they had two shots”–armor piercing ones where their enemy had none. The waiting you mention must have been especially grueling when they knew they were facing Romans–you know they are coming with those unstoppable heavy javelins, where all you have are the light kind, or else normal spears. It gives me more respect for the Gauls.

        Where did you do your training? Training in what?

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        1. I was part of a unit in the SCA. Midrealm, if you’re curious (Draco invictus!).

          Our unit was known for actually training in small-unit tactics, which is rare in the SCA. We’d spend time every week doing drills–three-step charges, basic maneuvers, and just generally sticking together. It was astonishing how effective such training was, too. Most people trained one-on-one, on the premise that shield tactics are obvious. Turns out they very much are not. Even spending 15 minutes a week learning to walk together made a dramatic difference; we were able to routinely take out units that were on paper much stronger than us, because they’d fall apart and we wouldn’t.

          The three-step charge drill was fun. One of the older fighters stood there, and our job was to knock him over in three steps. The guys in the group all failed miserably. One of the women–the shortest person in the group–sent him flying. And he let us know just how embarrassed we should be. I’d say he did it as part of the training (ie, he exaggerated the hit), but she did it consistently. There’s a trick to it: right before you contact you need to start pushing up in a certain way (which is hard to explain, but you know when you get it right). Once we all got the hang of it one-on-one, they had us do it in 2s and 3s, then as a unit.

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  33. Longtime reader, first time commenter! Thank you for all your informative and insightful posts Bret, especially the ones on the “ideal city” and “tyranny of the wagon” — so interesting!

    In this post you show that with a two-hand carrying capacity there is a choice between carrying a second heavy throwing spear and a thrusting spear. The Romans ultimately opted for the former. You also lay out the usefulness of those two throwing spears. But the added benefit of a second heavy throwing spear has to outweigh the disadvantage of bringing a short sword to a spear fight, if any. So we’re back to the gladius.

    In the Roman way of fighting, against spear-armed enemies, was there a disadvantage to only having a gladius in melee? Presumably this disadvantage was small enough that the added benefit of the second pilum (since you write that a 1-pilum 1-thrusting spear kit could have been an option) outweighed it? If there was so little difference between sword and spear, why did all the other surrounding civilizations settle on the omni-spear?

    I’ve read that spear-wall collisions result in lower casualties on both sides than clashes involving sword-armed troops (with a goal of conserving experienced troops, reducing trauma to green troops, and/or holding fast longer as a pinning force), and that the Romans, using their infantry as the decisive arm as you write, preferred a knife-fight style with higher infantry casualties on both sides. Is this true?

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    1. (1)In the Roman way of fighting, against spear-armed enemies, was there a disadvantage to only having a gladius in melee? (2)Presumably this disadvantage was small enough that the added benefit of the second pilum (since you write that a 1-pilum 1-thrusting spear kit could have been an option) outweighed it? (3)If there was so little difference between sword and spear, why did all the other surrounding civilizations settle on the omni-spear?

      (1): Normally not, since the Roman system relied on forcing the adversary into fighting with swords through disruption of their formation and violence of action. Against something like a phalanx (that is, the normal Macedonian pike-equipped variety), it was a massive disadvantage and they didn’t have any reliable way to compensate for it.

      (2): Depends on how you fight. For the Romans it was; for the Iberians, whose infantry used heavy javelins and spears, it wasn’t.

      (3): As above indicated, they didn’t all; moreover, spears are very flexible and generalist weapons that, when paired with a sword or other sidearm, are useful for basically any sort of combat situation — when fighting with a group they’re superior to a sword for prolonged close combat and at range or in brief charges can be thrown to good effect; when fighting singly they can similarly be thrown or can deliver powerful blows up close. The spear and sword are the universal weapons of the generalist warrior; it is when combatants are operating as pawns of a centralized military system that things generally diverge — the Hellenes specializing for prolonged formation combat with dedicated thrusting spears and pikes, the Achaemenids with their shield-bearers and archery, the Romans with their javelins and repeated charges, etc.

      I’ve read that spear-wall collisions result in lower casualties on both sides than clashes involving sword-armed troops (with a goal of conserving experienced troops, reducing trauma to green troops, and/or holding fast longer as a pinning force), and that the Romans, using their infantry as the decisive arm as you write, preferred a knife-fight style with higher infantry casualties on both sides. Is this true?

      As far as I know, no. Roman battlefield casualties were pretty run-of-the-mill.

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  34. I used to fight with the SCA, and while I expect that style of martial arts will have a rather bad reputation here (we try, but SCA combat is its own thing, not Medieval combat), I think some of what I saw as a shieldman bears on this. In particular, the effects of even a minor disruption to a shield wall are dramatic, more so than people seem to realize, IF you can capitalize on it.

    A lot of spears and the like are built (as they were in the Middle Ages) with bits to hook onto shields and pull them down. Once my shield is tilted forward–even slightly–my face is rather unfortunately exposed to a wide variety of things that are designed to ruin my day. More significantly, so are the faces of those beside me–because remember, you don’t need to (and in fact we were trained NOT TO) fight the guy in front of you. You can thrust your spear at an angle and stab someone three guys down the line. So you pull one shield down, your buddies on either side each stab a few people, and suddenly you have a five-person gap in the enemy line, with YOUR shields in good formation to screen your units as they move forward. (This is, I might add, EXTREMELY uncomfortable for anyone still alive who was once part of that disrupted shield wall.)

    What this means is that it doesn’t take too many shields pulled out of formation before the entire wall opens up like a dam bursting. And since most units are built to face enemies in front of them, rather than beside or behind them (though our unit did train in such tactics, so it’s possible), once you’re flanking the enemy or behind their front lines you can do a significant amount of damage before they can re-organize themselves.

    As I said, weapons built in part to accomplish such a disruption were common enough in the Middle Ages. One built specifically to do this in Roman times is perfectly logical, and it fits with the Roman military philosophy such as I understand it. And the Roman tactics (as presented here) seem to be built to exploit this sort of disruption. A common way that this disrupt-the-shield-wall tactic can fail is for your side to fail to exploit the gap–you’ve got a few seconds before the wall closes up again because the enemy isn’t stupid and has trained their people on what to do if someone falls out. If you have several units that are supposed to be jumping in anyway, you’ve already trained your soldiers on how to rapidly exploit these openings. It’s baked into your tactics.

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    1. Yes, a thing that HEMAists struggle with, but it’s normal experience for re-enactors, is that it’s not people fighting people: it’s a line fighting a line. I try to teach people new to formation combat to remember that they are fighting AT LEAST the three people in front of them, five if they have a thrusting spear or a poleweapon, and that they should not focus on outmanoeuvring their opponent, but on creating openings that their companions can exploit, while at the same time blocking attacks against their companions.

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      1. Having been in HEMA a number of years, with some experience in sidesword and buckler, which in no way makes me any kind of expert, it seems to me that the methods one uses in a sheldwall or some similar arrangement, must differ significantly from what one does in a one on one duel, even if using the exact same equipment, which I imagine people often did. In a wall or a line, I think you want to keep your shield as aligned with your colleagues shields as much as unit discipline and training will allow, otherwise you become exposed to the other side’s spears. In a duel, you want to dance around your opponent, seeking advantage by exploiting maximum mobility with one’s own body and equipment.

        In a line of men with shields and spears, some of them are going to lose their spears for whatever reason, and default to a sword instead. In that case, I believe that the best approach is still to align your shield with that of the other men in your line, is order to protect oneself. Leaning forward to attack with the sword seems like a very bad idea (and you would have to, because the other side still have their spears). I can’t see covering your sword attack with your shield, because that too would expose you. You could try to push ahead into the enemy line, but that’s also a bad idea, unless you knew that your fellows to each side were going to do the same thing at the same time (but why would they, they too have spears).

        The Romans were doing something else. They threw their armor piercing javelins at the enemy, presumably in concert, and then everyone rushed ahead, or retreated backward, or whatever the centurian told them to do, all at the same time, shields more or less aligned while they were doing it. This would have minimized the risk to everyone (well, except the enemy).

        Why the gladius and the scutum? No idea, but surely it can’t be coincidence. With a buckler, leaning into an attack while covering your sword arm with the buckler is absolutely a thing we do, but that’s because we aren’t worried about getting stabbed from the side. Presumably, the Romans were charging ahead, using their heavy shields to physically push right into the opposing line, then going all stabby stabby at very close range, Zulu style. Get close enough, and even big heavy swinging swords become a liability.

        Then back away quickly, while the Verites cover your retreat? Then behind the next maniple, who repeat the whole process. Obviously it worked.

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  35. “the ‘normal’ depth of a hoplite phalanx was usually something like 6-8”

    Minor point but is that really solidify grounded. At Nemea the anti spartan coalition was at 16 and Thebes insisted on their this time battle loosing much deeper than that depth. Even at much earlier Marathon the Athenians manged both thinner and thicker for their strategy.

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    1. Yes, more than one scholar has combed the sources and collected all of the reported formation depths and the most common are 6 and 8, though with significant variation.

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      1. I would expect more than eight ranks to be unusual. Mostly because more than that and the rear ranks cannot employ even really long pikes (for something that long I think pike is a better term than spear). Two feet of depth per trooper is really tight, and that means the pike ends up being 18 feet long if my math is right.

        So they would be there for casualty replacement and helping to push. At that point most of the time those troops would be better employed by lengthening the line.

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        1. And yet, it is well attested that the Macedonian phalanx was sixteen ranks deep, and that the earlier Greek phalanx often fought eight ranks deep despite having much shorter weapons that, again, could not reach the front from the rear ranks.

          One can only conclude that in practice, “casualty replacement and helping to push” turned out to be important enough that armies actually made them a priority over lengthening the line.

          One might speculate that part of the reason for this could be command and control. Each fighter in your phalanx occupies something roughly like a meter of frontage if not more. If you have 10,000 men in your army and you array them eight ranks deep, the line stretches 1250 meters. That’s already enough to make command and control difficult when you’re relying on (at best) galloping horse couriers to send messages. Doubling the length of the line to 2500 meters means you are far more vulnerable to having your army broken up piecemeal when the enemy’s formation plows into a single spot in your line.

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          1. My reading on this is limited, but you are correct that they considered the “push” to be important.
            Coverage is also important. In fact, this being a military, *everything* is important, so you have to balance things.

            But more than about 8 ranks would not be (initially) contributing in poking holes in the other side’s people.

        2. Casualty replacement is negligible and physical pushing is a poorly-founded myth. Formations were deep because depth helps absorb and resist strains on cohesion and morale.

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          2. Greek sources are fairly clear that the ‘push’ was just that – shield to shield at the front, shield against back from the rear.

          3. Greek sources are fairly clear that the ‘push’ was just that – shield to shield at the front, shield against back from the rear.

            They really aren’t. Granted there are some scholars who think that was how Greek hoplites fought, but even among this group I think most would admit that the evidence isn’t all that clear.

          4. They really aren’t. Granted there are some scholars who think that was how Greek hoplites fought, but even among this group I think most would admit that the evidence isn’t all that clear.

            Precisely. The fact of the matter is that we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the vast majority of “pushing” described in Classical Greek accounts is figurative: the Classical usage was inherited from Archaic or older origins, from a time when combat involved no formations, and close combat rarely — battle being predominantly a matter of loose missile skirmishing — and as such cannot be assumed as literal.

            Here are the two passages on Greek combat I can find on short notice that can be argued to provide evidence of literal othismos:

            Thuc. 4.96: “(…) the Boeotians, after a few more hasty words from Pagondas, struck up the paean, and came against them from the hill; the Athenians advancing to meet them, and closing at a run. The extreme wing of neither army came into action, one like the other being stopped by the water-courses in the way; the rest engaged with the utmost obstinacy, shield against shield.”

            Xen. Hell. 4.3.19: “For while he might have let the men pass by who were trying to break through and then have followed them and overcome those in the rear, he did not do this, but crashed against the Thebans front to front; and setting shields against shields they shoved, fought, killed, and were killed. Finally, some of the Thebans broke through and reached Mount Helicon, but many were killed while making their way thither.”

            Specifically, in the two above texts there is reference to shields being (set) against shields. This could be argued to refer to fighters pressing their shields against those of their adversaries, and supporters of literal pushing may look to these passages as among their most promising data points, but a more likely explanation is offered by pictorial evidence: period art of combat between fighters armed with shield and spear consistently depicts shields being held out towards the enemy in such a fashion that, in profile, one shield partially occludes the other. More perspectivally accomplished art in this vein sometimes shows shields held at an angle to both the bearer and the viewer, with the upper rim braced against the bearer’s shoulder and the lower rim jutting out towards their opponent. In both cases, while stylistic affectations cannot be discounted, it seems indicated that two combatants can be “shield against shield” in perfectly conventional single combat; it is no stretch of the imagination to suppose that similar conditions could prevail in battlefield contexts, especially the particularly pitched and intense group combat described in both above texts.

            In the second text there is reference to shoving, but this is by no means surprising: the action described is that of a contingent desperately attempting (and largely failing) to rejoin their allies by forcing their way through an enemy force. In this context shoving both within and without the Theban formation is quite understandable outside of any specialized doctrinal framework, but moreover, there is still no reason to reject the possibility — indeed, probability — that this is metaphor as in other cases.

          5. I think the biggest argument against the literal shield-shoving interpretation is that it would result in a large number of people getting literally crushed to death by the pressure of their rear ranks, whereas there’s no evidence in the literary sources that this was a common way for a soldier to be killed. Not to mention, a hoplite-style thrusting spear isn’t really suited for such a fight — if anything, a pilum/sword combo would be better, with the pilum used to kill/disrupt the enemy before the actual clash and then the sword (preferably a rather short one) used in the ensuing press.

  36. Sorry if this might be a double reply but I don’t see my comment lol.

    Didn’t archaic era “hoplites” carry around throwing spears? IIRC archaic era literature implies they’re hurling spears at each other and in the famed chigi vase you can clearly see that the hoplites are armed with two throwing spears with throwing loops attached as well as a long thrusting spear. I recall reading that before the Greco-Persian wars the Greeks were fighting in a similar way you describe the Romans, that is a warband of lightly armed throws mixed in with heavy infantry led by rich men.

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    1. Yes, Archaic Greek warriors threw spears quite a lot, although it was less a stable state of affairs and more a slow evolution towards closer, more organized, and more intense combat — correlated with a growing popularity of thrusting with spears — over a period of several hundred years from the 8th century BC to the full maturation of close-order spear-and-shield shock infantry in the 5th, and their supplantation by close-order pike-and-shield shock infantry in the 4th.

      The key difference here is that the early Archaic Greek system was an essentially necessary product of the lacking military centralization and organization in the period, which made it difficult to force fighters into close combat en masse. By contrast, the Roman system was the conscious objective of a centralized military institution, and thus is functionally extremely dissimilar — a Roman legion would likely crush an equivalent Geometric force with ease, because the former is an organized militia army acting in concert and the latter is a tribalistic feudal array where the majority of fighters wouldn’t venture within stabbing-range of a resisting enemy if you paid them.

      So in other words, the Archaic Greek system is exemplary of the sort of low-equilibrium warfare practiced by a majority of historical peoples, and which higher-equilibrium systems like those of the Latins and Hellenes gradually evolved from. In the Greek case people focused on othismos and the courage to remain in close combat, and developed the phalanx; in the Roman case people focused on impetus and the power of a cohesive charge, and developed the triplex acies.

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      1. Except that Gallic forces over-ran both Greek and Macedonian armies in the 5th and 4th centuries, beat Romans on a number of occasions and gave Caesar a prolonged and bloody fight. They must have had something going for them.

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        1. That’s not an exception — it just shows that said Gallic forces were by far not as militarily decentralised as the Archaic Greeks, which is absolutely obvious if you consider the overwhelming evidence of Gallic large-scale power projection visible in period accounts, including Caesar’s.

          There’s no black-and-white division of “state” and “non-state” peoples, and any arbitrary attempt like that which you are engaging in will inevitably demonstrate the world’s refusal to neatly organise itself into binaries.

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  37. “Except to see that in print in 2025 or perhaps 2026.” in the last 2 notes.

    I think you meant to write “Expect” there?

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  38. @GJ

    Biomechanical motions are always the same for everyone, no matter in what situation you find yourself: whether in a phalanx or a duel, you just stay behind your shield (or rather, should stay: theory is one thing, practice another). Unless you’re positing that for some reason in battlefield combat it’s better to stick out your hand, your argument doesn’t make much sense (also, you should never stick your shield to your own body, as far as it is physically possible of course).
    Depictions are just that: depictions. You can doubt whatever you want, but medieval paintins/miniatures/etc are not meant to be realistic, they’re symbolic; after all, it’s not like medieval artists were likely to be educated in shield-fighting finessess. You’re also forgetting that many such depictions portray mounted combat, where for obvious reasons it’s quite hard to literally keep your hand behind your shield, isn’t it ?

    A smaller shield can be held out away from the body to cover the sword-hand, whereas a Norman-style kite shield would be too tiring, too slow, and would limit your own line of attack too much.

    Nah, you can perfectly do that. I have both a Norman-style kite shield and the later, smaller one, and I’ve never had any difficulty, nor known anyone who had. By the way, have you ever tried using a targone/imbracciatura ? They’re as big as a Norman kite shield if not a bit more, and guess what ? They work in the same way.

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    1. Norman kite shields had strap grips, which means you can’t hold them out as far away from your body as with a centre boss grip. So, relative to a centre-grip shield, your kits shield will be close to your body, and this will make it harder to covery your shield hand with it.

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      1. Norman kite shields had strap grips, which means you can’t hold them out as far away from your body as with a centre boss grip

        You actually can. Just…try it.

        this will make it harder to covery your shield hand with it.

        No, it doesn’t. I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound rude, but you’re just wrong: you can perfectly cover your hand with all kinds of shields (or at least, I can’t manage to think of one you cannot, and you should always do so. Also, as I’ve said before, never keep your shield too close to your body.

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        1. “You actually can. Just…try it.”

          No, you can’t.

          A heater-strapped shield can only be held as far away from your torso as the length of your upper arm, shoulder to elbow (and good luck keeping it there for any length of time; it’s a super-awkward position). The reason is that the strap holding your arm in place is, well, holding your forearm in place. That means that part of the shield will always be at your elbow. A part can move past your arm (the handle is never at the edge, for obvious reasons), but as you swing it out the profile gets smaller and smaller as the angle gets bigger and bigger.

          A center grip, in contrast, can be a full arm’s length away–from shoulder to wrist. Generally you can’t keep it there for long, but it’s reasonable to hold it a significant portion of that total length, say around 75% of the way, and you still have the whole shield, not just the edge. (The edge can extend further out as well, and I’ve seen some fun tactics using that fact.)

          Are there ways to mitigate all this? Absolutely. But that doesn’t negate the fact that anything strapped to your forearm has to have part of it at your elbow.

          As for covering your sword-hand, you CAN use a kite shield to do it, but that’s kind of like saying you CAN use a wrench to hammer a nail. It’s not the purpose of a kite shield; they were used for very different types of combat.

          And before you say it, yeah, I’ve tried it. Center grip round, heater, and peanut shield, as well as heater-strapped heater shields, kite shields, and tower shields. I’m tall and skinny, so a kite shield is my preference and I HATE center-grips. But it’s personal taste, nothing to do with biomechanics.

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          1. Probably I wasn’t clear enough, but:

            a) I wasn’t literally arguing that you can hold a strapped shield “a full arm’s length away–from shoulder to wrist”, it wasn’t my intention. It’s my fault, I should have been more specific: the OP’s shifting arguments threw me off.

            b) I’m not saying that the purpose of a kite shield is to cover the hand, just that you can do it (and should do so) with every kind of shield that I can think of, and that itsn’t harder with a strapped shield rather than a single/centre-grip.

            Apart from that I mostly agree, especially on the preference for strapped shields.

        2. Remember we’re talking about battlefield combat, not fencing. If you try to extend a strapped shield too far, you leave a big gap for the enemy to your right to thrust into.

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          3. Right below, in a long answer to another user you’ll find that I pretty much covered your observation. Also, please stop shifting your arguments, or at least try to be more explicative.

          4. Right below, in a long answer to another user you’ll find that I pretty much covered your observation. Also, please stop shifting your arguments, or at least try to be more explicative.

            I never shifted my argument. If you have difficulty following it, that sounds like a you problem, as does your apparent expectation that people are going to go up and down hunting for posts on the off-chance that they might be relevant.

          5. I never shifted my argument.

            You did, multiple times. You introduce your argument of “battlefield combat” only when it suits you, then you drop it as soon as you realize it’s useless; you’ve never cared to elaborate, treating it like a magic buzzword that somehow doesn’t need any further explanation. It’s not even clear whether you mean foot or mounted combat, as you completely ignore something so basic.
            You also mentioned depictions without really arguing your point, and then dropped that argument too. As a matter of fact, you’ve never even bothered engaging in a serious discussion at all, as all your answers only consist in short, plain statements; statements that are wrong and I’ve tried to show you why, but you don’t seem interested in any meaningful reasoning.

            your apparent expectation that people are going to go up and down hunting for posts on the off-chance that they might be relevant.

            I expect my interlocutors to engage in a worthwhile discussion and say something intelligent, but to me it looks like you’re desperately trying to avoid arguing your point while putting up a passive-aggressive façade. I referred you to another post I wrote on the point: if you can’t bother to read it, or can’t even find it, then that sounds like YOUR problem, not mine.

  39. Depth is nice and all, but you always have to trade width for depth, so how did the Romans avoid just getting badly outflanked by an equal number arranged in thinner or fewer lines? (Obviously they didn’t always avoid it, but it must have been a rarity or the system wouldn’t have worked.)

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    1. This is a very good question.

      For my money, the answer comes down to the gaps between maniples. Michael J. Taylor’s research (ROMAN INFANTRY TACTICS IN THE MID-REPUBLIC: A REASSESSMENT, Historia, 2014) found that Roman Republican legions were generally able to both match frontage with comparably sized or larger Hellenistic armies AND dispose reserves in depth as well. How is it possible to both match frontage and keep reserves in depth without a huge manpower advantage? The answer seems to be that the gaps between maniples were varied in size as necessary to ensure the battle line matched frontage with the enemy, while leaving the maniples themselves in more or less a standard size.

      The potential vulnerabilities of gaps in the line, in my opinion, would be mitigated by the reserve lines covering the gaps to the rear and by the presence of velites skirmishing in the gaps as well.

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    2. Well, a comparison was already made by Mr. Devereaux above in relation to the Macedonian phalanx, a Roman legion being, if you recall, about the same depth. So against Hellenistic adversaries there isn’t really much of a depth imbalance to begin with. But moreover, remember that while Roman legions were about as deep as a phalanx, Roman legionaries were spaced in the lines at about half the density they would be in a phalanx.

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      1. Yes, the whole Roman triplex acies may have a total collective depth about equal to an opposing Hellenistic phalanx. But, the phalanx disposes its men in one single giant line, the triplex acies deploys in a depth of three lines, with distinct separation between them.

        How can the Romans match frontage while also deploying reserves in depth? As you say, being spaced in less density than a phalanx is and also maintaining gaps between maniples.

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        1. How can the Romans match frontage while also deploying reserves in depth?

          The simplest way of thinking about it, in my perspective, is that you’re taking a thick block of heavy infantry and separating slices off the back — the frontage stays the same, but you’re getting three thinner lines instead of the one; not necessarily an often desirable outcome, but it seems it is when you fight like the Romans did.

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  40. Ennius in his poem wrote: “Hastati spargunt hastas, fit ferreus imber.” – Hastati hurl Hastae, making rain of iron.. Ennius was poet, but also he was legionary and served during Punic wars. Hasta was most likely term commonly used with spears and heavier javelins, which would imply that Hastati didnt got their name because of thrusting spear, but throwing spear.

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    1. Ennius is writing poetry towards the end of the 3rd century BC / start of 2nd, so at least a hundred years after the hastati were first designated and equipped. As the article notes, we don’t have good sources for how the early Roman army evolved and names do change over time, so I’ll believe the linguists and historians that “hasta” originally meant thrusting spear. For an extreme example, the current day US army has a “cavalry division” which now consists of tanks, AFVs, and helicopters: this is not evidence that “cavalry” has always referred to mechanical vehicles.

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  41. I think it possible that the first pilum was thrown in a volley by the whole unit, but the second pilum only used at short range, directly before engaging with the sword. This model would create both a volley and a long missile exchange by the successive waves.

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  42. @Ynneadwraith

    The shields you’re talking about are all centre-grip shields designed to be used in a similar way to viking-era shields

    Ehm, no. Not considering ancient shields like the aspis, scutum, etc., I explicitly mentioned several types of shields from the Late Medieval/Renaissance era which a) have nothing to do with the Vikings, b) rotelle, adargas, targoni/imbracciature are, as a matter of fact, strapped shields, and c) some of them are quite different and must be used in a radically different way from Vikings shields, including the Norman kite shield you mentioned. I guess you’re a reenactor or a HEMA practitioner too, so I absolutely cannot understand how anyone with practical experience could say that a buckler or a Norman shield are “designed to be used in a similar way to viking-era shields”.

    Stand at a diagonal with your dominant-handed side forwards. Now extend your dominant hand out as if you’re at the apex of a strike. Then, put your shield-hand up next to your striking hand.

    Frankly, I don’t think your example is really apt. My first issue is that most shields prefer a stance with the left foot forward. That was the usual stance both for ancient phalanx formation (as far as I know: our host can certainly correct me if I’m wrong) and for LM/R shields such as rotelle, adargas, targoni/imbracciature. There’s no information that I’m aware of on earlier medieval shields (Vikings, Normans, Heater, etc…), but in my personal experience and in that of everyone I know standing with the left foot forward feels more comfortable and natural (I guess there’s a reason if in boxing and MMA it’s called the orthodox stance…).
    But, assuming a right foot stance, this movement doesn’t make much sense. When you strike you don’t *usually* fully stretch your arm: it’s too risky since it may easily leave you exposed. You can do it, it certainly happens, but *usually* you keep your arm a little bent, at least a tiny bit.
    Also, your hypothetical strike is done from a static position, which is… problematic. *Usually*, a strike from a motionless position is only done if you’re feinting or you’re at a close distance/measure where you can hit your opponent without moving (which may be really, really close depending on the body target and your weapon: my usually training sword is a 110 cm long side-sword, with a 90 cm sword it’s almost grappling distance), in which case covering your hand may not be your priority.
    When you strike you *usually* make a step forward with the rear leg: if you have a right foot stance, that means that as you strike your left side is brought forward and you can cover your right hand, even if fully stretched.

    To get the edge of the shield to effectively protect that striking hand, you ideally need a shield of >10″ in radius with a centre grip (like all of the shields you mentioned). If you had a strapped shield, you’d need a truly huge shield of >20″ radius which is much heavier and gets in the way a lot more (note that the Norman kite shield is not 40″ broad).

    I’m not used to freedom units, but even with an online converter your argument is… daft ? My rotella is a strapped round shield with a radius of 30 cm, and I can cover my armed hand even with a right stance and fully stretching my arm. My kite shield is 54 cm broad edge to edge with an horizontal strapping, and I can do the same: it’s quite uncomfortable if I fully stretch, but I’m perfectly fine if I keep my arm bent a little.
    I’m a rather average guy, 1.74 m tall; my arms are 70 and something cm long, average for my height, so I’m certain it’s not me. Maybe you’re confusing diameter and radius, maybe you’re thinking about peculiar shapes or some specific strapping, but for the life of me, I can’t get your point, it simply doesn’t make sense.

    (like all of the shields you mentioned)

    At the cost of sounding conceited: no. I explicitly mentioned five kinds of shield, of which two are very small gripped shields, and the other three are medium-to-big strapped shields.

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  43. Hmm. This description of Roman infantry tactics reminds me a lot of “human wave” tactics from eg imperial japanese infantry at least during offensive action against US infantry in the pacific theater of WW2 in 1942, and communist chinese infantry attacks on US infantry during the Korean War.

    Many details differ obviously due to the high lethality of ranged combat, so it’s surprising to me that both sets of tactics seem to try to provide psychological and, I guess, footwork and other tactical factors to enable a lot of your own infantry to apply themselves productively against a small number of enemy infantry and thereby get your own infantry in good order into the middle of a formation of enemy infantry in disorder.

    Specifically it surprised me to learn that there could be even that much in common between infantry tactics separated by so many centuries, no pun intended.

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    1. Military tactics have their differences, but some of the basics, like morale, have commonalities. Humans are humans, and war is war, even if the intensity shifts along with tools.

      The Romans remind me more than anything of the US if we’re making comparisons- ruthlessly exploiting their advantages in manpower and material to just steamroll their enemies. Roman manpower let them win attritional battles and that goes double when one factors in qualitative differences like heavier equipment, more sophisticated logistical and command systems, or the raw experience built up due to constant warfare. Bad enough to face one legion, but as Hannibal learned, Rome Has Reserves.

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  44. What’s fascinating to me is how the Italian “preference” for infantry in general and heavy infantry in particular seems to have carried over into the medieval period, as has the general dearth of archers. Military equipment and tactics are heavily influenced by material circumstances and culture, so that there’d be some continuity makes a great deal of sense to me.

    With the possible exception of Sicily (largely due to Arab influences I believe) and I think Corsica or Sardinia medieval Italy’s main missile troops were either javelin skirmishers or famously crossbowmen. They did seem to shift away from heavy sword wielding infantry to more “conventional” spear-and-shield (with swords as backups) militias and levies, albeit also a proliferation of anti-armor sidearms later like warhammers, maces etc; this was probably due to cost, and the generally greater power/threat posed by cavalry in the medieval era. And then there’s Sardinia, which was something of a leftover that seems to have preserved a lot of Roman/Byzantine customs.

    Actually, I’d love to see a deep dive into Medieval Communes, or Medieval Italy generally (Sardinia would be fascinating, as would Rome or Venice). I’d love to get a Roman Historian’s view on how things developed in the wake of the Western Empire’s dissolution, especially in areas where late Antiquity wasn’t totally obscured like in the Byzantine parts of Italy.

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