This week I want to do something a little different and discuss the evolution and development of a specific weapon, in this case the famed Roman gladius, the sword of the legions. As we’re going to see, this is going to entail a journey covering quite a bit of both time and space as the gladius first emerges from other sword forms, then evolves through its own subtypes and eventually into what we’d recognize as other, later sword forms.
And while this is a fun way to explore the development of a single weapon-type, I want to actually use this to make a few broader points. First, in the same way we discussed with the Mediterranean omni-spear, weapons develop in response to their threat-environment: on the one hand their shapes shift and mold towards the current threats, but on the other hand this is almost always a slow, evolutionary process of change rather than some sort of sudden ‘snap’ to an optimal design. Second, I want to also stress the substantial cultural exchange – in this case, often violent – implied by the twisting, turning journey of the gladius and the larger La Tène sword family. While we often represent weapon-types as distinctive to particular cultures – and to be fair, they often are! – but they are also often crossing cultural or political boundaries, influencing each other or splitting into distinct but related designs. Effective designs, in particular, prompt a lot of imitation.
And the gladius was very effective.
But first, if you like what you are reading here and want to help enable me to begin acquiring large numbers of modern reproductions of ancient swords, you can support me and this project on Patreon! I cannot promise I will use your donations to buy swords, but I also won’t promise not to waste use them to buy swords. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).
(Bibliography Note: The starting point for any kind of Roman military equipment is, unsurprisingly, M.C. Bishop and J.C.N. Coulston, Roman Military Equipment from the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome (2006), now in its second edition with a third edition on the way. I have used here, made available by the authors via creative commons licensing, several of the wonderful scale-drawing reproductions in that volume. On the La Tène sword, the best thing to read is T. Lejars, La Tène: La Collection Schwab (Bienne, Suisse). La Tène, Un Site, Un Mythe 3. (2013) but it is practically impossible to acquire in the United States. For English-readers, R. Pleiner, The Celtic Sword (1993) and J.M. De Navarro, The Finds from the Site of La Tène: Scabbards and the Swords Found in Them (1972) are both excellent surveys of the weapons. For La Tène swords in Spain and all other pre-Roman swords in Spain, Quesada Sanz, El Armamento Ibérico. Estudio tipológico, geográfico, functional, social y simbólico de las armas en la Cultura ibérica (siglos VI-I a.C.) (1997) is the place to go, but for something a bit more beginner-friendly F. Quesada Sanz, Arma de la antigua Iberia: De Tartesos a Numancia (2010) is excellent and well-illustrated, an English translation has just become available and is due for a fireside recommendation as soon as my copy actually arrives.
La Tène Beginnings
We start not in Italy at all, but in what is today France, in particular the region north of the Swiss Alps (so eastern France), which is where we find what seem to be the oldest La Tène material culture sites. La Tène material culture was itself a development out of the older Hallstatt material culture and so La Tène swords (exclusively made in iron) likely have their roots in earlier Hallstatt swords (generally made in bronze), though the shift in metal brings with it a shift in design (especially in the tang) that is significant enough to treat these as distinct sword-types.
Early iron La Tène swords already start showing some of the key design features that are going to define their long lineage (into which fits most of the European sword tradition). In particular, the base of the blade narrows to a thin, typically rectangular cross-sectioned tang, which runs through the hilt completely enclosed (rather than a flat tang like you may see on modern steak knives); the guard, handle and pommel, made out of organic materials (usually wood) are slide over that tang and then the tang is hammered down to make a ‘disc-button’ that presses the organic hilt elements together. That is by no means the only way to structure the handle of a sword – the other major options are to either make much of the grip out of metal (one sees this with many Indians swords) or to have a ‘flat’ tang of metal shaped in the flat silhouette of the grip, which is then sandwiched by organic elements and riveted through.1 So what I am going to call the ‘square-tang’ (short for square-sectioned-tang), while I can’t say it is exclusive to the greater La Tène sword family, is a notable marker of it.
Early La Tène swords (from around 500 – 300 BC; you’ll see these described as La Tène I swords) tend to be fairly short, with blade-lengths in the 50-65cm range (though some are longer than this) and they tend to come to quite sharp thrusting points. Note that I am going to give blade-lengths for various swords, but of course the total length will include the hilt, which is generally going to add 14-16cm to the total length (human hands varying only somewhat in size). The edges of the blade typically taper (that is, the blade begins to narrow) fairly early along the blade’s length compared to later La Tène swords – this would be in contrast to a sword with parallel edges for much of its length. Some swords of this kind come to disc-button pommels, but others have elaborate ‘antenna’ pommels, a stylistic element one sees in earlier Hallstatt swords, as well as swords in Spain and Italy, which drops away fairly quickly among La Tène swords.
And from this starting point, things now diverge because the early La Tène sword spreads geographically (by adoption, it seems, as much if not more than by migration; in many cases it is spreading to other linguistically and culturally distinctive groups who know a good thing when they see it) and as a result develops differently in different geographic spaces. In the La Tène ‘heartland’ of Gaul and the Danube region, it gets progressively longer and the edges become more parallel, producing the Middle La Tène sword (La Tène II sword) of the third and second century, with a blade length of 60-75cm (so a total length of 75-90cm). Because the edges more parallel, the taper is not so strong and so the point is less sharp; most Middle La Tène swords still have capable thrusting points, but some of them are starting to be rounded. What I suspect is happening is that as the metallurgy available to La Tène smiths improves – and they are experimenting with steel in full swing at this point – they are taking advantage of the superior capabilities to produce longer cutting blades (because they have stronger metal to play with, so they can get more length without compromising on weight or reliability). That greater length, combined with a combat environment where body armor is rare, encourages a cutting-oriented fighting style and the blades shift to match, favoring the cut over the thrust in their design.
In Italy, the early La Tène sword makes it into Cisalpine Gaul and from there into much of Italy. As Michael Taylor notes2 there’s good reason to suppose La Tène swords push out the Greek-style swords (both straight xiphe and curved kopides) which predominate the fifth-century burial evidence. A recovered fourth century sword-blade in La Tène style actually has an inscription, “TR POMPONIOS C [F?] [M]E FECET ROMA[I],” ‘Trebonius Pomponoius, Son of Gaius, made me in Rome,’ suggesting Roman smiths are already making swords in the fourth century in La Tène style. That also probably explains why the Romans shift from the native Latin word for sword (ensis, which gets used subsequently mostly in poetry) to a Proto-Celtic loanword for sword (the familiar gladius) to refer to these swords and then eventually all swords. This is a clear case of the La Tène style of sword crossing cultural boundaries – Romans are not Gauls – a thing that it turns out this sword-type will be very good at.
Meanwhile in Spain the early La Tène swords enter in the fourth century into a bewildering variety of sword-types in use on the Iberian peninsula. ’True’ La Tène swords remain rare – the longer “Middle’ La Tène types especially so – but smiths in the Celtiberian region of the Meseta take up the early La Tène sword and make it their own. Remaining around 55-65cm in blade length, local producers adapted the sword to the local suspension system (that is, the way the scabbard is held on the body) with a two-point ring suspension over the single-point chain suspension of La Tène swords; this is the suspension we in turn see in early Roman gladii. There’s also some cross-pollination, it seems with the indigenous Celtiberian ‘Antenna’ swords, which offer a bit of their blade-shape to this emerging type, perhaps contributing the later gladius‘ lightly slightly ‘waisted’ profile. The tang-structure, however, remains distinctively La Tène with a square-sectioned tang rather than the Antenna swords’ full metal handle.3
So by the mid-third century (that is, the 250s) we have three successors of the early La Tène sword: in the La Tène material culture sphere itself (Gaul, the Danube basin, the Alps) we mostly have ‘Middle’ La Tène swords (longer, parallel-edged, rounded points), while in Italy we have (alongside some Greek sword-types still holding on for the moment) apparently locally adopted but mostly unmodified early La Tène sword-types presumably being used by the armies of Rome, while in Celtiberian Spain we have a modified form of the early La Tène sword with a different suspension and a modestly different blade-shape.
And then the Romans find this Spanish variant of the La Tène sword. We don’t know when the Romans adopt the ‘Spanish sword’ (what gladius Hispaniensis means), except that they’ve clearly done so by the second century. The Suda puts it in the Second Punic War and while that is a weak reed source-wise, it makes a lot of sense, since Roman armies are operating in Spain continuously from 218. Consequently, scholars generally posit the Roman adoption of this weapon in the late third-century, essentially trading their own variant of the early La Tène sword for the Celtiberian one, probably as a consequence of Roman fighting in Spain. It is that sword which in turn becomes the famed gladius Hispaniensis, the distinctive ‘national’ sword of Rome and the standard weapon of the legions.
Gladius Hispaniensis and Other Swords
The earliest examples of the gladius Hispaniensis that we have in clearly Roman contexts are two early second-century swords from Grad near Šmihel, Slovenia and they are neat examples of the type.4 The blades are 62.2 and 66cm, which is to say at the longer end of the range for their Iberian forebears, but that will be typical for the type as the blade-lengths for the gladius Hispaniensis range from 60-70cm (with one outlier at 77.3cm) and they show a very slight ‘waisting’ – that is they narrow slightly from the ‘shoulders’ (where the blade meets the hilt) to about one third of the way ‘up’ the blade (to the point) before broadening out to a maximum width about two-thirds of the way up, then narrowing to a point. I don’t want to overstress this point, the ‘waist’ on these swords is quite mild, with the width at the thickest point (generally being around 4-5cm across) being within a centimeter of the width at the thinnest point (not counting the tip, of course).5
The tang structure of these swords is uniformly the La Tène square-sectioned tang style, though we know from artwork and later versions that the organic elements of the hilt have changed. Whereas La Tène swords often have a very small metal guard fitted on the shoulders of the blade (which in turn are sloped to accommodate this piece), the gladius lacks this element, instead featuring a wooden guard and grip, along with a generally more spherical wooden pommel. Combined with the change in suspension, the result is a sword that is clearly in the extended La Tène sword family, but is not itself a La Tène sword.
It also seems like at least at this point (if not earlier) the Romans have started experimenting with steel. One of the two Šmihel gladii was metallurgical tested and while it certainly isn’t good steel (the blade seems to have been decarburized, possibly carelessly during smithing but also potentially by the passage of time after deposition), there is meaningful carbon content, around 0.3% in the center of the blade.6 With a single example, its hard to say if this sort of quality was typical for early second century Roman gladii (later imperial-period swords show much higher quality, as do some La Tène swords, though in both cases, variance is high), but it is enough to show that the Romans are at least working with mild steel for their swords at this point.
What our sources absolutely agree about it was that it was a really effective and versatile weapon (e.g. Polyb. 3.114.1, 6.23.7, 15.15.8, Livy 31.34.4) able to cut and thrust well. That fact sometimes surprises folks more used to the more thrust-oriented imperial-period Roman gladius and its fighting style, but the weapon of the Middle and Late Republic was a versatile cut-and-thrust sword, rather than primarily-thrust-oriented weapon, though even those later gladii retain a lot of the design’s flexibility. These are also not short swords as they are far too often described. With a typical length of around 75-85cm, they’re only about 10% shorter than a typical medieval arming sword (they tend to be c. 90cm total length). The very modest residual waisting suggests a continued concern for power in the cut, as I think does the somewhat different combat stance Romans have in this period as compared to the thrust-oriented imperial period.
And of course that makes the sword really quite good for the Roman style of relatively-open order combat against a very wide range of opponents. A Roman needs a bit of space to wield this sword, but they have that space. At the same time, it allows for devastating cuts against unarmored opponents, but also dangerous and effective thrusts against more heavily armored opponents (either trying to split the rings of mail or strike exposed areas like necks and faces). Given how widely the Romans were fighting and that this was the only contact weapon the Roman heavy infantryman carried, the versatility must have been a major asset. Unlike dedicating cutting weapons (the kopis comes to mind) which would be at a profound disadvantage against a mailed opponent, the gladius Hispaniensis would work tolerably well under basically all conditions: armored, unarmored, close-press, open-order, skirmishing, formation fighting.
And then, of course, the Romans take this sword everywhere. We find Roman gladii from the Republic deposited in North Africa, France, in Greece (on Delos, no less), in Egypt (though the identification of this as a Hispaniensis is contested), in Cisalpine Gaul and of course in the Balkans as mentioned above. But they aren’t only carrying the gladius Hispaniensis.
Instead, its striking that in this period we also find what are clearly La Tène swords – not gladii – in Roman contexts too.7 The aformentioned Šmihel gladii were found with a La Tène sword, 79cm long with a gradual taper and a double-fuller, along with bell-shaped guard, a middle La Tène design.8 Meanwhile, fragments of at a least one La Tène sword, probably also a middle-type, were found in the second century Roman siege camps at Numantia. Now those could be loot (spolia, in technical parlance) or odd outliers, but given that the Romans were also using (early) La Tène swords before, it doesn’t seem entirely wild to suppose that they were still using some small number of (now middle) La Tène swords in the second century, especially because, as we’re going to see, that sword-type doesn’t fade away into oblivion.
What do fade are a lot of the other Mediterranean sword traditions: the expansion of Roman power leads to a sort of ‘mass extinction event’ for militaria in the Mediterranean. While a lot of styles of equipment end up incorporated into the Roman army one way or another (especially La Tène militaria), what doesn’t get drawn into the Roman militaria-stew often fades away: Greek-style tube-and-yoke cuirasses, Italic pectoral-cuirasses, the soliferreum, the sarissa, the Greek sword tradition (xiphos and kopis), quite a lot of Greek and Hellenistic helmet types (though others, like the muscle cuirass, survive as high-status officer’s armor for a time). Now I don’t want to overstate the impact here: there’s a whole world outside of the Roman Empire and other sword traditions live on there. But within Rome’s armies, the two principle swords end up being the La Tène sword and the gladius Hispaniensis…which was also a La Tène sword, of sorts.
Which leads us to:
Swords of the Empire
The Imperial period! Which, as a scholar of the Middle Republic, I am inclined to insist is just the funny post-credits ‘sting’ of Roman history.
The gladius does not stay static, however. By the early first century AD running to roughly mid-century, we see a fairly marked change in its design with the emergence of the ‘Mainz’ type, named after the Mainz Gladius (British Museum 1866,0806.1). The blade has becoming meaningfully shorter, with blade-lengths of 40-55cm; they’ve also become quite a bit wider, with maximum widths of 5.5-7.5cm as compared to the normal width of the Hispaniensis around 4-5cm. These blades are still often waisted, but obviously they’re shorter and stouter, coming to well-defined and sharp tips: still capable of delivering effective cuts, these are now clearly primarily thrusting weapons. By the Flavian Period (69-96AD) these give way to the Pompeii type, which features parallel edges (rather than waisted ones or a particularly long taper) and even shorter blades, generally 42-50cm, though also somewhat narrower widths (4.2-5.5cm); these swords persist through the Antonines at least.9
Now that is an interesting design change: this weapon is becoming wider and dramatically shorter, dropping from blade-lengths around 60-70cm to lengths around 40-50cm. And while I argued that the steady lengthening of earlier La Tène swords might have been a consequence of improving metallurgy, the reverse is not happening here: the gladius is getting shorter as Roman metallurgy continues to improve.10 So there is no structural reason that the gladius Hispaniensis had to get shorter to make for the Mainz- and Pompeii-types. And yet it does, why?
I think the answer here is “threat environment.” Roman armies of the third and especially second century BC are facing a wide array of mostly external threats. That includes relatively well-armored (less well than the Romans, but relatively well) opponents like Greeks and Macedonians (and probably Carthaginians) but also much less-well armored opponents like Gauls, Iberians, Celtiberians and so on. The Hispaniensis is ideal for the purpose: reasonably long (with a reach advantage over equivalent Greek swords), able to cut and thrust equally well (but excelling at neither), it is versatile for a varied threat environment.
But starting in the first century BC and continuing into the first century AD the threat environment for a Roman legionary soldier starts to become a lot less varied: by this point, the primary threat to a Roman legionary is another Roman legionary. Rome, after all, has defeated all of its peer rivals, but the first century BC is full of civil wars (and the first century AD will add one more big one in 69AD); the barbarians on the frontier may not often defeat Roman legions in pitched battles, but Roman legions do. And – as we’ll no doubt discuss here in more depth at some point soon – one thing about the Roman soldier that makes him stand out is that the Roman soldier is uncommonly heavily armored by the standards of antiquity. In particular, by the first century BC, the standard armor of the Roman legions was the lorica hamata, a mail shirt extending down to just short of the knees. That kind of armor offers excellent coverage (its flexibility means it can cover the upper legs and groin just fine) and no amount of force a human can apply will allow any iron or steel sword ever made to cut the rings of such an armor.
I think – though this is a point we cannot know – that the imperial-period gladii are a direct response to this problem. A shorter weapon allows for greater control of the tip for thrusting, while the stouter construction may make for a stiffer blade that transfers more energy to the point of impact (instead of bending) in order to hopefully split those rings and penetrate to the body underneath. At the same time, a shorter sword is also going to be handier for trying to get in close and strike at the spots not protected by mail, particularly the face and neck. It is also possible that Roman tactics are shifting in this period; Michael Taylor has noted a change in the positioning of Roman swords in artwork suggesting a different guard and its striking that at least much later Roman sources (like Vegetius) imagine a lot closer spacing than the fairly wide intervals of the legion of the Middle Republic. So I think that what is happening is that the gladius is transforming from a versatile cut-and-thrust weapon to a dedicated Roman-killer designed to be effective against a mailed opponent, though we must stress that even this shorter design is still quite capable of delivering strong cuts.
But deep in the heart of France, another sword was made. The broader La Tène cultural sphere in France and on the Danube remains independent of Roman control until the mid-first century BC and so its swords keep developing. The Middle La Tène sword of the third and second century continues to get longer, around 75-90cm in total length leading to the Late La Tène sword. The cut is more and more emphasized, with many swords having rounded tips which wouldn’t have been entirely useless in the thrust but would hardly be ideal for it; those tips however let the blade edges run parallel to each other for nearly the entire length, giving a nice, wide cutting surface. These are not ‘long swords’ – they’re still dedicated one-handed swords – but they are clearly cut-oriented swords.
My suspicion is that what is happening is two-fold: on the one hand, La Tène material culture peoples mostly fight each other and we know that metal body protection in the La Tène material culture sphere was relatively rare. Consequently a sword with a powerful cut that could cut through a textile defense to quickly disable the man beneath (cutting wounds are far more rapidly disabling than thrusting weapons) was thus better in that context. A longer sword creates a longer lever and thus more power in the cut and the extra reach hardly hurts either! At the same time, Gallic metallurgy is getting really quite good (at least for antiquity) in this period, so La Tène smiths working with high quality metals for the best, most expensive swords can safely make these swords longer without making them heavier, producing a superior product. Of course cheaper swords made of worse iron in the same pattern will be less reliable, but one can easily see how the elite products push sword-length generally longer.
In any case, those La Tène swords loop back into the Roman sphere in the form of what the Romans called the spatha (borrowed from the Greek σπάθη). Spatha is a ‘shape’ word, refering to something broad, flat and long (‘spatula shaped’) and we generally suppose these to have been derived from the longer La Tène swords. Early imperial spathae are relatively rare, but a few examples survive and tend to be quite long (c. 75-95cm) and one wonders if they actually derive from late La Tène swords or from middle La Tène swords persisting as cavalry swords in Roman armies. In design, they have parallel blades, but generally triangular, rather than rounded points, and often feature some kind of central groove or fuller, presumably to control the final weight of the weapon.11 The normal assumption is that these were, at least initially, cavalry weapons – the greater length enabling downward strikes from horseback – but especially after the Antonine periods (post-192 AD), the sword starts creeping into contexts that suggest it is being used by the infantry as well.
As we get into the third century, Roman swords continue to shift; this is sometimes represented as the end of the gladius, dropped now in favor of the spatha, but I’m not so sure of that.12 We get two rough groupings, a longer and narrower “Straubing/Nydam” type around 65-80cm of blade-length and a shorter, thicker “Lauriacum/Hromowka” type (55.7-65.5cm blade length).13 It is the case that a lot of the swords have the double-fuller and parallel edges common on earlier spathae as well as pattern-welding techniques not generally seen on gladii, but it seems to me we might be able to understand the shorter swords of this period as perhaps reflecting a merger of traditions: taking the production process and structure of the spatha and welding it, as it were, to a sword on the rough dimensions of an imperial-period gladius.
It is this ‘merged’ (in my mind, at least) style which continues into the late imperial period, with relatively long swords with blade lengths around 70-80cm, around 5cm thick, with the standard markers of their La Tène heritage: straight-blades with parallel edges and square-sectioned tangs. And by this point (the third and fourth century) those Roman spathae are not radically different in size, weight or function from the ‘barbarian’ swords in use of the frontier in the Rhine or the Danube; indeed it is very clear that these sword designs are moving freely in both directions over the Roman frontier, as they always have been. That convergence in turn leads to what we sometimes term simply the ‘Migration period sword,’ the ‘migration period’ being a term sometimes used for the fifth through eighth centuries (though I think this periodization does some question-beggging, given that we now suppose the actual scale of human migration in this period was not as large as was once thought).14
Why the shift now back to a longer sword with long parallel cutting edges? Well, to me at least, the solution that suggests itself is that once again the threat environment has shifted. For the first two centuries AD, the main threat to a heavily armored Roman legion was another heavily armored Roman legion in some sort of civil war. But as we get into the third century and beyond both the amount of armor in Roman armies may be declining (it certainly seems to be by the fourth century; the best troops remain as well-armored as ever, but become scarcer) and increasingly less heavily armored external threats (Germanic peoples, Sassanids and later Huns) begin to dominate over facing off against other Roman heavy infantry armies. Fortunately for the Roman soldier, there is already a good sword available that is highly effective against less well-armored enemies and still quite versatile: the spatha which you will note in the third century the longer form (the Straubing/Nydam-type) approximates the measurements of the gladius Hispaniensis, though it owes its shape much more to later La Tène swords.
Conclusions
As noted, those late Roman swords, with their La Tène ‘DNA,’ as it were, provide the most influential foundation point for the European sword tradition that follows, with nearly all European swords – even later curved swords – functioning with the same square-sectioned tang construction,15 as opposed to the ‘flat tang’ construction more common on the Eurasian Steppe and in the Middle East.
That said, what I want to draw out here most clearly are what I see as the two principle factors for the development of that tradition: the way that weapons respond to their perceived threat-environment, adapting to deal with changing problems and the fascinating way that weapon designs cross cultural boundaries.
On the one hand, the La Tène sword, developing out of older bronze swords and limited by early iron metallurgy, starts fairly short. But in the La Tène material cultural sphere, it steadily lengthens, because that makes it more effective against the kind of threat La Tène material culture warriors faced, which were for the most part other warriors with La Tène material culture, which is to say generally very little armor. By contrast the Romans, taking a local Spanish variant of this tradition, begin to shorten it as their threat environment shifts more and more heavily towards peer combatants wearing lots of mail armor. When that stops being the main threat, they drop that shorter version of the gladius, and shift to a longer sword, which just happens to be another branch of the larger La Tène sword family tree.
At the same time, the cultural boundaries for these weapons are incredibly porous! The La Tène sword goes to Spain, becomes a local La Tène variant that is quite distinctive, before traveling to Italy to become the gladius Hispaniensis, which then ripples outward across the Mediterranean. And if I’m right, in that process it eventually picks up the Middle/Late La Tène sword as a companion (the spatha) and then eventually ends up as a single merged sword tradition, which is at the same time both crossing over the Roman frontier (the limes) cross-pollinating with and merging with ‘barbarian’ sword traditions there. We often think of ‘this’ weapon belonging to ‘this’ culture – and weapons do often have strong cultural connections – but they also influence each other across cultural lines, sharing design elements or being adopted by other peoples.
As, indeed, do nearly all of the elements of culture, though such borrowing is often most visible in material culture objects which survive to us archaeologically. Cultures in the past – like cultures in the present – are not neatly defined, unchanging mutually exclusive things the way that they appear, for instance, in many video games, but rather amorphous, shifting and overlapping creatures. As true for swords as for anything else!
- Some earlier bronze swords have no tang at all, and attach to a fully organic hilt using rivets. That works for very short bronze swords, but is a poor idea for a longer iron sword which undergoes stronger forces on impact, thus the more robust iron age tangs.
- “Panoply and Identity during the Roman Republic” PBSR 88 (2020)
- On these swords, see F. Quesada San, op. cit. (1997), 250-55.
- J. Horvat, “Roman Republican Weapons from Šmihel in Slovenia” JRMES 8 (1997)
- On this, Connolly, “Pilum, Gladius and Pugio in the Late Republic” JRMES 8 (1997), 49-53.
- Kmetič, D., J. Horvat and F. Vodopivec. “Metallographic examinations of the Roman Republican weapons from the hoard from Grad near Šmihel.” Arheološki Vestnik 55 (2004)
- Noted by Taylor, op. cit., 38-9
- Horvat, “The Hoard of Roman Republicam Weapons from Grad near Šmihel” Arheoloski vestnik 53 (2002)
- Bishop and Coulston, op. cit., 78-81
- Bishop and Coulston, op. cit. 241-2; note also Sim and Ridge, Iron for the Eagles: The Iron Industry of Roman Britain (2004) and Sim and Kaminski, Roman Imperial Armour: The Production of Imperial Military Armour (2012) on the Roman metallurgical craft in this period.
- Bishop and Coulston, op. cit. 130-133
- Bishop and Coulston, op. cit., 154-157, frame it that way at least in the second edition; there’s a third edition coming fairly soon and I’m interested to see how it treats this transition.
- Bishop and Coulston, op. cit., 155-6
- To be clear what I mean here: people are clearly moving in this period, but what was once assumed to be mass population-replacement is now more often understood in most areas to be smaller population groups moving and merging with the pre-existing populations in these regions.
- Though, again, this isn’t the only square/rectangular sectioned tang sword tradition in the world
A few ‘corollary’ questions, if you will. The idea that the Roman sword design shifts in response to the commonly faced threats makes a lot of sense, especially in the military technology pollination pattern available to them. But with that in mind:
1) Why does Roman armor get rarer in the third century and beyond? Is it just a loss of wealth and technical ability with crisis of the third century and onwards, or is it something else?
2) Why are the rest of the La Tene world unable to get the kind of mass metalworking the Romans did and stick to an armor is rare environment? They clearly had the technical ability to make mail, but why couldn’t they scale it up to the point where lots of people have mail the way the Republic by the punic wars did?
3) While the primary threat for the early imperial soldier is another heavily armored legionnaire, there were clashes and raids along the (vast) borders. And I’m guessing that most of those people outside the empire didn’t have much in the way of metal armor. What is the plan of action against an unarmored or lightly armored opponent? Close quickly trusting your mail to protect you from his (presumed) longer reach weapon until you can get a stab in somewhere vital?
4) Pursuant to the shield walls from a few weeks back, how were you supposed to get past/through your opponent’s shield if you haven’t disabled it with your pilum? That’s also part of the defensive envelope, and AIUI, unlike metal armor, shields of some sort were basically universal.
As for No. 2, I think the reason is primarily economic. As Bret emphasized in his earlier series on ironworking, producing iron – before even working it into a finished product – took a LOT of labor (an amazing amount of it just in cutting down trees). “Barbarian” cultures like the various Germans simply didn’t generate enough economic surplus to have all that many men spending their time making charcoal and smelting ore instead of producing food. Nor did they have either the economic or social organization to create the (state-owned or -contracted) arms factories which the Romans had developed by the 1st centure BCE.
For number 3, being in metal armour and carrying a large shield makes it less likely that a patrolling legionary will get sniped or backstabbed.
In a small scale action, a pilum will work great against lightly armoured opponents. If you miss but you’ve got the better / heavier protection, yeah close and trust your shield to keep you safe. Despite what some RPGs say, wearing armour does not slow you down in a short sprint. You (the legionary) will be breathing hard and wanting a drink after the charge, but your lightly armoured opponents (at least on foot) will be dead.
#3 is probably the easiest to answer: use the auxilliaries. There’s even an old wargamer’s joke that the auxilia did more fighting on the frontiers while the legions were busy constructing roads and forts.
Regarding 3, bear in mind that the difference in range between the short Imperial gladius and a Late La Tene isn’t all that much, just around 30 to 40cm. That’s about two steps (in combat, smaller steps are safer), and the miles still has that scutum. Getting past that, especially with a cut, is going to be a non-trivial task, particularly for not-well-trained troops.
And getting in close is something Roman legionaries had to do anyways; the most likely weapon they’d face isn’t a sword, but a spear, which outranges even the Late Republican gladius or Late La Tene sword quite easily.
Regarding #4, the honest answer is probably “fake the enemy out, find a way to gang up on him, or hit him while he’s distracted and doesn’t get his shield up in time, crash your shield into his somehow or otherwise knock it out of line,” and so on.
You aren’t getting through a handheld shield with a handheld melee weapon. If you could do so, the guy would be carrying either a heavier shield or no shield at all, since an easily ruptured shield is actively a burden and worse than no shield at all.
This is basically it, yeah.
In a clash between infantry formations, you will rarely (but not never) hit the guy in front of you. He’s aware of you as a threat, he has his armour/shield/weapons with which to defend himself, and your ability to set up complex plays to get past those defenses, as you might in a 1v1 encounter, is limited by the other demands on your situational awareness inherent to mass combat.
But both you and your nearest opponent are part of a rank of other combatants and you have several more behind you. If you can hold his attention for a moment, one of your comrades might land a hit on him from an unexpected angle. Likewise, a lapse in your nearest opponent’s attention is a potential opportunity to attack the enemy combatants to his left and right.
Of course, the enemy will also try to do this to you and your comrades.
For #1, it’s the shift from primarily offensive to primarily defensive operations that ironically results in less average armor weight. An invading army generally chooses how fast it marches, and so can march at a slow enough pace that soldiers can carry a painful amount of gear; ironically a defensive force has to move as fast as possible to intercept enemies that will mostly choose to be as far away from bases as they can manage, or simply choose to never show up to the fight that they have all that armor for at all.
This holds true to today, with the US owning more ceramic body armor plates than all of the places that they could invade combined.
Specifically on rounded points, I think a lot of modern authors have a tendency to overstate the “rounded point = cutting only” idea. A wide blade out to the tip will make cuts near the tip much more effective, but a rounded profile that’s sharpened all the way around the tip will also thrust with devastating effect on unarmoured opponents. Where it runs into issues is on harder targets – armour is the obvious one, but thick bone etc would be another problem. And of course it’s harder to place the tip precisely on an opponent.
Yeah, the issue is thrusting against mail – a rounded point won’t do much then. But against an unarmored opponent (or someone in just textile armor), it’s still very dangerous.
When I was a boy, my granddad made me and my brother wooden swords of the spatha style. We sparred a lot, but doing thursts was a no. A rounded point of a wooden sword, sharpened to about 1 mm wide edge hurts even with a soft thrust to the tummy, and would hurt your innards if thrust in anger. And that is with a wooden sword without a cutting edge.
With a cutting edge, even if the thrust would not penetrate, it would temporarily incapacitate your opponent. It is much worse than a punch to the stomach.
You were not (I assume) wearing chainmail armor with a padded layer underneath. A thrust to a soft portion might disorient someone, but it would hardly be disabling.
Even with all that you can really, really hurt someone. I’ve been hit with a rounded sword with mail over padded armor, and it still hurt. The force delivered is the force you absorb, and while padding and armor help (f=ma and stress=strain/area), you’re still taking the energy. Waffle bruises are a thing, and “bruises” can include some rather nasty wounds. Anything that keeps you from full use of a limb for two days is not to be taken lightly!
Plus, the question of durability comes up. Ever hit a hauberk with a knife? Doesn’t do great things for the edge. Or the point. And that matters. If I know that my point is going to break off anyway, it makes more sense to start with a rounded tip that’s less likely to break. The pointier tip is just going to become rounded anyway (there’s a whole thing in geology where this is demonstrated, in fact). If I start with a more rounded tip my weapon is less likely to be broken. And a whole rounded tip is FAR superior to a broken sharp tip; the break creates a deep zone of weakness in the metal. (The physics of this get really fun–when I learned this I was taking both structural geology and a jewelry making class, and realized early on that the difference was mostly in application, the principles were identical. Which both professors found highly amusing.)
As an aside: When I was in college a buddy and I tested my hauberk against a variety of things. Mail is good against punches, and slashes, and even reasonably good against stabs (not perfect, but better than nothing). Burning stuff passes through it like it’s not even there. And even an extremely low-powered gun (a BB gun powered by a CO2 cartridge in this case) makes mail worse than nothing. It shattered four 14 gauge 1/4 inch inner diameter links (yeah….I didn’t know what I was doing). Having that metal enter into your body is not exactly fun. Another friend fought with an unorthodox great axe style, and frankly once you’re hit hard enough to become airborne what style of armor you’re wearing stops being a significant consideration.
Incidentally, a rounded but sharpened point makes it easier for the user to tell if the weapon is penetrating the target. An acute point may penetrate an unarmoured target so easily for the first few inches that it’s often quite hard to tell whether the weapon has actually struck home or not until the target starts bleeding (or oozing juice, in the case of the expired fruits I tried this on).
There’s a bit in one of those HEMA-inspired ‘what might an actual fight have looked like if the duellists are using authentic fechtbuch forms’ videos you can find on youTube that demonstrates this point (hah!) quite neatly – the badass swordmaster stabs his adversary but only realises that he’s won the encounter when he notices blood on the foible of his sword as he’s recovering the thrust, then he’s back to focusing on his opponent just as said opponent collapses to the ground with a serious, probably fatal, wound; so his focus immediately switches to his opponent’s friend and he pauses a beat to see if the friend will press the fight or back off.
The whole sequence, from strike through to resuming en garde against the friend, takes a second or so.
Feel like this might be too specific a detail to have evidence on but I’m very curious: do we understand how swords are being procured in this era and how that affects the process of experimenting with sword design? E.g. are swords being commissioned with specific features by their users, or are smiths competing with each other for general sale and some designs prove more popular than others? And is there any evidence for testing out new swords (literally experimenting), or is all the information influencing their design coming from real battlefield experience?
I’m not sure how much we know in general, but remember that Republican Rome basically had all adult male citizens were veterans or in service (and you or your family bought your gear). The smith who made the sword had likely used a sword in the field. The father who commissioned one for his younger son, had likely used his own sword.
And I’d guess that debating the fine points of “Who makes the best sword and why is it good?” is something that was discussed in camp quite a bit. You’ve also got people capturing gear, and thus possibly trying out enemy kit. I’d guess the guy commissioning it described what he wanted and discussed it with the smith.
There’s a fair amount of discussion about this on the article about the Marian reforms. In short, some swords were privately procured by the recruit, while others were provided by the state through fabricae. We’re not really that clear on the details of the swordsmith’s trade beyond that — certainly nothing on the level of detail we have about medieval bladesmiths and cutlers. This medieval evidence shows _both_ swords being produced and sold as-is and others made individually as custom commissions for the wealthy, as well as several other modes in between (such as cutlers carrying an assortment of sword parts for customers to pick from at the shop). I’d be very surprised if the Roman arms trade wasn’t just as varied, and we have some circumstantial evidence to support this in the varying quality of blades and fittings in archaeological finds. One thing we _do_ know is that it was bad form to carry swords within the pomerium, so the butcher’s stand at the forum was a predictably common source of weapons for people looking to cause trouble within the city limits (to the point that it’s something of a running joke among classical historians).
A historically famous La Tene sword Romans faced in 4th century BC was Brennus´ one. The “Vae victis” sword.
What was the weight of Brennus´ sword? As he put it on the scales, so including the organic hilt?
Also: how is the organic hilt prepared to be slid on the tang? How is the tang turned into the “disc-button” without damaging the organic parts of the hilt? And if the hilt organic part was damaged, how could the organic part of hilt be repaired/replaced?
I propose a pedantic New Year’s Resolution: namely, that you drop the use of the phrase “begging the question.”
Used as traditionally by English-speaking academics as a synonym for the circular reasoning fallacy, it can have no purpose but to confuse readers who are not in on the secret. The phrase clearly means what ignorant people think it means (namely, that an assertion invites a followup question for clarification). Insisting that it really means “assuming the conclusion of an argument” is just a way of drawing a line between the audience who’s worth talking to, and the one that it’s ok to bewilder.
What’s more, the whole issue arises from a bad translation of Aristotle into Latin, and another bad translation of Latin into English. You would do a great service by not perpetuating this chain of errors.
Language Log has a good article on the phrase (which recommends against using it at all, in either sense.)
Right, but their reason for not using it in the “correct” assuming the conclusion meaning is that it makes you seem pedantic and that no one will understand you.
Not being understood is bad, but given the name of this blog being pedantic is on point. So you have to ballance being on message vs. being more widely understood.
Also, the post has a typo in the word “begging”.
(I’m commenting mainly to get notifications. I don’t care about typos that much.)
“It can have no purpose but to confuse readers”
Well, no, it can also mean something, AND it can make the writer look educated or pretentious. So that’s three purposes, not one!
Further, if the only possible purpose was to confuse the reader, how do you explain our host linking the phrase to an explanation of its meaning? That seems like both a very weird thing to do if he was trying to confuse readers (as you assert he must have been), and also a very reasonable compromise when using a confusing term.
Personally, I don’t use the phrase because I’m simultaneously unwilling to use it to mean “raises” or “invites” a question, but also aware that the rhetorical usage is confusing and that many people will mistake my meaning. But I do use other jargon and terms of art, and I think there’s a place for using words some people won’t already know, especially if you make it easy for them to learn the meaning.
I propose two more New Year’s resolutions: stop making resolutions for other people (it’s rude) and maybe chill just a little? As I said above, I do agree with you on the utility of “begs the question,” but it’s very weird that you decided to accuse our host of trying to confuse readers.
The link he posted just made things more confusing because it seemed like he was being coy and didn’t want to be clear which definition he was using – the link says what the phrases means colloquially, so it didn’t actually clear anything up – was he using the obscure academic use or the everyday use? Annoying to waste mental energy on it.
We pedants reclaimed the word “ironic” (or at least bullied a lot of people into being scared to use it); we will reconquer “begging the question” as well.
And, indeed, “pedantic” to no longer be a synonym of “nitpicking”.
Ironically, I’m not sure that is true.
Re “this is almost always a slow, evolutionary process of change rather than some sort of sudden ‘snap’ to an optimal design”: the adoption of the Macedonian sarissa phalanx under Philip was a notable exception, right?
Depending on how we interpret the nature of the Iphikratean peltast, maybe not. It’s worth noting that very long pike-like spears were already used by skirmishing peltasts from Thrace and Macedonia back in the Classical period, so their adoption by close-order line infantry might not have been a sudden thing even if Iphikrates’ “peltasts” (who were armed in a strikingly similar manner to the Macedonian phalangite) was just a red herring or even a flight of fantasy.
Interesting. If you search ‘Papua New Guinea Tribal War’ on youtube you’ll be able to find some excellent videos of tribal conflict. This is predominantly skirmish warfare, and gives a good visual perception of how this sort of combat may have played out.
One of the things they have is people wielding very long poles, used to knock arrows and javelins off their course.
It’s worth noting that very long pike-like spears were already used by skirmishing peltasts from Thrace and Macedonia back in the Classical period
What’s your source?
Fascinating read!
I’ve read that one of the features of late roman armies is a much greater reliance on thrusting spears as the primary infantry weapon compared to the early imperial and late republican combo of thrown spears and gladius that you’ve covered. Does this interact with sword trends?
Would a late roman army have the sort of mass sword use that we stereotypically associate with the legions? If not, would that make the sword a relatively ‘elite’ weapon and impact the preference for longer, perhaps more visually impressive weapons?
Happy to be corrected by someone with more thorough knowledge, but AFAIK the late Imperial Roman army is still using throwing spears in large numbers, if not always pila.
See the discussion of Arrian’s Array Against the Alans, a Roman formation against horse archers,
https://acoup.blog/2021/11/19/referenda-ad-senatum-november-19-2021-hidden-string-pullers-falling-empires-and-tactics-against-horse-archers/
The Byzantines (East Romans) do eventually switch over to long thrusting spears but well after the ‘fall’ of Rome itself.
Firstly, the linked post neither states nor implies that the Roman heavy infantry of the time were of the sword-and-javelin persuasion. Arrian himself refers to the heavy infantry as spearmen (kontophoroi) who, being described as armed with spears (kontois), are exclusively described as thrusting with — not throwing — the aforementioned weapons. The spears are vaguely described as having slender tips, but this does not oblige us to interpret them as pilum in the Republican or Early Imperial style; and at any rate it is obvious that spears, whatever sort they may be, are being employed in close combat at a considerably larger scale than indicated in earlier Roman sources.
Secondly, Arrian is not the most relevant authority to this discussion, since he never saw, partook in, or wrote about any Late Roman battle, skirmish, combat, or other engagement. Born towards the end of the first century, he had been dead for c. 124 years by the generally recognized start of the Later Roman period — and was not reputed to hold the gift of prophecy!
My knowledge of the period is not entirely extensive, but as far as I have been able to discern, the Late Roman army did indeed employ spears significantly in a number of close combat contexts, an evolution which Arrian’s Array does not contradict and can indeed, in limited fashion, be seen as early evidence of. The Roman Empire continues this trend past the fall of the West, and what is novel in Byzantine times is not the throwing-and-thrusting spear — which had been in active use for several hundred years by that time — but rather the resurgence of the pike.
It seems to me that a reasonable progression may be inferred. Developing from the organizational improvement and intensification of Early Italian and Gallic light infantry traditions, Republican heavy infantry fought on a basis of intermitent shock clashes, tactical withdrawals, and feigned retreats; a system not incomparable to cycle-charging cavalry of the medeival period. This mode of combat is responsible for the fairly peculiar equipment with which they fought, and which distinguishes them in particular from the previously dominant Hellenistic tradition in modern understanding.
Yet advancing into the Principate, the now-professional legions found eachother to be their primary adversaries, with both material and sociocultural impacts on the experience of combat: a greater reliance on thrusting implements in an armour-heavy environment, an increasingly rigid order and discipline attendant to their expanding durations of service and subservient social origin, and a significant deemphasis of the glory-seeking warrior culture that characterized the upper-class, politically participant citizen-soldiers of the Republic.
All three listed factors, I suspect, converged upon a predictable outcome: Roman soldiers gradually made less reckless charges, engaged in less displays and duels, held their ground more strongly, held their place in line more strongly, battled more closely packed, and altogether came to fight in precisely the sure, coordinated, steadfast fashion that has across history — and most particularly among the Hellenes the Romans so admired — shown itself to be the strongest domain of the thrusting spear.
The front rank Romans in ‘Array Against the Alans’ are using spears with iron shanks. The only Roman spear with an iron shank is the pilum.
Phil Barker in ‘Armies and Enemies of Imperial Rome’ and ‘De Bellis Antiquitatis’ (2014), drawing from his own research and among others ‘The Late Roman Army’ by Southern & Dixon and ‘The Rise and Decline of the Late Roman Army’ by Cromwell, writes that legionaries in the 4th and 5th centuries CE did NOT use thrusting spears. They carried the spiculum, a heavy javelin; the verrutum, a lighter javelin; and martiobarbuli, smaller weighted feathered throwing darts.
Ian Hughes in ‘Belisarius: The Last Roman General’ (2009), drawing on among others ‘Romano-Byzantine Military Equipment’ by Stephenson, writes that Byzantine 6th century CE heavy infantry did NOT use thrusting spears. They used the spiculum and angon, two types of javelin; and plumbatae, small weighted throwing darts.
The Roman infantry throwing spear plus sword kit is very effective, and the Romans keep on using this style of infantry for as long as they can. It’s not static and unchanging, the gladius becomes the spatha and the pilum is replaced by lighter and more numerous throwing spears. I don’t see any need to infer an evolution into hoplites or shield wall warriors.
“Shank” is an erroneous or at least assumptive translation — per my understanding, the original greek simply refers to long and slender irons which, while quite indicative of the pilum or instruments like it, is not a direct technical reference to the latter.
As for spears, Roman soldiers are clearly and obviously represented with foliate “omnispears” in many pieces of 4th and 5th century evidence; see for instance Theodosius’ missorium, Constantinople’s arch, and the Vergilius Vaticanus. Ammianus, writing in the 4th century, refers various times to spears (hastae) being used in what is obviously close infantry combat, certainly to a far greater extent that anything we have evidence for from Republican or Early Imperial sources (ex.: XV 4.11, XXIV 6.10, XXXI 13.5). Obviously this was not an instant change, nor a complete one, and various javelins remained very popular throughout; but to suggest that no substantial alteration to Roman infantry tactics and equipment occurred over the course of the Empire is misleading in the extreme.
Oh, man, somebody just had to bring up Arrian.
The only thing I want to say is that Arrian _doesn’t_ resolve the issue of whether the front ranks’ kontos was a throwing or thrusting weapon. The verbs he used for what the front-rankers did with them was “paiein e akontizein,” which Van Dorst translated with the single verb “stab,” but I’m really not comfortable with the way those two verbs get compressed into one. I’d rather translate them as “thrust or throw,” since Arrian seems to be hinting at _two_ different possible actions. So the kontos could be either a thrusting or a throwing weapon, or (my preferred interpretation) something that gave the user the option to use it either way.
But then some Byzantine sources spoke about throwing pikes, so what do I know.
Thanks for the notes on translation, particularly that a phrase might mean thrusting OR throwing.
The front rankers in Arrian’s array are IMHO definitely legionaries armed with pila, but using them as thrusting spears of a sort rather than throwing them.
The front ranks have locked shields, which is going to make it next to impossible to throw a long pilum weighing over a kilogram with any force. I doubt they’re going to unlock shields because the body action for a full throw ends with your left arm and shield off to the side and the right side of your body forward, which isn’t a great stance when facing people with bows even if you are wearing armour.
I’m not suggesting that a pilum is usable as a spear for actual fighting. Any Roman legionary who arrives at the enemy battle line with a pilum still in hand is Doing It Wrong. Against cavalry, though, as shown from ancient times all the way into the 19th C, infantry just need long pointy sticks formed into a barrier. A pilum will work fine as a cavalry deterrent, and if the cavalry charge actually does crash into the front rank Romans those legionaries have bigger problems than just clumsy spears.
This may be getting into a complicated side question, but how did the Romans actually get rolling on having that much armor relative to opponents?
I can imagine several possible answers, mostly boiling down to “greater resources”, “concentration of wealth into protecting the fighting elite”, or “accumulating spoils over time”. Yet none of these seem to entirely suffice. Did Roman soldiers choose to disproportionately sacrifice metal from other goods to provide for war or was there some other reason they could do this? Even the huge wealth of the Roman elite was built on extraordinary military success as much as it caused it (i.e., Marius equipping an army at his own expense).
Combination of factors, including greater resources and also the method of recruitment.
As our host discussed in
https://acoup.blog/2023/06/16/collections-how-to-raise-a-roman-army-the-dilectus/
the Roman legionaries are drawn from the wealthier classes and provide their own equipment, so motivated to buy the best (= metal) armour they can afford.
Can’t find an article discussing such, but IIRC our host on a podcast compared this with the Successor states to the east where the soldiers were equipped by the state, and as such more likely to be give the cheapest gear to keep the budget down.
But the armies of other parts of the world were also drawn from the wealthy classes. And iirc our host also wrote, that all of Italy was (on average) more heavily armored then Greece and other places.
Why could a Greek from the Hoplit class afford less armor then his Latin counterpart?
Perhaps the difference in battle formations also played a role. If I’m understanding correctly, the roman legions typically used a more open formation than either the Greek hoplites or the Macedonian-style phalanx. Heavier armor might be more useful in a more open formation than in a closely packed formation where the shields are providing most of the protection.
This is definitely one of the major aspects in play.
Early Greek warfare was much looser and less organized than its Classical and Hellenistic progeny, and Greek armour in the Archaic period was extremely heavy compared to what followed; indeed, I have as yet seen no Italian warrior of antiquity possessing the sheer weight and coverage of armour that the heaviest fighters of the Archaic possessed — the standard was a respectable full helmet, cuirass, and greaves, but a full set of all protections we have evidence for would cover the head, face fully, chest, back, stomache, every limb, each ankle, each foot, the groin, and the shoulders partially, and incorporate, as if the above were not enough, bronze-plated shields as well.
But come to the Classical and helmets shrink back to maintain a respectable distance from the face and ears as a whole, bronze cuirasses fall away in favour of linen, and even those are seemingly eschewed entirely in many instances; arm and thigh defences might as well not have existed to begin with. The Hellenistic seems to bring at least some metallic armour back into prominence, perhaps a result of unenviable soldierly exposure to the experience of pike combat with a light shield, and to bring also a great love of loose-hanging leather and lamellar strips ’round the thighs and shoulders, but doesn’t seem to reach the same apogee — perhaps because anyone with that kind of money or funding would be doing rather a lot more good as a cataphract.
In the Classical case, it is probably attributable to the dramatic expansion of the socioeconomic range from which specifically heavy shock infantry was drawn, as well as the lesser protectrive demands of close formation combat. In the Hellenistic both the former and latter hold partially true, yet not, respectively, in quite the same way or to quite the same degree, and in such a perspective it is perhaps unsurprising that they demonstrate a more significant level of armament.
The hoplite class didn’t really have less armour than Roman infantry — it was actually roughly equivalent to the first and maybe second classes of infantry back when Italian elites still fought as Greek-style hoplites. But it was a much smaller class than what the Romans could draw upon for their heavy infantry — indeed, smaller than what the Macedonians could draw upon, hence why Philip and Alexander steamrolled over Greece in just a few decades. Greece also had generally poorer agricultural soil than Italy. Check out the articles on the socii and ancient population estimates for more details.
I believe a contributing factor may be cultural as well as economic. Quite simply, the romans cared about their infantry to the point of being willing to armour them and had the means to armour them, so they did armour them.
By comparaison, many cultures tend to focus on elites fighting, frequently cavalry. So for example the gauls were pretty great smiths and I guess could have had access to enough metal to armour their infantry but the nobles preferred to fight as horsemen and to spend as little as possible on poor infantrymen. So despite the economic possibility of armouring, the culture made it unfeasible.
I think that could also be a factor on why roman cavalry has a poor reputation. Infantry being the focus made it unnecessary to invest into good cavalry, and because roman cavalry wasn’t quite good there was little point to invest in it to win battles.
I think they also depended on the “socii” for cavalry starting fairly early. So some of it may have been something like “*real* Romans are heavy infantry”.
Another factor, in addition to the cultural importance Rome placed on its infantry (and general militarism) and the relative wealth of Rome/Italy, might be wealth distribution. Rome appeared to have an unusually large and wealthy ‘middle class’ of smallholding farmers. The sum wealth of the Roman people looks like it was distributed (relatively) more evenly between this ‘middle class’ and the very wealthy elites. More ‘regular Romans’ were wealthy enough to afford to armour themselves.
Compare that to the Gauls, who produced some truly astonishing metalworking, but where the general masses often went without even a metal helmet. It would appear that the sum wealth of Gaul, in addition to it being less than Rome, was concentrated more strongly in the elite. This would encourage the creation of some truly incredible metalwork as the rich tribal elites seek to display their status. However, the more broadly distributed wealth of the Romans means a lot more ‘workaday’ materiel being produced (as much as mail is ‘workaday’).
The “fighting elite” was a much broader part of the population in Rome then in contemporary monarchies so concentrating wealth in the elites would have just been counter productive in that regard. Rome seemed to mobilize a comparatively large portion of the resources of the people towards war making. If you are sending one of the sons of your village to go fight, it’s a fight you believe in and if the prospect of victory means wealth for his family (with whom you have various village level informal ties) you are going to want to dig deep to get him to come back alive and with spoils. In an rural environment where most of the population doesn’t have much coinage available, people are going to have a lot easier time marshaling their resources towards paying a blacksmith in their own community to make chainmail then towards paying a government in a city days away for the upkeep of an army.
Bit late, but I’m increasingly of the perspective that Roman legionaries didn’t spend dramatically more on armour than Classical or Hellenistic phalangites.
A Republican legionary has a bronze helmet, and an iron chainmail tunic; a Hellenistic phalangite, meanwhile, has a bronze helmet, bronze shield-facing, and bronze greaves.
The bronze on the shield is only a thin layer, and the greaves are not colossal objects, but bronze is really expensive. Add to this that said phalangites would at the very least also be wearing a linen or leather tube-and-yoke corslet — which while not exactly bronze, is neither a negligible expense — and the value of their defensive panoply is actually fairly impressive.
The difference is that the Romans were working with La Tène tech, and iron is dramatically cheaper than bronze even if metallurgical limitations made its application to armour awkward by comparison; Republican legionaries wore the obligatory bronze helmet, but otherwise their only armour was a simple and easy-to-produce garment of exceptionally cost-effective chainmail.
If the gladius became shorter because of a mail heavy environment, could the adoption of the lorica segmentata be partly explained as another civil war adaptation?
Kind of hard to tell. Segmented armour was largely out by the third century but the civil wars certainly didn’t stop.
Lorica segmentata doesn’t seem to have been adopted until the early imperial period, after the civil war period had finished. It then fell out of use during the third century, when Rome went through its next big civil war period.
> Now those could be loot (spolia, in technical parlance) or odd outliers, but given that the Romans were also using (early) La Tène swords before, it doesn’t seem entirely wild to suppose that they were still using some small number of (now middle) La Tène swords in the second century, especially because, as we’re going to see, that sword-type doesn’t fade away into oblivion.
It could also be that the blade just has been in the family of the legionary who owned it for a long time. Blades that are treated well, can stay useable for generations, and it was far cheaper to add a new hilt to an old blade. I remember one example Matt Easton (of the youtube channel Schola Gladiatora) talked about, where a 18th century hilt was added to an 16th or 15th century style blade.
What is known about the term “semi-spatha” (or “demi-spatha”)? Can it be applied to shorter Late Roman swords, like the “Lauriacum/Hromowka” type? Does it imply that those swords were developed from spathae and not from gladii?
The only reference I’m aware of is Vegetius and he’s not terribly specific about it. It doesn’t help that his description of the legion mixes up details from all sorts of eras, so the semispatha could conceivably refer to the pugio or a similar dagger-like weapon rather than a proper sword-sized gladius.
For the first two centuries AD, the main threat to a heavily armored Roman legion was another heavily armored Roman legion in some sort of civil war.
That’s… not really true, though. After Augustus defeated Antony, the next major civil war was the Year of the Four Emperors in AD 69, almost exactly a hundred years later. The next one was the Year of the Five Emperors and subsequent disturbances, which lasted from AD 193-197. So in the first two centuries AD, the chances of a Roman legionary fighting another Roman legionary were actually very slim; he’d be much more likely to fight either Germanic or Dacian barbarians on the northern frontier or Parthians to the east, depending on where he was stationed.
In the period a legionary’s most frequent military action was likely to be against internal threats – minor revolts, bandits and so on. We read of frequent detachments for this purpose. Perhaps a shorter sword was handier in the alleys of a village?
In the period a legionary’s most frequent military action was likely to be against internal threats – minor revolts, bandits and so on. We read of frequent detachments for this purpose. Perhaps a shorter sword was handier in the alleys of a village?
I think external raiders would have been the most common threat — obviously there were bandits, rebellions, and the like, but the period isn’t called the Pax Romana for nothing. More importantly, internal policing actions wouldn’t have involved lots of village fighting — bandits and the like were more likely to set up away from settlements, to make it harder to track them down.
I’d take the “main threat” here as referring to the threat the Romans _couldn’t_ afford to lose against — the barbarians along the northern frontier were seldom capable of penetrating deep into Roman territory in this era, while the Parthians never really threatened the Roman position in Syria and Anatolia to anything like the same extent the Sasanids later did (and the frontier was largely quiet except for small flare-ups until the last quarter of the period in question). Losing a battle or a small campaign against either of these threats would have meant some loss of territory at worst, more likely just the plundering but not permanent occupation of some Roman-controlled territory, but in neither case was it an existential matter to the Roman Empire. On the other hand, losing against a rival imperial pretender was literally as existential as it could get within this period. It’s the same reason why the US military is largely set up to face a peer threat rather than for counter-insurgency work.
Firstly, he said “the main threat to a heavily armoured Roman legion”, not “the main threat to the Roman Empire” (which is also untrue — being overthrown might have been the main threat for the emperor, although even then this normally came about through assassination rather than rebellion, but neither the 69 nor the 193 civil wars came even close to threatening the existence of the Empire as a whole).
Secondly, even if civil war were the main threat, optimising your legions to fight other legions would also benefit the rebel side, cancelling out any advantage you might get.
Thirdly, if the emperors of the principate really viewed legionary rebellions as the main threat to the Empire, they’d have done what Diocletian actually did in the third century — separate different military functions and split up large commands to make it harder for a pretender to gather enough troops, regularly tour the Empire to try and keep an eye on as much as possible, keep a large strategic reserve to turn against any rebellion, make sure to command large gatherings of troops in person so their general couldn’t turn them against you. That they did none of these things indicates that they didn’t view legionary rebellion as the main threat to their rule.
“Secondly, even if civil war were the main threat, optimising your legions to fight other legions would also benefit the rebel side, cancelling out any advantage you might get.”
That is true from the Emperors point of view, but from the point of view of a legion commander, optimising your own legion to fight other legions might well be sensible. After all, no battle against something other than another legion is likely to make you Emperor.
So the Emperor’s just going to sit around whilst his generals openly prepare to fight each other? And the generals are going to openly prepare to fight each other, and then hardly ever fight each other for two hundred years? And no ancient author is going to mention all this?
It’s called “deterrence.” How many wars has the US fought against its pacing threats in the second half of the 20th and first quarter of the 21st centuries? Zero. But nobody’s going to argue that first the USSR and now the PRC aren’t the enemies the US was/is the most concerned about.
It’s called “deterrence.” How many wars has the US fought against its pacing threats in the second half of the 20th and first quarter of the 21st centuries? Zero. But nobody’s going to argue that first the USSR and now the PRC aren’t the enemies the US was/is the most concerned about.
We know that the US is concerned about them because we have lots of sources saying the US is concerned about them. What sources do we have saying that Roman armies of the principate were deliberately equipped with a view to fighting each other?
“So the Emperor’s just going to sit around whilst his generals openly prepare to fight each other?”
Perhaps, if the generals in question are ones he especially trusts to side with him against a rebellion. Perhaps not if they are a long way off and it is hard to see what they are doing. But in that case, it would be hard to see what preparations they are making.
Perhaps, if the generals in question are ones he especially trusts to side with him against a rebellion. Perhaps not if they are a long way off and it is hard to see what they are doing. But in that case, it would be hard to see what preparations they are making.
Most governors (who, in the early Empire, were also generals) only served for a few years, and based on the archaeological record, it seems that the Romans tended to keep equipment in service until it wore out, rather than regularly replacing old kit with new the way a modern army does. So to get a situation where Roman legions are optimised for fighting each other, you’d need a situation where the emperors are so bad at personnel management, they consistently appoint would-be rebels to command their armies for a generation or even more (to give enough time for the old non-civil-war-optimised kit to fall out of use), and then somehow fail to notice that all of their generals are openly preparing to rebel (communications were bad in this period, but not *that* bad). Oh, and these generals, despite all preparing to rebel, hardly ever get round to actually doing so (as I mentioned above, there were just two major civil wars in the first 250 years of the principate).
I think it’s obvious how implausible this all is.
See, you’re trying to impose modern ideas on how the legions worked (as a “national army” deployed against foreign threats) rather than starting with the historical data. When a Roman emperor or pretender felt threatened by a rival Roman army, they generally picked up their legions (or at least vexillations thereof) and marched them against their Roman rivals, which indicates that they viewed the legions as their primary weapon against peer (i.e. Roman) threats. “Barbarian” or Parthian threats didn’t always need the legions to be out there, and in fact we see a trend of auxilliaries being used more and more in active campaigning around and beyond the frontiers while the legions were kept behind to maintain roads and forts, which would incidentally help them march faster against not only foreign but also domestic enemies. An extreme example of this tendency would be Agricola at Mons Graupius, where auxilliaries did all the fighting while the legions in reserve never got engaged at all (at least not before the Caledonians had been defeated).
And as I’ve shown before, if we’re looking for modern parallels, then look at what kind of forces armies are optimised to fight. 19th-century European armies, for all their imperial pretensions, saw each other as the most dangerous threats, so the bulk of their preparation, training, procurement, etc. was intended for fighting each other rather than colonial opponents. The notable exception was the British army, but this was because the strength of the Royal Navy gave Britain a gigantic moat to hide behind, and what did the Royal Navy do? They focused on building their conventional strength to be able to fight the two next largest European navies combined, the rest of the world’s navies be damned. Bret’s assertion about the Romans make perfect sense in this regard.
Another point is that optimising one’s legions to fight rival legions doesn’t always produce symmetric results. The Roman empire was huge, and with news travelling at the speed of a post-horse, the legions stationed across the empire gradually developed distinct cultures. Egyptian legions spent a great deal of time guarding grain boats and became something of a riverine/amphibious garrison. The III Gallica, having served at Syria, picked up the custom of saluting the sun at dawn — the thing that was mistaken by their enemies (i.e. pro-Vitellian legions) as the arrival of more pro-Vespasian reinforcements from the east. This latter example was particularly ironic in light of the Eastern/Syrian legions’ later reputation for being rather decadent and less effective than other Roman legions — again, the sources don’t mention this explicitly, but it’s glaringly obvious that their yardstick was how well the Eastern legions fought _against other Roman legionaries_, with the implications that they got “soft” because they spent too much time fighting Jews, Parthians, and other enemies viewed as being less dangerous than “real” Romans. I can go on, but really. Look more at the sources and less at our own modern thought experiments. The Romans within the first two centuries AD feared each other militarily much more than they feared any other “barbarian” or foreign power, just as Bret said (and he’d know better than me, having had his nose buried in the relevant sources for something like two decades).
You say “Look more at the sources and less at our own modern thought experiments,” but you haven’t cited a single source for your claim that Roman legions were deliberately optimised to fight each other.
The Romans within the first two centuries AD feared each other militarily much more than they feared any other “barbarian” or foreign power, just as Bret said (and he’d know better than me, having had his nose buried in the relevant sources for something like two decades).
You know, academics are wrong about things sometimes, even in their area of speciality. It’s OK to admit it; you don’t need to twist yourself in knots trying to defend everything they say.
I suspect part of it is also the dominant form of warfare- while fighting barbarians or parthians may consitute the majority of engagements, in a period without significant campaigns conducted at scale you do not typically adapt your weaponry to the oponents you are facing. After all, your troops are mostly facing scenic views, having been assigned to garrison duty, even on the frontier.
This would be particularly true in regions characterised by raids, border skirmishes, minor outbreaks of violence and so on. As the larger, better equiped army, turning up is the most important part of border defence – if you trap a raiding force with fancy manouvre you might well get a battle out of it, but most of the time the raiders are simply going to leave once Rome turns out in force.
Note: this isn’t saying that war would be bloodless, or not involve battle at all, but there’s a difference between trying to defeat a legion so that you can carry out a large scale raid on a city or can say they were wrong about the exact location of the border, and having to do that several more times over several years in order to permanently secure significant territorial claims. As the border wasn’t advancing, it’s entirely possible Rome’s neighbours knew they could get away with SOME fighting, but that both sides knew that neither wanted full scale war.
Correct, and note that most of the fighting against “barbarians” were actually against the most Romanised ones — if not peregrines within the empire, then revolts by tribes just barely over the border, led by a Roman(ised) veteran, usually involving a fair number of other Roman(ised) veterans in the “barbarian” force too.
Most veterans would be from the auxiliaries, who tended to have a different fighting style to the legionaries. So even if the barbarians had been “Romanised” by such people — a dubious proposition in the first place — fighting them still wouldn’t be the same as fighting a Roman legion.
I suspect part of it is also the dominant form of warfare- while fighting barbarians or parthians may consitute the majority of engagements, in a period without significant campaigns conducted at scale you do not typically adapt your weaponry to the oponents you are facing.
The Romans fought more significant campaigns conducted as scale against foreign (or rebellious non-Roman) enemies than against Roman enemies during this period — the Illyrian revolt, Augustus and Tiberius’ Germanic wars, the invasion of Britain, the Jewish revolts, the conquest of Dacia, the Marcommanic Wars, the various wars against the Parthians…
(There are a couple of instances of ‘principle’ in this post that should be ‘principal’)
It’d probably be a good idea to distinguish between “thickness” and “breadth” here — I’d prefer to use “broad/wide” or “narrow” in most cases where you used “thick” or “thin” in this article, since you’re pretty consistently referring to the sword’s breadth from one edge to the other as opposed to thickness or thinness from one flat/ridge to the opposite. It’d help reduce confusion with regards to which dimension you’re referring to.
“Which, as a scholar of the Middle Republic, I am inclined to insist is just the funny post-credits ‘sting’ of Roman history.”
I know this is just a joke (just like us early-modernists joke about classical historians having a frightening lack of sources…) but I just wanted to segue into how I’ve felt it is a frighteningly common view among laypeople: There’s a weird assumption among some people that Rome collapsed shortly after Julius Caesar and not (depending on how you count) 500 or 1500 years later.
The “sting” is, even if you discount the byzantines, almost as long as the republic, after all.
“(cutting wounds are far more rapidly disabling than thrusting weapons)”
Do they? There are two things that argue against this. And a lot of the argument here rests on this, so I’m curious whether anyone has any insights.
1) Most cutting moves are slower than stabbing moves. You can stab several times in the time it takes to slash once. Just look at the distance–for a stab to be effective you only need to penetrate the length of the blade (usually the blade plus some distance, as most enemies won’t allow you to just put your knife tip n them), but for slashes you have to have far more movement. Slashes can be incredibly fast–I’ve seen shots thrown so fast that normal video couldn’t capture them–but the same person could stab even faster.
2) Stabs to major organs shut those organs off due to trauma. Pull out and you’ve got the blood loss as well (this is why if you’re ever empaled you’re supposed to leave the thing in until doctors can deal with it). Slashes can cause damage, but it’s entirely possible to keep fighting with even a deep slash. As sort of a 2A, there’s the issue of mail. Sure, if I disembowel you, you’re going to be incapacitated; however, none of the swords discussed so far will disembowel someone wearing a riveted hauberk. They CAN, however, stab through the hauberk. This changes where you’re going to aim. If I’m slashing I’m going to aim for the arms, neck, and head (even if I can’t cut your helm, a solid enough blow WILL put you out of the fight). If I’m stabbing, I’ve got your arm, face, neck, torso, legs (the motion to stab a leg is easier than to slash it), etc.
I’ve never seen it tested, but I’d be very curious to know whether cloth armor worked best against stabs or slashes.
Slashing wounds will bleed out, though, which causes a warrior to tire and slow down even if they aren’t immediately disabled. Yes, stabbing someone in the lung or heart will disable (actually kill) them pretty quickly, but the human body is built to protect internal organs like that. Your sword needs to get through their skin and ribs and several inches into the body to destroy those organs. Meanwhile if I can land several slashing blows on your arms, torso, and legs while protecting myself then you’re going to get tired and bleed out.
Look at the historical accounts. Vegetius mentioned thrusts being deadlier, but Livy described the horror felt by Greek enemies upon viewing the horrific cutting trauma inflicted by Roman swords during the Macedonian Wars. The British during the Napoleonic Wars adopted cutting-oriented swords and fencing styles (primarily for the cavalry, but less formally also for infantry officers) because they judged that while thrusting wounds were more lethal in the long run — more of the wounded would die after taking thrusts to the body — cuts were more likely to take an enemy out of combat in the short term (as in within the minutes or hours that a tactical engagement would take) and was more effective against less vital targets (many cavalrymen fought on with thrust wounds to the arm, but a cut to the sword arm often rendered the victim unable to continue using the sword for the duration of the skirmish/battle/whatever). The debate continued for the rest of the 19th century but most people with combat experience seemed to gravitate towards the conclusion that it was best to have a sword that could _both_ cut and thrust reasonably well. Pretty much just like the gladius hispaniensis, although better metallurgy allowed the 19th-century swords to be made longer.
As for thrusts being faster, that’s only when we’re talking in a vacuum. The sword isn’t always going to be held with the point towards the enemy (especially if it had just been used to parry an incoming attack), the opponent’s weapon or shield might be in the way of a direct thrust, and most importantly, speed is measured on a relative scale to the enemy’s movements/reaction. We see rapier treatises from the 17th century — a far more thrust-oriented sword than the gladius — recommending the use of cuts against the lower leg since it’s usually not a good idea to strike low when the opponent isn’t already distracted by some feint or other preparatory action in a high line anyway, and the long distance from the sword’s previous position in a high line provided enough time to accelerate the blade to an effective cutting speed. Personally I’d poke people in the toes all day with an epee but the vast majority of my lower-leg hits with the longsword or the Messer have actually been made with cuts. The thighs, on the other hand, are a perfect target for thrusts out of the upper hangings.
There have been some tests with swords against padded/quilted cloth. The results were broadly similar to what we see with mail — cuts were mostly rendered ineffective, while thrusts remained effective to varying degrees depending on the characteristics of the weapons involved. You can see one of the most extensive experiments here http://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.11131.html
It’s less to do with lethality and more to do with rendering someone unable to continue fighting. People can and have continued to fight after multiple fatal stab wounds. However, if a single cut severs the muscles in someone’s shoulder, or the fore-arm, or cuts tendons in the wrist you have instantly lost the function of that arm. Similar wounds to the leg would prevent someone from standing, let alone fighting. Despite all of those wounds being eminently more survivable than a stab to the gut
You do have the issue of landing that cut, which as you say is harder than a stab, but you only need to do it once and it’s very obvious the other fella isn’t fighting back anymore.
I think you’re over-estimating the efficacy of a slice–there are enough first-hand accounts of people continuing to fight despite dangerous slashes that I’m not willing to grant that one slash and the person is out of the fight.
That said, the thread running through these comments is certainly interesting. The premise of my original argument (that what works at the scale of individual combat works at the scale of military combat) isn’t really true. Which makes sense–a group is composed of individuals, but people behave differently in groups; that’s why things like deep formations work.
Treating it as “stab automatically ineffective, slash automatically effective” is certainly inaccurate.
I think the best way to understand it is statistically: the more “stuff” you damage with your blow, the better the chance of immediately removing your opponent from the fight – either by discouraging them from continuing (pain/shock/morale), or because something you’ve damaged was crucial to their continued fighting (severed muscles/tendons, etc). Bleeding out is rarely a relevant mechanism here – it almost always takes long enough that the opponent can still make a right mess of you.
The tradeoff is that you do have to hit them. Thrusting attacks will generally penetrate or bypass protection more easily. You aren’t really reliably driving any sword through a mail hauberk on a quick jab*, but you can put one into a smaller target area (such as a gap between two plates) more easily. If you keep the point of your weapon between you and your opponent, you automatically are lined up for a thrust. Hence a lot of weapons throughout history will make a tradeoff between the two: swords which can cut and thrust; polearms with a pointy bit and a choppy bit; etc.
“Bleeding out is rarely a relevant mechanism here – it almost always takes long enough that the opponent can still make a right mess of you.”
True–the Spanish and the French had differing views of that when rapiers were common, for example. On the scale of an army, though, would it matter? The opponent can mess me up, but in a 10,000 person strong army, despite what I’d like to think of myself, I’m just not that significant, especially if I’m on a shield wall (they don’t tend to put officers in that position).
I think your point that we need to look at this statistically is a good one. And not just statistically, but also economically. Armies are expensive, and military planners will be amply incentivized to get the most bang for their buck. To use an absurd example: Something that’s extremely effective in one-on-one combat but horrifically expensive to build is going to be terrible at the scale of an army. I think we see some of this with the nations that buy the materials for a modern-systems army without having the training for it–an individual with a high-powered automatic rifle and modern body armor, night vision, etc is superior to someone with a semi-automatic rifle in one-on-one combat, but if you can only afford 1,000 of those guys and I can afford 50,000 guys with semi-automatic rifles, I’m probably still going to win the battle.
Another thing is going to be training. For something like a phalanx, where you’re thrusting spears at each other, thrusting is nearly instinctive–the pointy bit is that small piece on the end, after all. With swords humans seem to instinctively chop, however. See the damage to the tangless bronze swords–it’s almost always consistent with some idiot forgetting it’s a dedicated thrusting tool. If you CAN train for a thrust, great, but if you can’t, it’s easier to direct what people want to do anyway than it is to train new habits.
The difference between winning battles and winning wars is also significant, but I haven’t give it much thought yet.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, to be clear. Just thinking out loud, mostly.
“You aren’t really reliably driving any sword through a mail hauberk on a quick jab*….”
I see the star, but want to expand on this. Wearing a hauberk while someone attempts to force some sharp bit into you HURTS. Maybe not “instant kill” levels of hurts, but definitely “You have my full attention and I will deal with you when I get my breath back” levels of hurts. Maille is made of rings, only a small portion of which make contact with you. This spreads the force out orders of magnitude compared to a thrust (and since stress=strain/area, this is significant!), but the force is still hitting you. And the area it’s spread out over is still relatively small compared to, say, a fist. Padding helps (decreases deceleration, as well as spreading the force out even more), but it’s still entirely plausible to reliably do damage. If you’re strong enough you can break ribs, rupture internal organs, and do other fun things without ever breaking skin.
“if you can only afford 1,000 of those guys and I can afford 50,000 guys with semi-automatic rifles, I’m probably still going to win the battle.”
Though there’s not just numbers and materiel, but training and cohesion/motivation. Will the 50,000 stand and fight, or will they break and run when the 1000 start gunning them down with automatic fire, or making nocturnal attacks with their night vision? Are they fighting to save their homeland, or because they’re poorly paid authoritarian conscripts?
Interesting stuff! I’ve always been a bit baffled as to why people idolize the gladius when it doesn’t seem to be exceptional in any way. But from your post, maybe the key is that it’s an all-round sword. It’s OK for thrusting. It’s OK for cutting. It’s OK against armored opponents. It’s OK against unarmored opponents. It’s short enough to be OK in a press. It’s long enough to be OK in a dispersed fight. It’s a jack-of-all-trades sword.
I think I’ve seen claims that that is also true of Roman legionaries. They’re a flexible unit who can function OK in a variety of contexts. They can fight OK in a tight formation, they can fight OK in a lose formation, they can use projectile weapons OK, they can use close-up weapons OK. Whatever enemy they face, they can adopt a good way to deal with them.
Is the gladius a jack-of-all-trades sword for a jack-of-all-trades soldier?
This, and the general roman strategic advantages. Roman armies do lose. Not as much as they win, but it’s not that uncommon, it’s just that the romans can churn out another army to replace it and try again. And again. And again.
That kind of claim is bound to be problematic since the Roman legions lasted quite a long while (let’s say from the first decent evidence we find in the 4th century BC to the reorganisation of the army after the Third Century Crisis) and it had been _many_ things over the course of all these centuries, not one. And even if it was true, they certainly weren’t the first to claim that title — Macedonian phalangites under Philip and Alexander seemed to have a similar degree of flexibility, being able to skirmish, engage in special operations (especially scaling a cliff to assault a mountaintop fortress), and fight in close order. Later phalangites (especially the ones the Roman fought around the turn of the 3rd-2nd centuries BC) may have lost much of this flexibility on account of fewer of them being experienced veterans, which hints at the very likely notion that less experienced Roman legionaries might not have been that flexible either.
So, what’s next? Can I put in a request to look at shield design during this period?
I feel bad for never really saying this before, but you’ve taught me more about history than I learned in my AP history classes that I took in high school. I doubt I can express how much you’ve helped me with my worldbuilding and my historical interests
La Tène is not in what is today Frace as stated in the article. Although the name is french the place is located in Switzerland north of the Lake Neuchâtel. Switzerland has a big region were people speek french. La Tène lies in that region. Maybe the (wrong) assumption that it would lie in France comes from the french sounding name.
This is my first post on this blog and so I also want to take the opportunity to thank the author for all the knowledge that comes from this place. You are giving all of us such a great gift, thanks a lot.
The La Tène material culture sphere is larger than the site of La Tène and rather more of it ends up in France than Switzerland, thus the necessary simplification.