This is the first part of the second part of our four? four part1 look at the great third and second century BC contest between the Hellenistic armies of the heirs of Alexander and the Roman legions. Last time, we looked at the Hellenistic army as a complete system, incorporating not just the famed Macedonian sarisa-phalanx, but also light and medium infantry and a decisive cavalry-striking force. This week, we turn to the Romans to look at how the Roman legion of the Middle Republic is structured and its tactical system. Then, for the second half of this part (next week) we’re going to zoom out a bit and look at some of the operational and strategic level advantages the Roman legion enjoys.
And here it might be a good time to refresh those terms. When we talk about tactics, we mean the methods used to win battles at the lowest layer of military analysis. Whereas, when we talk about strategy, we are talking about the upper-most layer of military analysis, which is concerned with end goals (‘ends’), the methods to reach those goals in the big-picture-abstract (‘ways’) and the resources required to do so (‘means’). In between these two layers is operations, which is where all of the thorny problems of moving large armies over vast distances come in: logistics, long distance maneuvers, coordination of forces and so on. To simplify a bit, tactics is the how of war, operations is the where and strategy is the why: tactics is how you fight a battle, operations where you fight that battle and strategy is why you fought that battle in the first place (for more on these terms, you can consult our handy Military Terminology Glossary!)
This week, we’re looking primarily at Roman tactics, because the interaction of the Roman tactical system with Hellenistic armies, I will argue later, gave the Romans a fairly clear edge, especially in the second century once the full system seems to be in place. Whereas Hellenistic armies aimed to win with a decisive cavalry strike on the flanks, Roman armies were fundamentally attritional, aiming to win by grinding down the center of the enemy army. As we’ll see, that attritional approach influences tactics, but it also impacts weapons. The interaction of tactics and weapons itself is a huge topic, but fortunately, we’ve already discussed the key Roman weapons involved, the pilum heavy javelin and the gladius Hispaniensis, so I’ll be referring back to those posts a bit here.
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Of Combined Arms and Men
The basic building blocks of Roman armies in the Middle Republic are the citizen legion and the socii alae or ‘wing.’ A ‘standard’ Roman army generally consisted of two legions and two matching alae. but larger and smaller armies were possible by stacking more legions or enlarging the alae. We’re not nearly so well informed as to the structure of the alae of socii (the socii being Rome’s ‘allied’ – really, subject – peoples in Italy), except that they seem to have been tactically and organizationally interchangeable with legions. Combined with the fact that they don’t seem archaeologically distinctive (that is, we don’t find different non-Roman weapons with them), the strong impression is that at least by the mid-third century – if not earlier – the differences were broadly ironed out and these formations worked much the same way.2 So, for the sake of simplicity, I am going to discuss the legion here, but I want you to understand (because it will matter later) that for every legion, there is a matching ala of socii which works the same way, has effectively the same equipment, fights in the same style and has roughly the same number of troops.
With that said, we reach the first and arguably most important thing to know about the legion: the Roman legion (and socii ala) of the Middle Republic is an integrated combined arms unit. That is to say, unlike a Hellenistic army, where different ‘arms’ (light infantry, heavy infantry, cavalry, etc) are split into different, largely homogeneous units, these are ‘organic’ to the legion, that is to say they are part of its internal structure (we might say they are ‘brigaded together’ into the legion as well). Consequently, whereas the Hellenistic army aims to have different arms on the battlefield in different places doing different things to produce victory, the Roman legion instead understands these different arms to be functioning in a fairly tightly integrated fashion with a single theory of victory all operating on the same ‘space’ in the enemy’s line.
And you may well ask, before we get to organization, “What is that theory of victory?” As we saw, the Hellenistic army aims to fix the enemy with its heavy infantry center, hold the flanks with lighter, more mobile infantry (to protect that formation) and win the battle with a decisive cavalry-led hammer-blow on a flank. By contrast, the Romans seem to have decided that the quickest way to an enemy’s vulnerable rear was through their front. The legion is thus not built for flanking, its cavalry component – while ample in numbers – is distinctly secondary. Instead, the legion is built to sandpaper away the enemy’s main battle line in the center through attrition, in order to produce a rupture and thus victory.
To do that, you need to create a lot of attrition and this is what the manipular legion is built to do.
The legion of the Middle Republic is built out of five components: three lines of heavy infantry (hastati, principes and triarii), a body of light infantry (the velites), and a cavalry contingent (the equites). Specifically, a normal legion has 1200 each of velites, hastati and principes, 600 triarii and 300 equites, making a total combined unit of 4,500. Organizationally, the light infantry velites were packaged in with the heavy infantry (Polyb. 6.24.2-5) for things like marching and duties in camp, but in battle they typically function separately as a screening force thrown forward of the legion.
So to take the legion as an enemy would experience them, the first force were the velites. These seem to have been deployed in open order in front of the legion to screen its advance. These fellows had lighter javelins, the hasta velitaris (Livy notes they carried seven, Livy 39.21.13), no body armor and a ‘simple headcovering’ (λιτός περικεφάλαιος, Polyb. 6.22.3), possibly hide or textile; they also carried a smaller round shield, the parma, and the gladius Hispaniensis for close-in defense (Livy 38.21.13). These are, all things considered, fairly typical ancient javelin troops, aiming to use the mobility their light equipment offers them to stay out of close-combat.
Behind the velites was the first line of the heavy infantry, the hastati. These fellows were organized into units called maniples (lit: ‘a handful’) of 120, which in turn are divided into centuries of 60 each. The maniples are their own semi-independent maneuvering units (note how much smaller they are than the equivalent taxeis in the phalanx, this is a more flexible fighting system), each with its own small standard (Polyb. 6.24.6) to enable it to maintain coherence as it maneuvers. That said, they normally form up in a quincunx (5/12ths, after a Roman coin with the symbol of five punches, like on dice) formation with the rear ranks, as you can see above.
The hastati (and the principes, who are equipped the same way) have the large Roman shield, the scutum, two heavy javelins (pila), the gladius Hispaniensis sword, a helmet (almost always a Montefortino-type in bronze in this period) and body armor. Poorer soldiers, we’re told, wore a pectoral, wealthier soldiers (probably post-225, though we cannot be certain) wore mail. That is, by the standards of antiquity, quite a lot of armor, actually – probably more armor per-man than any other infantry formation on their contemporary battlefield. That relatively higher degree of protection – big shield, stout helmet (Montefortino’s in this period range from 1.5-2.5kg, making them unusually robust), and lots of body armor – makes sense because these fellows are going to aim to grind the enemy down.
Note that a lot of popular treatments of this assume that the hastati were worse equipped than the principes; there’s no reason to assume this is actually true. The principes are older than the hastati, but the way to understand this formation is that the velites are young or poor, whereas for the upper-classes of the infantry (probably pedites I-IV) after maybe the first year or so, they serve in the heavy infantry (hastati, principes, triarii) based on age, not on wealth (and then the equites are the truly rich, regardless of what age they are; the relevant passage here is Polyb. 6.21.7-9, which is, admittedly, not entirely clear on what is an age distinction and what is a wealth distinction).
We’ve discussed the combat width these guys fight with already – somewhat wider spacing than most, so that each man covers the other’s flanks but they all have room to maneuver. It seems like the standard depth in the Middle Republic was either base-3 (so 3 deep on close order, 6 deep for ‘fighting’ open order) or base-4 (so 4 and 8). Even in open-order with the maniples stretched wide (possibly by having rear centuries move forward), there would have been open intervals (10-20m) between maniples, which reinforces the role of a maniple as a potentially independent maneuvering unit – it has the space to move.3
Behind the hastati are the principes, with the same equipment and organization, slightly off-set to cover the intervals between the hastati, with a gap between the two lines (we do not know how large a gap). These men are slightly older, though not ‘old.’ The whole field army generally consists of iuniores (men under 46) and given how the Romans seem to like to conscript, the vast majority of men will be in their late teens and 20s. So we might imagine the velites to be poorer men, or men in their late teens (17 being the age when one become liable for conscription) or so, while the hastati are early twenties, the principes mid-twenties and the handful of triarii being men in their late twenties or perhaps early 30s. The positioning of the principes isn’t to spare older men the rigors of combat, but rather to put more experienced veterans in a position where they can steady the less experienced hastati.4
Finally, behind them are the triarii, who trade the pila for a thrusting spear, the hasta, the Roman version of the Mediterranean omni-spear. These men are, as noted, the oldest and so likely the calmest under pressure and thus form a reserve in the rear. The three-line system here is what the Romans call a triplex acies (‘three battle lines’). This wasn’t the only way these armies engaged and they could sometimes be formed up into a single solid line, but the triplex acies seems to have been the standard. We don’t know exactly how deep such a formation would run, but we have fairly good evidence that a legion might occupy a space around 400m wide (with some variation), meaning a whole Roman army’s core heavy infantry component (the two legions and two alae) might be some 1.6km (about a mile) across.
The equites, while organic to the legion organizationally, will be tactically grouped in battle to form cavalry screens on the edges of the army, not as a grand flanking cavalry ‘hammer,’ but as flank-protection for the advancing infantry body (as a result, they tend to fight more cautiously). The equites in this period are heavy cavalry, with armored riders (after c. 225, that would be mail), using a shield and a hasta, along with a gladius as a backup weapon and thus serving as ‘shock’ cavalry. Roman cavalry, if we look at their deployments, is generally ample in numbers, but the Romans seem to have been well aware it wasn’t very good, and sought allied cavalry (especially non-Italian allied cavalry) whenever they could get it. But the cavalry, Roman or not, was almost never the decisive part of the army.
Polybius tells us that the socii supplies more cavalry than the Romans and implies that there was a standard rule of three socii cavalrymen to every Roman equites, while socii infantry matched Roman infantry numbers (Polyb. 6.26.7). Looking at actual deployments though, we see that the socii tend to outnumber the Romans modestly, on about a 2:3 ratio, with socii cavalry only modestly outnumbering Roman cavalry.5 Consequently a normal Roman consular field army (of which the Romans generally had at least two every year) was 8,400 Roman infantry, around 12,600 socii infantry, 600 Roman cavalry and perhaps a thousand or so socii cavalry, for a combined force of 21,000 infantry (c. 5,000 light 16,000 heavy, so that’s a lot of heavy infantry) and 1,600 cavalry. That somewhat undersells the cavalry force the Romans might bring, as Roman armies also often move with auxilia externa (allied forces not part of the socii), which are very frequently cavalry-heavy (especially, after 203, that really good Numidian cavalry).6 By and large, it’s not that the Romans bring a lot less cavalry (as a percentage of army size), but that Italian cavalry tends to perform poorly and the as a result the Romans do not built their battle plans around their weakest combat arm.
Perhaps ironically, the Romans used their cavalry like Alexander and Hellenistic armies used their light infantry: holding forces designed to keep the flanks of the battlefield busy while the decisive action happened somewhere else.
Roman Fighting
With our units in place, we can now walk through the intended engagement pattern of the legion (keeping in mind that it isn’t operating alone, but likely has another legion deployed on one of its flanks, and then this two-legion formation has two alae of socii, similarly organized, on their flanks). First, we’re going to look at it from the Roman perspective to get a sense of what happens when, and then we’re going to pivot and look at what it would be like to be at the business end of this system to see how its attritional system works.
The first thing is that the Roman army almost certainly advances into contact; the Romans tended not to wait to receive assaults (to be fair, neither did Hellenistic armies or earlier Greek hoplite phalanxes either) but instead looked to advance into contact. The velites go forward; they have no officers with them (their officers, organizationally, are the centurions who are back with their maniples) and so we shouldn’t imagine much in the way of formation here, which is fine because the style of fighting they employ is not formation based. With seven lighter javelins (the hasta velitaris), the velites can continue skirmishing over longer periods as the battle develops.
In practice, the velites serve a few roles in this initial phase. On the one hand, of course, the velites can skirmish an advancing line of enemy infantry, throwing their lighter javelins while staying out of reach. If the enemy charges the velites in response, because their equipment is lighter and they are the younger men, they can easily fall back faster to the safety of the hastati. An enemy that has broken formation to pursue the velites which then slams face-first into the hastati while tired and out of formation is going to have a very bad time. Consequently, the velites can harass enemy infantry pretty readily, falling back as needed.
On the flipside, the velites also serve a key screening function. If the enemy has skirmish or missile infantry themselves, they could present the advancing Roman heavy infantry with the same problem: advance slowly and get harassed by javelins and arrows or charge – breaking out of formation to do it – and get torn up by supporting heavy infantry. But with the velites out in front, they absorb that fire. While in video games it is often really easy to have archer units or javelin units simply fire over low-value units to hit high value units behind them, on actual battlefield where troops are limited to what they can see with their Mark-One Eyeballs at head-height, a screening force of light infantry in front like this can essentially shield the advancing heavy infantry. Meanwhile, because the velites are not in close-order (thus, lots of open space for arrows or javelins or sling bullets to miss into) and have shields, they make poor targets for massed missile fire.
Consequently, the velites can effectively ‘deliver’ the rest of the legion intact against an enemy with their own light infantry screen. Now of course, Hellenistic armies don’t have a forward-thrown light infantry screen; their light infantry is deployed on the flanks. Once again, video-game tactics here are a poor guide. Often in something like a Total War game, an archer unit deployed on a flank can cover most of the army’s line. But real armies are a lot bigger. A single legion probably occupies around 400m of frontage, recall – whereas effective bow range fades out around 200m in most cases. So a unit of archers, deployed on the flanks of a legion would struggle to hit targets at the center of that legion – and a normal Roman army is four legions wide, so archers on the flanks of that formation are way out of range of the formation’s center.
Once the enemy has closed enough to press the velites, they retreat through the intervals of the hastati. Meanwhile, the maniples of the hastati probably shift to their standard combat spacing and depth, filling most but not all of the open intervals. The remaining 10-20m spaces between the maniples gives the rest of the velites somewhere to go, which is important: having your own light infantry pushed back into a heavy infantry formation can disrupt it, but here there’s no problem as there are lanes ready for it already. The hastati then hurl their pila and charge into close-combat. With only two pila, this isn’t going to be an extended barrage7 but a ‘throw-and-charge’ quick sequence of shocks against the enemy front line.
The hastatus‘ kit in turn demands a particular sort of fighting once he comes into close contact: after all, he doesn’t have a 2.5-3m long spear, but rather a c. 75-85cm sword. Now in practice the fighting distance isn’t as long as that difference implies, since the spear isn’t gripped all the way to one end the way a sword is, but fighting with the spear carried overhand it might be held around the midpoint (so 125-150cm of reach) or perhaps choked up a bit closer to the tip, whereas the Roman has just their 60-65cm of blade length. Consequently, the Roman soldier has to advance through the striking range of the spear to get into range himself, which of course is part of what the large, curved scutum – the Roman shield – is for, since it covers basically the whole body of the man behind it.
But of course once in close at sword-striking ranges, the advantages shift to the Roman: his versatile cut-and-thrust sword is made for this, his large shield makes it much harder for his opponent to land a good hit (or see what the Roman’s sword is doing) and his heavier armor makes it less likely that hit will be disabling or fatal. Given this fighting style, it seems no accident that where Greek sources often extol a kind of courage (andreia) sometimes described as ‘passive’ courage (holding position and standing impassively in your assigned place), the Roman equivalent – virtus – is an aggressive, borderline reckless courage (mixed with drive, ambition and energy) that has to be restrained by the other key Roman martial virtue, disciplina. You can get a sense of this different, more aggressive ethos from a Roman military oath Livy (22.38.4) recalls, that the soldiers were made to swear “not to abandon their formation, neither for fear or flight, but only in order to pick up a weapon, or strike an enemy, or save a fellow citizen.” Both “I saw my buddy Gaius was in trouble” and “I saw that foe was focused on someone else and left his left side open” are valid reasons to move out of position in formation, at least for a moment.
Now you may be imagining that those intervals between the maniples are going to be a problem. I think Michael Taylor has actually done a pretty good job showing that the intervals between the maniples were never fully close up – the Romans in this period never formed a single solid line, but fought a series of 120-man maniple-blocks. But the 10-20m wide intervals are also hardly inviting for the enemy. Attacking through them means flanking your own formation (as Romans from your right and left dash out of formation “in order to strike an enemy”) and if you do get through, you are going to run headfirst into the next line of Roman infantry, the principes. The other factor here is probably the velites; while they’re not close-combat infantry, they do have swords, the same gladius Hispaniensis as everyone else (Livy 38.21.13) and serviceable if smaller shields. We’re not told this, but it seems almost certain to me that the velites are probably in these intervals (probably still throwing javelins) as well, fluidly filling the gaps without getting ‘stuck in’ in the front.
Now there are certainly battles where the hastati proceed to win the battle, often because the impact of that initial onset overwhelms the enemy. Livy sometimes briefly mentions (e.g. Livy 8.16.6)8[ these sorts of battles as being won clamore atque impetu primo, “at the first shout and onset.” But if the hastati‘s onset doesn’t trigger morale collapse and flight, the attritional structure now takes over: the hastati fall back through the next line, the principes, who then engage.
This rank-exchange procedure prompts a lot of incredulity from students, but it is abundantly clear that this is how the Roman legion worked. And it isn’t so implausible in any event. First, remember that these maniples do have the necessary command structures: two NCOs (the centurions) to make the decision to fall back and coordinate the movement, as well as their own standard and standard-bearer to reform around if necessary (centurions, at least by the late Republic and the imperial period, also wear helmets with very distinctive transverse crests, making it easy for soldiers to find their centurions in the chaos). For an enemy, chasing the hastati also poses the same problems as chasing the velites did – there’s another line of entirely fresh, well-formed heavy infantry behind them, so if you break ranks to maximize the casualties the hastati take in withdrawal, you’ll end up cut to pieces by the principes. Finally, of course, the velites are not gone, so that screening force can also cover the withdrawal. That’s not to say it was always so orderly – one has to imagine many times the hastati just came apart. These are, after all, some of the less experienced men in the army. But even if they just collapse, the intervals between the maniples of the principes are going to funnel them together again, where their centurions can get ahold of them, reorganize them around the standard, without disrupting the principes.
The principes, you will recall, have exactly the same equipment as the hastati and so they now engage the same way: another barrage of pila, another clamor (the war-cry), another sudden onset of gladii, their intervals still full of velites (and maybe the hastati). You can, I hope, start to see how casualties and wounds are beginning to stack up for the enemy. Generally, it seems like the expectation was that the principes were the ‘battle winners,’ at least for tough fights. Having matters ‘go to the triarii (ad triarios venit) meant things were going badly and Plautus – a Roman comedic playwright who wrote during the Second Punic War (and who is hilarious) – even jokes about how the triarii never do anything (Plaut. Frivolaria frag. 5 – that’s right folks, we got a fragment of old Latin into this post).
That said, if the principes can’t get it done, the triarii in the rear, composed of the oldest and most experienced men can either provide a nucleus for the whole army to try one more time to break the enemy lines or else cover a fighting withdrawal. It is possible that the triarii‘s longer persistence with the hasta over the pilum reflects this need for these guys, more than anyone else, to stand their ground or die trying. We’ll come back to the triarii, but I think their role as the army’s backstop may9 have some explanatory power for why Pyrrhus in particular really struggles to deliver a sufficiently decisive defeat to Roman armies: it’s hard to ‘run up the score’ once you are winning if the enemy has a built in ‘die-so-everyone-else-can-get-away’ component.
One Very Bad Day
And now let’s shift perspectives to that enemy front line. You’ve formed up in your fighting order and begun to advance and first a cloud of light enemies (the velites) move up against you. Behind them, you can vaguely see the main Roman body, but not in much detail yet. Instead, you are treated to shower of lighter javelins; these only mass around 250g or so, but some of them are bound to catch a face or an unarmored leg and bring someone down or get stuck in a shield. The damage is probably minimal, but what the velites are doing is already wearing you down: you are now, physically and mentally ‘in combat,’ with weapons flying and adrenaline running (whereas the Roman heavy infantry are not!). The velites don’t need to inflict casualties at this stage to have an effect: they’re inflicting friction (in the Clausewitzian sense, drink!) and that is enough.
As you approach the velites, they scatter back to their lines and now the first real trial comes: when you are about twenty meters out from the enemy line, a storm of those heavy pila come in, thick and all at once. Each one masses around 1.3kg (just short of three pounds) so even if the tip doesn’t bite, one of these things clanging off of armor or a shield is going to hurt, the impacts stagger men near you as you struggle to keep formation (and for a Hellenistic army, get and keep those sarisa-points down). The impact of the massed volley, especially against close-order infantry with tight fighting-width, is going to be chaotic as some men are killed, others disabled, still more suddenly staggered. The volley is followed almost immediately by the on-rush of the hastati. These guys don’t have a long spear for keeping you at a distance, they’re all brandishing swords and aim to get in close, using their large body-shields to absorb any blows you might throw while they get right up in your face, where their swords can stab and slash viciously over or under your shield. These hastati are aggressive and they’re probably better armored than you are.
And of course an engagement in contact like this is unpredictable. Perhaps in some areas, your lines push forward, whereas in other places it bends back. For large maneuver units (like taxeis!) this can be a real problem, but Roman maniples are small, so one maniple can advance if it fights the opportunity while others hold position or are even forced back (we actually see a general give, essentially, an ‘advance at your own discretion’ order at Pydna, Plut. Aem. 20.8).
After a short and terrifying experience – these moments of shock combat probably didn’t last all that long, perhaps as little as just a few minutes – the hastati fall back. The front of your line is already physically and mentally exhausted. Many men are wounded and certainly some have been killed or disabled. I don’t want to oversell the casualties aspect of this: armies don’t annihilate each other in stand-up engagements (instead more casualties happen in pursuit), but wounds and exhaustion matter. Latin has this phrase, of being confectus vulneribus, “exhausted by wounds” or perhaps “worn down by wounds” (Liv. 24.26.14, 31.17.11, Caes. BGall. 5.45) to describe how the accumulation of a lot of little wounds can sap soldiers of their ability to resist effectively, even if no one wound is lethal. And just as important, all of the emotional impetus of your initial attack is spent. And there’s a decent chance that, as you try to breath, you still have these light velites javelins (the hasta velitaris) thudding into your line every few seconds, because – again – they carry seven of them. They’re not out.
And then, as you are getting your bearings, trying desperately to catch your breath, the principes come up. They’re not physically tired or emotionally exhausted, but eager (like you were a half an hour ago when you advanced), they’ve been waiting all this time. Worse yet, these are probably the most combat-effective soldiers the Romans have, in the prime of their life, with years of combat experience. Now the second volley of pila comes in, creating yet more chaos. And then more angry, heavily armored Romans, behind their big shields, stabbing and cutting with their deadly gladii.
Now the men at the back of your single line may be relatively fresh, but you have no real way to get them to the front, so the wrath of the principes falls on men who are already exhausted, already wounded, already tired and already out of fight. Your line isn’t advancing so stridently; the men in the back, if the formation is deep, don’t know why the advance is slowed, why the line seems to be wavering, only that it seems to be wavering. And meanwhile, everyone is hoping that, at any moment, the victorious cavalry on the flanks is going to show up and win the battle, but they can’t see it anywhere in the confusion. Maybe your cavalry has won and is moments away – or perhaps Antiochus III charged it off the field again and no help is coming. Or perhaps the enemy cavalry has tied it up or worse yet, the Roman’s highly skilled Numidian allies might have mastered the flanks. You have no idea, you only know that help isn’t here, you are tired and more Romans are upon you. And somewhere, the thin thread of human courage snaps, either from the exhausted men in front or the confused men behind and the formation begins to collapse.
As the collective defense of lapped shields or serried pikes gives way, the Romans are now truly in their element: their large shields function just fine in individual combat and their versatile swords do as well. Lead by their centurions, the principes, with practiced and experienced skill, are finding the gaps, cutting as they go. As the formation crumbles, the velites can pursue – lightly armored, but well enough armed, backed up by the equites if there are any left.
Attrition and Friction
You can see thus how this is a formation designed to wear down an enemy’s main battle line. It isn’t that the Romans are set massively deeper than a Hellenistic army, either. Assuming a base-3 set of file-depths (which seems to me the most likely), the Roman ranks are probably six, six and three men deep (hastati, principes, triarii), for a total depth over each file of 15, one less than the normal Macedonian formation. And with the wider fighting intervals the Romans use, they won’t normally have much of a problem matching the fighting width of the enemy army, unless substantially outnumbered (as, for instance, at Magnesia).
It’s not the Roman formation is deeper, its that its successive battle lines avoid exposing the entire army to exhaustion, attrition and friction all at once. In effect, it uses the same principles as defense-in-depth, exploiting the effect of friction on the enemy line to wear it down, but does so on the offensive. I don’t think it is an accident that when the Romans do lose, it tends to be because this model battle was spoiled in some way, either because the army was ambushed, enveloped, something disrupted the triplex acies or because the enemy was able to carry the field with just the momentum of the first charge – the Roman lines essentially failing like a building undergoing controlled demolition, as each floor pancakes the next without slowing.
But an army that isn’t able to decisively win the battle either at the first onset or somewhere else on the line is going to find itself in quite a lot of trouble as the Romans almost inevitably sandpaper away the morale and stamina of the main line of resistance until it collapses.
Now many of you may already be realizing that this kind of force is going to present a Hellenistic army with a lot of problems, both because it is set up for a different kind of fight than they are, but also because it may end up matching much heavier troops against the lighter parts of a Hellenistic army. But before we jump into battles, we need to zoom up to the upper levels of military analysis – operations and strategy – and talk about the advantages the Romans have there.
Because if all the Romans had was an edge in their tactical system, we might expect them to win battles but sometimes lose wars. Instead, while the Romans sometimes lose battles, they seemingly always win the war. And that’s where we’ll look next week.
- This gag amuses me more than it should.
- On this, see Burns, M. T. “The Homogenisation of Military Equipment under the Roman Republic.” In Romanization? Digressus Supplement I. London: Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2003.
- On this, M.J. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-Republic: A Reassment” Historia 63.3 (2014): 301-322.
- To expound at some length on my own thoughts on how I think the wealth/age issue was probably managed, Dionysius (4.19.2) claims that the Romans recruited by centuries in the comitia centuriata such that the wealthy, divided into fewer voting blocks, served more often, and we know from Polybius that the maximum period of service for the infantry was sixteen years and from some math done by N. Rosenstein in Rome at War (2004) that the average service must have been around seven years. My suspicion, which I cannot prove is that the very poorest Roman assidui (men liable for conscription) might have only been serving fewer years on average and so it wasn’t a problem having them do all of their service as velites (the only role they can afford), whereas wealthier Romans (my guess is pedites IV and up) are the ones who age into the heavy infantry, with pedites I, whose members probably serve more than the seven-year average (perhaps around 10?) might make up close to 40% of the actual heavy infantry body (which is their balance in the comitia centuriata). The velites thus serves two important functions: a place to ‘blood’ wealthier young Roman men to prepare them to stand firm in the heavy infantry line, as well as a place for poorer Romans to contribute militarily in a way they could afford. But I think that, once in the heavy infantry, the division between hastati, principes and triarii was – as Polybius says (6.21.7-9 and 6.23.1) – an age division, not a wealth division Instead, the next wealth line is for the equites.
- The data on this is compiled by Taylor, Soldiers & Silver (2020), 26-28.
- Taylor, op. cit., 54-7 compiles examples.
- We discussed this problem in the scholarship here.
- For more examples, see Zhmodikov, “Roman Republican Heavy Infantrymen in Battle (IV-II centuries BC)” Historia 49.1 (2000), fn. 31.
- Important word! Our sources, as we’ll see, for the Pyrrhic War, aren’t very good and some of those battles are beyond confident reconstruction.
Hello there, I’m pleased to see I’m the first one to comment and also, on the subject of the Roman cavalry, I was curious if you’d had a chance to peruse Philip Sidnell’s book Warhorse: Cavalry in the Ancient World and if so, what were your thoughts?
Cheers
Fascinating. But it makes me wonder. If this staggered approach is good at keeping the rear formations fresh and ready to go instead of exhausting the formation all at once, why weren’t the Hellenistic armies able to do something similar? Instead of one big phalanx 16 men deep, split it up into two 8 man deep hemi-phalanxes, maybe with some sort of screening light infantry in between the back of your first phalanx and the front of your second. Especially if the Hellenistic theory of victory was that the infantry center just had to hold long enough for the cavalry to deliver a crushing blow from the flank somewhere, I would have thought that these armies would be very quick to emphasize anything that gave the formation more staying power.
I’m guessing there’s a flaw in this tactical model somewhere, but what made the Romans able to split up and engage in multiple echelons but the Hellenistic armies seem to be one line that engages all at once?
It may be related to the spear vs. sword+javelins split – my impression is that it would be hard to maneuver like that with sarrisas lowered, and trying to have the new unit lower sarrisas after swapping to be the front line would leave them vulnerable (also, having the old unit ler sarrisas before swapping would leave them vulnerable as they lose)
The Seleucids at Magnesia did divide the phalanx into multiple sub-phalanxes (with elephants in the intervals). It didn’t help.
That isn’t rotating phalanxes so that some people are in combat and some are rested and ready to go.
Mostly because the sarissa tiself makes that kind of thing extremely difficult, as you can’t really turn with a lowered sarissa, certainly not drawn up in a phalanx.
But you could retreat straight backward.
I suspect this is a complexity issue, in that non-Roman armies didn’t train their men to engage in complex high stakes maneuvers like this, because they couldn’t afford to (I mean they didn’t have the wealth to do it). And this, in turn reflects a difference in demography–doesn’t a larger percentage of the Roman army consist of well educated middle class men? Being better educated in the first place means they can be better trained once they join the army.
Or am I wrong about that?
Retreating backward faster than the enemy can advance forward is really difficult. It generally supposes that the enemy cannot advance for some reason.
But you could retreat straight backward.
There would be a big risk of tripping over.
Retreating straight back is impossible because there is a man in the way. Stepping to the right and back won’t work, either, because there are multiple sarissae in the way kf the side step. And because a goodly length of that sarissa is actually sticking out on the man’s back, for balance reasons, stepping left and back isn’t exactly trivial either.
Plus, you’d need a fairly loose formation to begin with, so you have a lane to retreat in.
Oh, and there is an angry stranger trying to stab you while you do this.
This is where a shield punch can get you the time to disengage, and the man behind you to step up . . . But that presupposes you have a shield that’s good for punching, and that covers you well as you retreat.
A scutum does that much better than the smaller hoplite shield.
I suppose it loops back to the systemic issues of phalangites being pulled from a smaller recruiting pool. Elephants clearly didn’t work as gap-fillers. Another phalanx, however, might work a lot better. It produces the same effect as the Roman version. Spend all your energy fighting the first phalanx (which itself is harder to do head-on than a legion), only for it to retreat into a gap and you face another fresh phalanx. You can’t outflank the phalanx, otherwise you’d expose your flanks to the second line of phalanxes (especially scary if they could charge like Swiss ones could).
You run up against the issue of pivoting though. If the enemy is engaging one phalanx, and the relief phalanx is just to the left, it can’t pivot to engage the enemy. Unless that’s not how the Roman formation worked either, and just the threat of the second line moving up was enough to force a disengagement of the enemy. If it’s the former, then any other form of heavy infantry could happily plug the gaps.
This is all rather moot of course as it presupposes a Hellenistic army developing a theory of victory it didn’t have, but it’s fun to noodle some thoughts around…
I can see it being hard to retreat a phalanx into another phalanx without disrupting both of them, and if you split them like the maniples with 10-20m gaps people can go in those gaps and that’s a lot harder to swing your sarissa to deal with than to swing a gladius.
I think a big part of the answer here is that the maneuver flexibility of maniples is in part a of product of not having to manage a massive pike while doing it.
That said, the closest I can think of to the idea you are getting at here is probably the employment of tercios in early modern Europe, where instead of one big line of pikes, the army is deployed as a number of independently maneuvering pike blocks, each with its own integrated gunpowder support (and sometimes artillery).
Which, now that I think about it, sounds like the kind of thing someone might come up with if…
Hm. This is a sort of a history-of-history question, I think.
Would the Renaissance-era Spanish who (so far as I know) invented the tercio formation have known about the triplex acies? They would presumably have had access to the basic core classical texts on warfare in the Roman Republic such as Livy, I’d think.
Could the inspiration have been deliberate?
(I bet someone knows whether it was or not, definitively, but that person certainly isn’t me)
If I remember correctly, the Spanish concept of the tercio developed more organically during the Italian wars when the Spanish encountered the Swiss pike formations. The Dutch on the other hand, when fighting against the Spanish in the 80-years war, built explicitly on texts from antiquity on Roman battle formations, including the ideas of disciplina and triplex acies.
And one has to keep in mind that the importance of firearms and field artillery radically changed the situation on the battlefield and subsequently battlefield formations and tactics in the early modern period.
Yes absolutely – early modern formations were explicitly based on Roman practice. The funny thing is that it was the Hellenistic drill tradition (exemplified particularly by Aelian) that provided the inspiration at the lowest tactical level, yet the Roman tradition of multiple lines of independent units (culled from Livy and Caesar) at the grand tactical level,
On the face of it, if they had been that heavily influenced by classical antiquity, they would have introduced giant curved shields, not giant two-handed spears. So I wonder if they were that much more influenced by antiquity than are modern generals talking about Cannae. People quoting precedents for what they want to do anyway naturally seek precedents that sound impressive to the target audience.
Much like we do when we look back at medieval history, they smashed lots of stuff up together. So you see faux-Greek-hero spear and shield stuff; pikes and pike formations; and sword and shield faux-legionaries all being mashed up together.
Livy was known – Machiavelli wrote his Discourses on Livy during the Italian Wars at about the same time as the Spanish are hammering out their version of pike-and-shot warfare through the Colunella to the Tercio.
Maurcie of Nassau explicitly based the organisation of his army on the Roman one, down to the Dutch army using a triple-line of brigades.
*Maurice, dammit
Is this something that could be usefully explored with some practical re-enactment?
Reminds me a bit of WW1 and the switch to infiltration tactics, albeit achieved in a very different way. And by one army, perhaps over an extended period, rather in a couple of years by (apparently) every combatant army simultaneously.
The issue with splitting the phalanx this way is twofold.
First of all, Phalanxes reply on mutual support both physically and for morale – they are rather more densely packed as a necessity of how they function. Thinning a Phalanx weakens it considerably. The Macedonian Phalanx in particular relies on deep ranks to create a massive and imposing hedge of spears – you aren’t trying to push pass 1 guy but him and at least 3-5 buddies with very long spears that can reach you, just in his file alone (before you even get into the guys in the file to the right and left)
Secondly, because of the tight packing of Phalanxes (doubly, no triply, so the Macedonian over the Hellenic), their ability to maneuver is limited compared to a more open order formation. Roman maniples and cohorts can wheel much more easily, while turning a Phalanx is difficult and slow. So your hypothetical second Phalanx in the rear isn’t going to be able to maneuver around the first to engage the enemy. In which case they may as well have stayed at home and at least not gotten in the way of any retreats. Or y’know, just have been part of the front line, as was the way it was done IRL.
It’s been said previously that the first 5 ranks of a Macedonian phalanx could use their pikes, and the projection to the rear probably makes it so that the next few ranks can’t easily disengage. But still, the Macedonian phalanx was 16 deep while the standard Greek phalanx was 8. Why add the extra depth, when you could make your line twice as wide? Is that really the most effective way to deploy phalangists in Greek/Macedonian warfare?
Because maneuvering against their opponent isn’t their goal. Their goal is to keep standing, or rather keep slowly advancing, until the the flanks win the day. Being 16 ranks deep makes it easiert to keep standing, or rather makes it harder to turn an run.
Could it have something to do with what they do with the new recruits? If a phalanx is immovable, and the scariest part is right at the front (that has to last the whole battle). You want your most experienced me there. In order to expose your new recruits to danger in a safe way (such that they can build up the experience they need to stand and fight in critical locations), it would make sense to put them at the back of the formation. That way they can get exposed to how everything works without being in danger, or in too critical of a location.
I suppose to make it a fair comparison, you’d compare a single phalanx (which is expected to fight through the entire battle) to all three ranks of Romans (who are also expected to fight through the entire battle). So the phalanx’s 16 ranks compares to the legion’s 18 (or 24, if it’s base-4 rather than base-3).
My suspicion is path dependence. Going with the sarisa and a tight-packed line means you’ve emphasized that mentality both militarily and socially. Moving to smaller more fluid units requires a psychological pivot away from ‘stand firm until the cavalry strikes’.
I’m not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding from what I’m reading is that the looser interpersonal spacing of the maniple vs the phalanx may play a role here – i.e. if you are not packed in with long, unwieldy pikes you are able to maneuver and retreat in better order. The pike phalanx would have to coordinate everyone moving backwards together, which strikes me as much harder to pull off – especially if everyone is tired and on the verge of breaking.
My impression from the Bret’s previous posts is that the Roman system needed a lot of training to pull off all those controlled retreats. So I was assuming the Hellenistic armies didn’t put in that kind of training time — but I do notice he doesn’t mention that as a factor here.
Speaking as one who spent a career in the Army… retiring is hard; even when you have planned it. It’s hard with an open order, and small body of troops; all in (functional) earshot of the commander.
For a phalanx to retire in good order, everyone has to trust the people behind haven’t turned to flee. The front must maintain contact (at least psychological) with the enemy; and the entire unit has to be moving, backwards, at the same pace; each file maintaining it’s dressing, while not being able to see whats behind it.
And then what? Either the enemy has let you walk back; breaking contact. Or they haven’t, and when you stop you are in the same position (up close and personal) only more fatigued from the more difficult movement you just executed.
The Roman change in units might have been a gradual falling back (which does take a great deal of training; see above about falling back in contact). It may also have been they stopped advancing, let the enemy fall back, and then the other two (princepi and triarii) moved up; effectively relieving them in place.
That would take a fair bit of training, but would reduce the odds of the hastati (who, remember are not as experienced at the others) breaking formation and routing.
It’s the reverse, actually — Hellenistic phalanxes required and received far more drill that contemporary Roman legions.
Legionary tactics were designed to cater to untrained conscripts, and were thus as simple and straightforward in operation as they could afford to be, while phalangites were trained professionals whose style of combat relied on them being able to constantly keep formation.
So imagine the Roman system of retreat less as carefully maneouvring blocks of soldiers marching around in lockstep, and more as flexible, fairly disordered, amoeba-like warbands of about 120 men each, kept together by their standards, getting funnelled through the only available gaps in the wall of soldiers behind them in their retreat/flight from the enemy in front.
I suspect that the sarissa-phalanx was supposed to be able to swap half-files internally. They had half-file (and even quarter-file) NCOs, and obviously must have drilled the orders for “[from normal order] form synaspismos! (blue half-file forward)” and correspondingly “[from synaspismos] form normal order! (blue half-file back)” simply as a matter of having these two formations (in addition to loose order, with those transitions also drilled). It would have been a trivial addition to also drill the order “[from synaspismos] form alternate normal order! (yellow half-file back)”.
This would, of course, partially make a mess of the officer layout. Now you have the file-closer (ouragos) in the middle of the file, and the senior-ish NCOs, from lochagos to syntagmarch, are likewise buried in the middle of the formation, deaf and blind but in command. The former is theoretically solvable (the ouragos just moves to the back, never mind that it’s the “wrong” half-file and that now they are of different sizes), the latter is not, since the whole point is that the people in the front rank got exhausted. Perhaps the yellow half-file leader in “the syntagmarch file” gets to give commands in lieu of the syntagmarch?
In practice, this would most likely have required some breathing room. And a problem here is that such a lull in the fight (of the requisite length) is the least likely to be available exactly when you need it the most. Light-but-line and medium infantry might not be purposefully courteous about leaving you alone for long enough, but if you are …infantry-dominant over them, they reach exhaustion and fall back, allowing you enough time to swap half-files before the enemy infantry gathers their wits and becomes able to attack again. With Romans, even if you exhaust the hastati first, the Romans don’t need to wait for the hastati to reconstitute before they can apply pressure again, so the time-window to notice the lull in pressure, give the orders, and have them executed, is much tighter. If the principes arrive before your half-files have finished moving, you will be very unhappy. If fear of that outcome prevents you from using this capability, then it only exists on papyrus and the parade ground.
I’m going to argue it can be done… and actually works after a fashion. Why? Well how do pike and shot formations after Maurice of Nassau actually operate? In staggered two line formations built around 500 man battalions. If that is reminiscent of the later legion with cohorts in place of the maniples as the main tactical block… well it is not accidental.
Well you can argue that the pike blocks are going to be more vulnerable to having gaps between them than a legion… the rear ranks of the pike block can’t go after infiltrators as easily as legionnaires can by the time of our friend Maurice the battalion is a mixed force of pikemen and musketeers plus a small and decreasing contingent of halberd armed infantry that gradually disappears. So we are talking about mixed formations.
Lets get back to our Hellenistic armies. What is Pyrrhus doing at Asculum? He’s mixing up his Tarentine and Epirote taxeis with his Samnite, Bruttian and Laucani allies arguably trying to deal with the superior flexibility of his Roman opponents. He’s not the only one to do so, Antigonus Doson at Sellasia is doing the same interspersing between his phalanx taxeis and Illyrians.
So the question is how would the Hellenistic army involve long term to deal with the legion? I think we get a first hint at Antiochus IV arming infantry in the Roman fashion while still retaining the phalanx, I’m inclined to believe Antiochus was rearming his peltasts in this fashion which to me indicates a use other than the man supposedly slavishly copying the Romans, his pseudo-legionnaires are likely there to protect the phalanx.
Given how the Macedonian state is destroyed at Pydna, the Seleucids collapse into anarchy after Antiochus IV and the Ptolemies aren’t much better after Ptolemy VI we will never know of course. But I think the hints of what we actually see happening and knowledge of what did actually happen when the pike returned to the battlefield in the 14-15th century should be indicative of the way things might possibly have evolved.
Of course here we are left with the other minor issue that Macedonia died when her one field army died at Pydna. Had Perseus been up to snuff and crushed the Roman army in June 16th how many replacement armies could Rome produce?
There are a lot of military reasons give, but I wonder if psychology/philosophy plays a role.
The Roman and the Greek concept of bravery were, according to this, fundamentally different. Rome valued individual initiative and prowess, whereas the Greek concept was more collective. This means that it would be easier for a Roman to think in terms that make this battle work. The soldier would be willing to charge and kill, but crucially would also be willing to say “Gaius is behind me, and he’s a beast in battle” and “I’ve been ordered to fall back.” Both are really important.
When you’re in a fight–which is by definition chaotic and designed to break your will to continue on–you drop to the level of your training, which is based on a philosophy. If your philosophy is “Do your damnedest, but also give your superiors their due”, that’s what you’re going to do. If your philosophy is “Stand impassively while the world ends around you”, that’s what you’re going to do. Everything from training to armor to weapons is going to be built from that foundation up.
I think it’s possible to overstate the difference between Roman and Greek concepts of bravery. The single most important text in Greek culture was the Iliad, whose heroes very much emphasise personal aggression and skill-at-arms. Herodotus also mentions particularly distinguished fighters getting a “prize for valour” after battle — it’s not entirely clear what this involved, but it is evident that individual Greek soldiers could and did get recognition for their bravery. Obviously a Macedonian-style phalanx would need much more rigid formation discipline than a line of hoplites, let alone a Roman legion, but the Greeks certainly did have a concept of individual bravery and martial prowess.
Actually, the Romans would punish cowardice less severely than failure to retreat promptly on order. Courage was less important than discipline.
Rather than fight in multiple lines, the way for pikes to become more manoeuvrable is the Swiss pattern – smaller columns each with its fringe of missile troops, attacking in echelon. Try to flank the first and the second one coming up gets you (and so on for the third and fourth). Like Romans, the Swiss aimed to smash through rather than go for the phalanx grip.
I think the answer here is that they achieved their durability by other means which were mutually exclusive — they organised in tight, rigidly-officered formations and fought with long, overlapping pikes. Neither promote the same sort of flexibility of infra-battle line manoeuvre as the Roman formations, which were loose, comparatively unorganised bands of fairly mobile and self-sufficient warriors.
And this wasn’t some way in which they lost out and were going about things in a worse way, mind. The thing about Devereaux’s vivid description of a Roman legion in action is that it’s not being seen from the point of view of a Hellenistic phalangite, but rather from the perspective of some variety of auxiliary spearman.
I say this because the straight-forward process he outlines never actually worked on a pike phalanx — closing the gap was functionally impossible, so all the legionaries could really do was throw spears at the phalangites, the front ranks of whom, from a frontal angle, were almost entirely coated in bronze armour. They wore bronze greaves on their lower legs, bronze helmets on their heads, their upper legs and torsos were covered by bronze-faced shields, and their torsos were additionally protected by bronze cuirasses. For all that Devereaux points out the popularity of armour in Roman armies, Hellenistic soldiers were themselves exceptionally well-armoured for the frontal, pike’s length combat they practiced — and to circumvent that defensive strategy in close in-fighting combat, a Roman soldier would have to make their way through the pikes. Largely, they didn’t — not unless other circumstances disrupted the mutualistic strength of the formation.
And that’s one helpful perspectival frame: while all armies are cooperative creatures, a Hellenistic phalanx was a built to strain the very limits of battlefield mutualism — its whole structure was dedicated to carefully arranging soldiers in a perfect interlinked array that, when properly constructed, acted as a giant, unified force multiplier. Roman heavy infantry tactics, conversely, were deeply individualistic and expressed that in a very different method for increasing the combat potential of a group of men — namely, ingeniously allowing as many of them as possible fight intense, individual close combats on the line of battle, resulting in the benefits elaborated by Devereaux above.
I think there’s a variety of reasons, some of which could be overcome with *massive* reforms to the military system in a way that I think few states managed. I would compile the reasons given in other posts and my own thoughts as follows:
1. The Sarissa is the wrong weapon for it.
1a. Gaps:
The effectiveness of the front-swapping of the manipular quincunx relies of the large gaps between the maneuver units that allow the “spent” front units to move through without disrupting the formation. These gaps are not a problem for the gladius-wielders, as any enemy moving into a gap to flank will be faced with what’s basically still a solid front of soldiers, as with the short sword, you can turn on the spot and hit somebody to the side of the formation. A sarissa phalanx just can’t. The first five ranks of people can’t turn in any way, as their weapons force them to stay facing forward. The older hoplite phalanx and the medium infantry after the La Tene model could be reformed to do it because of the shorter weapons, but the sarissa is just too long.
1b. Morale:
As Prof. Deveraux points out often, the point of back ranks is to provide moral support (and replacement) for the front fighter. If we assume that the 8-rank hoplite phalanx represents a sort of optimal depth, that means you need 7 people behind the one at the front who does the fighting to give them the moral support to keep fighting. In a sarissa phalanx, the first *five* ranks are actively fighting. Under the above assumption, that means that a 8 man rank would have only 3 people providing the backbone, which would likely be considered too low to not cause the front to break. And increasing it to 2 rows of 12-rank phalanxes (5 fighting + 7 support = 12) would shorten your frontage, which would conflict with the idea of controlling the flanks.
2. The organization of the army is wrong
2a. The nature of light infantry:
In the Roman army, the velites are part of the legion, ethnically and organisationally not set apart from the more heavily armored troops. This means these soldiers know and trust each other, and have trained together. In a Macedonian army, the light infantry is likely to be of a completely different ethnicity, under a different commander and camping in a very different location compared to the phalangites. To get these two to train together to create the necessary coordination for screening a retreat without getting entangled would a large effort.
2b. Location of the officers:
The highest-ranked officers of a sarissa phalanx are placed at the very front. That is good for morale when in the phalanx formation, but for the coordinated retreat past the back line phalanx, it’s a problem. At the point where you need a clear line of command and the ability to quickly figure out where to go, the crucial people are likely to be wounded, demoralized or outright dead.
3. The philosophy of battle is wrong
3a. Andreia vs. Virtus:
Not only was the Greek military philosophy placing the emphasis on steadfastness, the idea of the phalanx is the distillation of that: It is very much meant to be the immovable anvil against which to hammer the enemy forces. Having the anvil be “malleable” by having this staggered rotation of units would seem philosophically the wrong approach. People would likely have argued that by so much as training this kind of demi-retreat might undermine the very steadfastness that was the strength of a phalanx.
3b. Gaps:
(Yes, again). The entire Macedonian army model was based on having and *maintaining* a continuous front of units even as parts of it moved at different speeds and in different directions. And to no surprise, given that they were based on the tradition of Alexander, who had effectively capitalized on gaps in the enemy line, and also had his share of scares from when his battle line developed gaps and threatened victory. Having a quincunx setup with large gaps (and they are essential for the rotation) would look like a massive blunder in the Alexander Battle philosophy.
The fact that we have in different times and places more mobile pike-wielding or pike-containing combined arms forces shows it’s not just the sarissa as equipment that’s the issue (although those pikes are all understandably shorter), but also other, organisational and philosophical matters that prevent this kind of adoption.
If the Romans were aware that their cavalry was a) generally mediocre and also b) drawn from the wealthier citizens, in a system which otherwise seems to equate wealth and status with responsibility, why wasn’t there more societal pressure on the equites to “shape up” and pull their weight?
What are you going to do to make them shape up? Tell your entire (largely urban) ruling class that they need to go live in the country and ride a horse a minimum of an hour or two every day and use a horse to get to and from their neighbors and to and from the city?
Good cavalry comes from riding pretty much all the time. Which you don’t do if you live in your townhouse in the city so you can visit your patron or the forum regularly and recieve visits from your clients.
The cavalry was still fighting, and presumably doing its best (I mean, the equites have a stronger incentive than anyone else to want to not lose the cavalry engagement), but it just wasn’t as good as the enemy cavalry, I assume because the lifestyle wasn’t there.
Also I gather from primary readings that the Romans tend to conceive of these things as “racial” i.e. “Roman cavalry just aren’t as good because they inherently aren’t as good at being cavalrymen.” Naturally this isn’t the *fault* of the cavalry it’s just how it is. Basically, I suspect that the Romans don’t believe the cavalry *can* shape up beyond a certain point or that deliberate action could forge Roman cavalry as good as e.g. Numidian cavalry.
But on the other hand, the Romans seem to have been generally willing to and capable of adopting new weapons, tactics, etc. from their neighbors and opponents. Romans might not have been natural sailors, but they built a navy that could contend with other naval powers of the time.
I mean, it clearly worked out for them overall, so I guess I can’t criticize too much! But it seems to me that you could turn that question around and ask why the equites get to spend their time hobnobbing with their clients in the forum rather than practicing their horsemanship. Other elites throughout history seem to have found time for it!
Because if you try and prosecute them for it, the judge, and both defending and prosecuting advocates were all of the equestrian order.
Funnily enough, calling the judge in either a criminal or civil trial a lazy layabout has, as far as I am aware, an unbroken record of causing you to lose the case.
Same reason presumably that other cultures wasted time on things other than horse archery, or not so rich farmers in other places wasted time not working to buy a good set of armor and fighting and practicing complex infantry maneuvers with as good of protection as possible. Something about the environment, culture and institutions they are operating in, etc. limits what they can do. Its possible strategically that pushing Roman cavalrymen to change out other activities for horsemanship doesn’t pay off, those meetings with clients are how business and politics function, which are valuable activities for the society in themselves. Living in densely packed countryside with lots of cities is likely a worse environment for horse riding than other places that used cavalry.
(“Wasted time” is meant in irony/sarcasm/saying something contradicted elsewhere for effect, if that isn’t clear.)
I have seen argued if Roman cavalry was actually that bad, some writing I’ve seen argues that it was fine, but infantry still got more attention/was more important. Which suggests a story where Roman cavalry was solid and did their jobs well, just not as well as other societies did. (Kind of like velites vs. other ranged weapon infantry, which romans also grabbed from other places as time went on.)
I have seen argued if Roman cavalry was actually that bad, some writing I’ve seen argues that it was fine, but infantry still got more attention/was more important. Which suggests a story where Roman cavalry was solid and did their jobs well, just not as well as other societies did. (Kind of like velites vs. other ranged weapon infantry, which romans also grabbed from other places as time went on.)
They seem to have done fine in the Early Republic against other Italian foes. They generally got hammered by Hannibal, but then Hannibal was a military genius commanding an exceptional army of long-service professionals, so I won’t judge the equites too harshly. They seem to have played a diminishing role after the Second Punic War, although I’m not sure how far that was because the Romans didn’t see their cavalry as being up to the job, and how far that was because the equestrians were increasingly needed in non-military roles instead.
Those elites found the time by emphasizing hawking & hunting as noble past-times. Activities which are far more common in the countryside than the city. Here the urban concentration of Roman wealth works against such activities becoming common.
And polo! Every time I watch it, I’m subconsciously waiting for one of the players to just go for the head of someone on the other team.
I think you can also overstate it a bit: Roman cavalry isn’t *great* but it usually does the work its supposed to. (except when it doesen’t of course)
The romans also do pretty continously try to improve their cavalry: The improvement just takes the form of getting allied cavalry.
Why would you think the equities were urban? The vast majority of the citizens and money were in the countryside.
A wealthy patriarch in his 60s might be in the countryside, but he isn’t going to war anyway. I don’t see what his grandsons would be doing in the countryside – they have careers to build, and the only voters who get counted are the ones that go to Rome to vote.
Equites weren’t the ones building political careers — you’re presumably thinking of Senators.
No, becoming a senator and being wealthy and living in the countryside are all things that happen toward the end of a career. Before you’re made a senator, you need to get at least a quaestorship. To get a quaestorship, you (usually, informally) need to be 30yo and have been a tribune. To get elected as tribune, you need to campaign and get votes, be a known face, have a patron, defend some legal cases pro-bono to show your wit, all things that can’t be done from the countryside.
Now you may say that while equites are rare and upper-class, they are still too numerous, not every one of those 1000 cavalrymen in a consular army is going to become a senator. And that’s true, because not everyone who campaigns becomes a tribune, and not every tribune becomes a quaestor and so on.
The equites generally had to go straight to quaestorship, because they were patricians. How generally depends on when, since wealthy plebians increased as time went on.
“No, becoming a senator and being wealthy and living in the countryside are all things that happen toward the end of a career.”
Where are you getting this idea from? The republican wealth qualification for an equestrian was 50,000 denarii of assets which would be 42 years salary for an infantryman. The census tax for an equestrian alone would be more then an infantryman would see in a year. You are not going to save up that kind of money working as an urban craftsmen. (when inflation increased the wages of urban craftsmen later, the wealth requirements went up as well). A few exceptional tradespeople could make that kind of money but that would be a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands you needed for the equestrian order. The only way to get tens of thousands of people that wealthy would be through owning more land then your family could personally farm.
Wealthy landowners don’t have to live on their land, because they’re not the ones doing the work.
Now you may say that while equites are rare and upper-class, they are still too numerous, not every one of those 1000 cavalrymen in a consular army is going to become a senator. And that’s true, because not everyone who campaigns becomes a tribune, and not every tribune becomes a quaestor and so on.
More importantly, most of those 1,000 cavalrymen aren’t going to *want* to become a tribune — we know from the sources that competition for offices was fierce, but nothing gives us any indication that it was at all close to 1,000-candidates-for-each-quaestorship-level fierce. So that leaves a large body of wealthy cavalrymen who don’t need to be in Rome for career reasons and can in fact devote their time to practising horsemanship and skill at arms if that’s what they want to do.
> The republican wealth qualification for an equestrian was 50,000 denarii of assets which would be 42 years salary for an infantryman.
I was thinking of the hypothetical 20yo grandsons of the hypothetical wealthy patriarch when I wrote that. They are wealthy in that they belong to a wealthy family and will get a horse, but the wealth isn’t quite *theirs* yet. If their plan is to just sit back and enjoy the wealth instead of advancing the family interests, some patriarchs might opt to tighten the purse strings.
> More importantly, most of those 1,000 cavalrymen aren’t going to *want* to become a tribune
I agree with your general comment that many won’t even try and those guys might get some riding practice if they were so inclined. Just want to point out that competition probably was better than 1000:1. For simplicity’s sake, if you bring in 1200 fresh young noblemen in all at once to staff your two consular armies, and they all do mandatory 10-year service stints with no casualties (haha), that’s, depending on the period, 20-200 quaestorships over 10 years that they could divvy up. Plus hundreds of military tribune appointments.
I was thinking of the hypothetical 20yo grandsons of the hypothetical wealthy patriarch when I wrote that. They are wealthy in that they belong to a wealthy family and will get a horse, but the wealth isn’t quite *theirs* yet. If their plan is to just sit back and enjoy the wealth instead of advancing the family interests, some patriarchs might opt to tighten the purse strings.
Training to serve in the army, and then actually serving, is very far from “sitting back and enjoying the wealth”.
“Wealthy landowners don’t have to live on their land, because they’re not the ones doing the work.”
At an extremely high level of wealth, sure, but that’s way above most mere equites. Think about enough land to be worked by ten or twenty people and a few capital investments like a threshing courtyard or millstone. Who is buying/hiring the labor or renting out the land? Who is negotiating rent of your plows and facilities to smallholders? Who is serving as cash rich middleman for all the smallholders who dont have currency to pay the census tax? Who is serving as advocate and mediator in the community as required by the customs of patronage? Even if it’s not farming it’s still going to be a lot of work.
These people are very rich by the standards of their society but that society is extremely poor compared to today. They dont have wealth comparable to a modern millionaire who could live comfortably off of dividends.
At an extremely high level of wealth, sure, but that’s way above most mere equites.
By the Late Republic, if not sooner, the property qualification for being an eques was 50,000 denarii. By way of comparison, legionaries in the principate were paid 225 denarii per year, meaning that one eques’ property could support over 220 soldiers for a year. I don’t know how exactly you’d define “an extremely high level of wealth”, but Roman equites were very wealthy by any reasonable definition of the term.
Think about enough land to be worked by ten or twenty people and a few capital investments like a threshing courtyard or millstone. Who is buying/hiring the labor or renting out the land? Who is negotiating rent of your plows and facilities to smallholders? Who is serving as cash rich middleman for all the smallholders who dont have currency to pay the census tax? Who is serving as advocate and mediator in the community as required by the customs of patronage? Even if it’s not farming it’s still going to be a lot of work.
You hire (or buy) a steward to do all that for you, which — as a man whose property could pay the salaries of over 220 soldiers for an entire year — you are easily rich enough to do.
Addtionally the Roman cavalry weren’t expected to be decisive. All they needed to do was secure the flanks; which they *were* capable of doing. When they needed specialised cavalry, they arranged to have turmae of auxiliary troops, who could do what they needed doing.
One of the problems with cavalry is mistakes are both easier to make, and harder to recover from (think The Greys at Waterloo, or the Light Brigade in the Crimea) If you have your socially important (and relatively small) class in a unit which, when it fails, takes catastrophic losses (which even a losing Legion rarely did) you are going to see to it that failure is much less likely.
So you hire professionals to take the job which is more “do or die” and let the folks you need to keep the social order functioning (not the top, not the bottom; but the class which does most of the middle-paying, and support roles) do something important, and glamorous, but not a role where they will die in large numbers keeping a minor victory from become a defeat.
Alternatively, why didn’t the equites dismount? If it was the infantry who were actually winning the battles, why did the aristocrats deprive themselves of that glory?
For one thing, they’d be less able to fulfil their function of guarding the flanks from enemy cavalry.
They’ve got socii for that.
The individual Roman cavalryman probably still has more opportunities to win glory than the individual Roman heavy infantryman. The cavalry is engaged during the entire battle instead of being switched out and they will be facing stronger enemies. Killing another aristocrat gets you more glory than killing an average enemy.
And if you want the glory of breaking through the enemy center, get yourself elected military tribune and command a legion at the center while it does that.
If you do win the battle, the mounted equites will be chasing down the defeated enemy, racking up an impressive kill count. That can be spun as glory, if needed.
If you don’t win the battle, being mounted means you can run away to find your glory some other day.
Also I guess you can carry a lot more of less glorious plunder, then the guys on foot. And be there to take it first.
The extra height from being on horseback probably makes it easier to see what’s going on and make yourself heard and visible? (Not to mention that whole “height == status” thing that humans seem to have.) And the extra speed probably helps when reacting to something you saw on the other side of the battlefield. For commanders, it might also make it easier to acquire spolia optima, although I don’t know how much that motivation actually mattered in common practice. But if the enemy leaders were also on horseback, the best way to go after them would be on horseback yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia_opima
It might also be that “being good in a pitched battle” isn’t the only thing that cavalry needs to achieve. If Roman equites were good scouts or foragers or harbingers or raiders, maybe it didn’t matter quite so much that they weren’t much good on the field of battle.
My understanding is that they made poor scouts as well, generally seeing themselves as above that sort of duty moreso than other cultures. I’m not sure when they shaped up in that regard.
I don’t know about the other functions.
They could be mediocre by cavalry standards while still being elite compared to the infantry.
Note that the infantry gets the majority of votes in the Comitia Centuriata, which selects the highest Roman magistrates. The equites get more voting power per person and get to vote first, but they don’t decide the elections. So on the battlefield they play an important but supporting role and in politics they get a special place of honor while remaining less powerful as a group – that fits. If the cavalry became too important on the battlefield, they might demand the larger share of the power, so it is politically in the interest of the infantry to keep them in a supporting role.
Note that it was just the knights of the public horse (1800 of them) who had extra voting weight. The knights of private horse (the rest of the 26 100 knights in 225) fought with knights of public horse but voted with first class foot.
Lucky for the Hellenistic armies that the Romans never thought to unleash dedicated units of Paeligni flag-throwers.
You do need supporting troops for this sort of fighting. A combined arms system/. flag throwers always need support from flag retrievers to follow up the cloth missiles. 🙂
At the risk of being a ridiculous pedant (but then again, when in Rome…), it occurs to me that tactics, operations, & strategy is more about how/where/why you *engage the enemy* rather than fight battles as such. You can definitely analyze things like the Berlin Airlift or the Cuban Missile Crisis tactically, operationally, & strategically, even though neither event involved battles
The supreme excellence is to conquer the enemy without fighting by airlifting coal until they give up.
Our good host is actually using here the Continental division of the military art into three subdisciplines, instead of the dual tactics-strategy distinction usual in American discourse.
I would, though, add the fourth level, which is actually the one he discusses in this article: “combat-technical”. The idea here is that everything below battalion level is combat technique. (Although an infantry company fighting in sparse enough formation and large enough area of responsibility may actually be using tactics already.) “Tactics” involves coordinating multiple service branches and utilising creativity to fight a single battle, usually at divisional level at the most. At company level and below, you mainly apply the combat doctrine of your weapons systems to the terrain and the enemy. “Operations” on the other hand, is the stuff that army corps and armies do: fighting a series of multiple battles in a wide area to cause a strategic-level effect.
For a citizen of a small country like me, national strategy is then essentially the same as theater-level strategy of a superpower. Sometimes, it may even tie to the operational concerns of superpowers and coalitions: for example, the Finnish decision to base a fighter wing and an infantry brigade in Lapland in the late 1970’s had – for the Soviet Leningrad Military District – an operational effect that using Finnish Lapland as a shortcut to flank the NATO forces in Norther Norway became considerably more difficult. (The limited amount of roads in Lapland limits the amount of troops that can be effectively concentrated there.) For Finland, though, this effect had a strategic value of decreasing likelihood that our sovereignity would be violated as the first move of a larger conflict.
About the Princeps: Do we know if the Princeps typically deliver victory by a second shock or by this point would they typically stay engaged for a bit before the enemy broke?
Additionally, how do longer battles work? I’ve seen some, although I don’t have any names to hand so perhaps I am simply misremembering, that supposedly lasted the better part of a day. Would that look like extended skirmishing before full heavy infantry contact? Or contact-break-contact?
I recall our host in the total generalship series discussing a general’s offering battle by morning or afternoon according to how confident they were: in a battle taking place late just a few hours before dusk the losing side could have nightfall cover for its routing soldiers. So at least for the period of this post maybe up to 4 hours could be a possible or expected range for the amount of time a battle could take, imo this seems more like a maximum and many battles could be over in one hour.
I have wondered about these longer battles too. I read Caeasar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars recently and he mentions such battles, so you aren’t totally imagining things. In the context of a badly outnumbered force holding fortifications (or simply holding naturally defensible ground), you might imagine a series of brief attacks over the course of a day at several hours.
In that context, the attackers would be able to retreat and regroup to launch another attack a couple hours later, because the defenders know they’re outnumbered and so will be reluctant to leave whatever strong position they’re holding (or if they do make a brief sally, they’ll pull back before the enemy can regroup). But I’m not sure this can explain all such reports of battles lasting many hours.
I’m speculating, but I’d imagine it’s a mix of the two.
Close combat with melee weapons just isn’t sustainable for very long before people start collapsing of exhaustion, and the ‘ammo’ supply of archers and javelin troops only carries you so far.
A long battle is, I would guess, going to be one with a lot of maneuver before a decisive clash, or it’s going to involve both sides clashing and running out of strength and energy without breaking the other’s line, then falling back a few dozen paces to rest, scream insults, and occasionally lob some spears at each other.
And honestly a fair amount of infantry contact may have involved prolonged periods of that too, both before and after rounds of more intense close-combat where one side actually closes and slams into the other’s line. With muscle-powered weapons and the reality that you can’t easily shoot “over” your own troops, that kind of scenario is sustainable for long periods… at least until someone invents gunpowder and being that close to the enemy means that every couple of minutes that bastard arquebusier shoots another one of your guys dead right through the breastplate.
The probable answer is that there wasn’t actually just one charge per line — a given line would have engaged in a drawn-out process of intermittent charges and skirmishing until they sufficiently exhausted themselves and their ammunition to merit a changing of the guard.
Caesar describes one long battle against another legionary force where his soldiers only exhausted their javelins after hours of combat, and having done so won the day with a sword charge; it seems quite probable that there were charges and clashes in some capacity throughout the fight, but long stints of time could have been and probably were spent in more tentative skirmishes and ranged exchanges.
re the hastati withdrawing, the triarii behind were probably another factor keeping them from fleeing further than they were supposed to.
yeah, I imagine there were probably times when the Hastati essentially broke entirely and then rallied before they could even leave the back of the line – the formation means the direct route away from a particularly terrifying enemy is to run straight into the Triarii, who are, after all, directly behind the Hastati. Even the moment of having to pause and look around for a way out that doesn’t involve running straight onto a spear is probably enough to calm someone who’s simply panicked. The Triarii ferry the Hastati back into shape (and if you’re truly running away, they can probably trip you up with a spear and tell you to get back into formation).
This sounds like a pretty solid plan to me. So how did Hannibal manage to beat the crap out of Roman army after Roman army? Did he have a cheat-code?
IIRC, they hadn’t met elephants much beforehand. Which to the Roman infantryman would ahve been a bit of a nasty shock, so…
His elephants all died in the crossing of the Alps didn’t they? And he didn’t receive anymore once he got bottled up in southern Italy. A decade later he returned to the Carthage and got to use elephants again but it ended up in defeat (Zama).
Ah, in that *particular* case, IIRC, the romans were handicapped by having possibly the *dumbest* ever general commanding them that marched straight into a trap so blatantly obvious that he was told bluntly by his subordinates “You are marching into a trap” and *still* did it.
By the time a more competent general took over, thye were handicapped instead by the losses the dumbarse had taken.
Most did, then some died in the next yearish/few months of campaigning.
The Romans had met and beaten elephants in the Pyrrhic and First Punic Wars, not that it made much difference, since Hannibal’s were mostly dead by the end of his first winter in Italy.
Well, he had Numidian cavalry, and that rarest of abilities, the ability to persuade the cavalry to break off pursuit and return to the main battle instead of looting the camp.
Aside from that, his battles in Italy all involved some clever tactic that’s still taught in military circles today.
Good system, but still in range of the combat systems of the time. Like how in many computer games everything seems overpowered on its own but can obviously be beaten, or how the best appliances/cars/computer parts/etc. have noticeable advantages but others can still do the job. This post described the ideal of how a Roman unit fights generic infantry in a battle line, but many other armies have their own improvements in the concept.
Hannibal in the three famous battles used ambushes and flanking to get an advantage, which work on Romans as well as anyone. I’m not as familiar with the other battles, which might be more normal. A mix of keeping morale up, good positioning, and other basics helps against Romans as much as anyone else, and better cavalry a lot of the time will win the fight the usual way cavalry does.
1. He was very good at setting up ambushes. In his great victories, there are always troops suddenly appearing in places the Romans didn’t expect them. (Even in Cannae – an open plane – he hid his best troops behind the wings of his own line and then threw them into the fight when his center retreated.)
2. Very good cavalry. Numidian javalin cavalry on the one hand and Gallic heavily armored cavalry on the other (+elephants at Trebia which he used against the Roman cavalry). While the Roman cavalry doesn’t win battles, it is important that they keep the flanks secure, and against Hannibal they didn’t manage that.
3. Capable subcommanders, which allowed him to carry out comparatively complex battle plans with multiple moving parts. (example: At Cannae, his left cavalry defeats the Roman cavalry, then runs over to the other side of the Roman line, drives of the cavalry there, then hits the Roman center from the rear – all while Hannibal is extremely busy at the center of his own line).
Note that the Romans break through Hannibal’s center at Trebia, but by that point he has won at the other parts of the battlefield so the Roman center retreats to the next town. At Cannae the Romans push Hannibal’s center back and it takes Hannibal’s personal leadership to prevent it from falling apart (he planned for that to happen so he placed himself at there at that most critical point of the battle). If you put Hannibal’s army under average leadership, it would probably loose against a Roman army most of the time.
With the big glaring exception of Cannae, Hannibal’s victories tend to fall into one of two exception cases: Ambush like lake Trasameine, or “gull the Romans into attacking you up a hill” like Silarius. In neither case, do the Romans really get their attrition heavy game on. If he couldn’t set that sort of thing up, he tended to refuse battle. While Fabius gets the nickname of “Cuncator”, Hannibal did that quite a lot when conditions weren’t favorable.
There are a lot of good answers, but I thing I can condense it to a single sentence:
By finding ways to not have his center be ground down by the heavy roman infantry, before his flanks could take the day.
I don’t know from my own knowledge if this summary is true, but it’s certainly what an insightful summary ought to look like.
Thank you. And from what I know it’s true. Hannibal usually won on the flanks, and denied the romans a victory in the center. Either by ambush (Trasimene), hitting the roman rear (Trebia), or by having his center fall back (Cannae).
Hannibal understood that different peoples had different systems and produced different armies. Nearly every other adversary the Romans faced at that scale had a well-honed understanding that the best possible anyone could have would look like the best possible army they could imagine themselves having. Hannibal didn’t interpret the features of the Roman army as failed attempts to field a perfect Phoenician army.
You mention the “Mediterranean omni-spear” with ~1.6m of reach, but in the battles we’re talking about, the legionnaires were going up against pike-wielding troops potentially with over 4m of reach, right? That would mean our legionnaires are needing to cover over 3m of ground to the range where their swords work, needing to slip past three, maybe four pike points to get there? 3m seems like an incredibly long distance when you need to move through a “hedge of pike-points” (as you put it earlier in the series).
I realize some of this is just my gut-level response, but I find it much easier to imagine a shield as an effective defense arrows and javelins (which are going to get deflected once and end up on the ground), vs. something that will allow you to push past multiple pike points at once.
Well, for a start, if you have to cover 3m, then the front rank of the enemy are holding their spears by the spearbutt like a moron, so any impact by *them* is more likely to result in the first rank of the enemy being forced to drop their spears by the forces involved.
You *actually* grip a spear at the mid-point, so it’s 1.5mof reach, and your own sword is 85-90cm, so it’s only 0.65-0.55cm of reach you’re giving up.
And Roman soldiers were both more hevily armoured *and* had shields large enough they could get their entire body behind. Meaning, well, where the fuck do you stab?
Not to mention that Pila are *heavy*, so the idea seems to be that the charge is quick enough to exploit gaps opened up by the pila barrage, and, well, while it’s exceptionalyl difficult for swordsmen to successfully penetrate a close-order pike formation, if they *do* pull it off, then the pikemen are going to take exceptionally heavy casualties.
I’m not assuming a 3m spear held at one end, I’m assuming a 5.8m pike held 1.6m from the rear, as specified in this post (and apparently backed up by the experiments of reeanactors): https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ia-heirs-of-alexander/
Fair, but it doesn’t change much that the combination of heavier armour and the shields makes it very difficult to find somewhere to stab reliably that can actually do much.
Also, there’s probably a good reason why it was the princeps that were considered the decisive troops- essentially, they’d been fighting boht the velites *and* the hastii by that point, so the chances of the phalanx being intact at that point is low, and once the phalanx starts breaking down, it is in serious trouble.
You *actually* grip a spear at the mid-point, so it’s 1.5mof reach, and your own sword is 85-90cm, so it’s only 0.65-0.55cm of reach you’re giving up.
No, you hold it about a cubit from the back, so you can brace it against your forearm for easier holding and also have most of the spear jutting out in front of you.
As I understand it, it’s a simpler factor:
The entirety of the Hellenist infantry wasn’t uniformly pikes (Sarissa) – they were only about half the line. While the Roman Legion just spams the same legionairre outfit for every unit.
Therefore, if your particular maniple gets stuck on the front of a phalanx, unable to overcome the thicket of spikes, the next maniple over might be stomping on the faces of some lighter infantry – and can soon come help you. Meanwhile the phalanx(es) can’t readily maneuver without breaking formation, so you don’t have the same worry.
Even if the next maniple (centuria) over is also facing the sarissa-phalanx, they can exploit the fact that the frontage of their rigid maneuver unit (the maniple) is much narrower than that of the taxis. One maniple actually engages, the other hangs back a dozen paces and says “neener neener”. If they get charged, that’s good for you, because that means the phalanx broke somewhere. If they do not get charged, then they will be able to move laterally to reinforce the grind. In other words, multiple maniples (cohorts) that are usually lined up next to each other can sequentially engage the same spot on the phalanx.
Well the pikeman at the front is hopefully too busy trying to extricate your pilum from his shield, if not his person, to effectively threaten you.
Then there’s leverage: the pikeman has his hands maybe 1m apart on the sarissa, giving him a 4:1 mechanical disadvantage compared to the legionary trying to push the point away with his shield, weapon or body. I expect the curve on the scutum is helpful here in making blows glance off to the side.
And the sarissa has to occupy all of the straight line between the pikeman’s hands and an exposed bit of roman. So there will be a sort of cone (frustrum?) of protection expanding behind the scutum with the vertex at the pikeman’s hands. If you peer just over the rim of the scutum so you can see the top half of the pikeman’s upper arms, it’s not going to be possible for them to hit you in the face.
And once you’re close enough, you are probably able to charge in faster than the pikeman can choke up on his weapon. So each sarissa gets maybe one chance to strike before the phalanx is within gladius-range.
Except that the number of points in play make pushing through a pike-hedge very difficult. For all their armour and large shields, the Romans were usually pushed back by an intact phalanx. Their advantage was that their formations allowed a good deal of give without making the line vulnerable – something not true of the Hellenistic phalanx.
Much later, in the Scottish civil war of the 17th century, Irish sword and buckler troops could defeat pikes – but only by luring them on to unfavourable ground
I wonder if the Roman infantry could dive under the pikes and strike upward with the gladius.
You are correct. Where legions come up against a phalanx head-on without some external circumstance swinging it in their favour (i.e. the phalanx being broken up by bad terrain), they generally lose badly or get horribly mauled fighting to a standstill while some other action on the battlefield decides the matter.
The difference is the Roman army is very nearly all legions, whereas the Hellenistic army only has a comparatively small proportion of phalangites. So while one part of the Roman line gets chewed up with sarissae, the rest is engaging with infantry it can soundly beat.
This sounds closer to a “chaotic melee” than to “disciplined” formation combat or to the “make an internal combustion engine out of men” of renaissance combat.
I suppose the difference from a movie-style melee is that unengaged ranks stay in order to allow filling “holes” and letting winded friendlies retreat while not letting enemies filter past.
Team sports seems the analogy to use. People move around a lot, looks random at first, but if you know what to look for it all has a purpose.
Although the “Rome” TV series gets a lot of criticism the opening scene at the Battle of Alesia is very like this. With Vorenus counting out the timing, and yelling at Pullo to get back into line.
In one of the podcasts Bret was on, he specifically called out that scene as a plausible interpretation of what a small section of Roman battle might have looked like.
The spacing is a bit tight and they lack pila, but it is better than par, for certain.
It’s not Hollywood-level chaotic because the individual maniples of heavy infantry still stay in fairly tight blocks that can shift to shield each other. There’s no situation where Romans and their enemies are charging PAST each other and interpenetrating to create a totally chaotic situation where any person might be hit from any direction at any time.
Hollywood sets up fights like that because it makes it easier to pick camera angles and focus in on Our Protagonist heroically dueling enemies one at a time while also making it easy for the plot to explain how sacrificial characters can get dramatically stabbed in the back or something. In practice, it would never work.
In a melee that crazy, I’m pretty sure everyone immediately freaks out and runs away and/or gets stabbed in the back, because everyone has an armed enemy behind them. Which is the one condition that ancient and medieval infantry formations were most consistently designed to avoid. Because you can’t really ask soldiers to keep fighting while an enemy with a big sharp weapon is standing literally 10-15 feet behind them. At that point, common sense demands that you run for your life, before said enemy starts paying attention and takes advantage of the situation.
The other reason for the “Hollywood melee” is that you can arrange it so that Team Left and Team Right are each charging in their own lanes, so nobody actually slams into another performer (except as a planned and rehearsed stunt, of course). Note how that wide shot is always parallel to the line of contact: the lanes would be obvious if you shot it from above, or from behind one army or the other, but from the side, they’re hidden and it looks chaotic.
Using gamer terminology, I get the feeling the answer to “why wasn’t the meta just copying rome’s army comp” is going to be “they suck at macro”.
I suspect it may be more accurate to flip that around. The Roman army comp was *enabled* by their exceptionally good macro (and most other mediterranean powers just couldn’t compete in that meta).
Was the Roman army composition actually strictly better man-for-man than the Phalanx, or was it just more adapted for a society that had better armor and worse cavalry?
Polybius says the Antigonid (Hellenistic Macedonian) army had the best soldiers, man-for-man, in the Mediterranean. Which is not the same as saying modern historians agree, or for that matter disagree, but it’s at least a roughly contemporary estimate of quality.
Presumably the same for “why not copy (other successful army)” (Macedonians, Horse archers, Assyrians, Qin, etc.): A mix of “It takes time to adapt to the new system”, “Different circumstances make copying impossibvle/not as effective in other places”, “people don’t know ahead of time that certain systems will be better”: Followed by “They do copy it, or take elements from it and adapt to a situation.”
Roman system requires a culture where people are willing to spend lots of time in an army, be trained, have the ability and willingness to get the right equipment (Wealthier, or willing to spend a larger fraction of wealth on equipment), have leadership/organization who can command the soldiers appropriately. Lots of other cultures seemed to lack these things, or apply them in a different way, like Macedonian based armies applying training and soldier skills to phalanx fighting instead.
As always, quantity has a quality of its own (Rome had both).
Other armies did try to copy Rome’s army comp, the results were mediocre. The fighting style and gear isn’t that much different from the armored greek medium infantry. The hard part is copying the society that produces the soldiers and fighting units.
Rome’s army is a reflection of Rome’s society. That extremely expensive infantry kit required having a society that was willing to chip in to pay for it. That constant mobilization required having people who would willingly fork over the annual census tax. The professional officers required a culture that compelled the wealthy to serve the state. And this comes with tradeoffs, if you are mobilizing society to well equipped heavy infantry those are resources that aren’t going to nobility who can give you shock cavalry.
Bertrand Russel gives a very good discussion of those tradeoffs when he considers Sparta in his “History of Western Philosophy”: Sparta was able to offer physical security to its citizens at the proce of complete devotion to the state, bht not much more. Rome was also quite centered on warfare, and the Republican Rome didn’t produce any philosophy or science worth mentioning before Cicero and Cato, and even they were just rehashing Greek ideas into Latin language, just like Plautius did for Greek plays in theater. Even the architecture was quite modest compared to cities of corresponding size elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
So, the tradeoffs were there, and they were visible to anyone visiting Rome.
Plautus and the era of simply translating Greek new comedies was 150 years before Cicero. The Latin speaking world at the time was much smaller then the Greek speaking world. The era where we dont have original latin work is also just the era where there isn’t any surviving writing. It’s like if you looked at 7th century greece and concluded they had no art.
There isn’t any surviving writing for several reasons:
* the Latin of the early and middle Republic was so different from the classical ideal that it wasn’t fit to use as a model.
* there probably wasn’t that much good literature to copy. (The librarians of the late antiquity had a good taste.)
* the Romans of the late Republic and Principate themselves considered their own earlier culture uncouth and archaic.
Of course, Rome probably did have a rich oral culture and beginnings of a written culture, and especially a rich system of religious rituals, but they were not up to the standards of older civilizations. Otherwise, the Romans wouldn’t have forsaken that heritage pretty completely. (Varro and other antiquarians had hard time deciphering what had already been lost.)
This shows very well that before the late Republic, culture and arts were not the focus of Roman society. The military and politics were the way for a Roman to make a name for himself.
Just very little from that era survives, in general. The Twelve Tables have had to be reconstructed from fragments, and those are things that were inscribed on stone.
A lot of early Roman literature was actually writen in Greek. E.g., Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian, composed his works in Greek rather than Latin.
Bertrand Russel gives a very good discussion of those tradeoffs when he considers Sparta in his “History of Western Philosophy”:
Bertrand Russel’s “History of Western Philosophy” was originally published in 1946. So, I am pretty sure its description of Sparta is outdated by now.
For example, I remember that he had described the Spartan state as ‘stable’ and producing ‘invincible warriors’*. I have the Dutch translation so I do not know the original terms.
*I had the impression that, currently, modern military historians regarded the Spartan military as only marginally better than those of other Greek Polis.
That gets complicated. Our gracious host certainly does, and it may be that there are others as well, but there’s some ideologically motivated reasoning going on there.
The thing is that you can subdivide Sparta’s military history into three periods–pre-Peloponnesian Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars, and post-Peloponnesian Wars. The pre-Peloponnesian Wars period is where Sparta gets its rep for being really good at war, and while their record during the Peloponnesian Wars isn’t as good it’s still quite respectable.
Their post-Peloponnesian Wars record, however, is absolutely miserable.
There was another post by our host about how armies mimic the social structure of their societies. I think it was about horse archers – arguably the strongest comp, but impossible to adopt for a society of farmers. Presumably if you want your army to be “the highest quality heavy infantry ever”, you need:
* a society where the infantry is prestigious enough for elites to serve in it (this alone explains why most societies try to win with heavy cavalry imo)
* a population that can afford all that heavy infantry kit
* a political structure that makes it possible for generals to actually force those (wealthy?) infantrymen to carry all their kit. IIRC that was called out as the problem in Greece; polemarchs being unable to conduct sieges because you don’t get to stay a polemarch for long if you force your citizen-soldiers too much and make yourself unpopular
That makes sense, but it pushes the amount of armor needed even higher. Because if they’re not trading their armor around, they need enough armor to equip the entire conscript-able population, and that’s not counting the stuff people who have passed the age of conscription are holding onto for their sons.
@guy I’m guessing you meant this to be in our discussion elsewhere?
Oh yeah, the Romans need much more armour than the Hellenistic phalanxes or any other army where equipment was issued by the state. In terms of minimum resource usage it is inefficient, but the Romans turn this into an advantage because their military is more resilient to loss.
As @Simon_Jester and others have noted elsewhere, the losing side in a battle also loses the armour worn by their casualties. You (the state) not only have to recruit more soldiers, you’ve got to equip them as well.
In a Hellenistic army, if there are twenty thousand phalangites and shock cavalry in the standing army, there’s only a *need* for twenty thousand sets of armour. (And swords, they’re expensive too.) So the natural tendency is not to buy much more than that. Then the state gets into a war, the army gets crushed with massive casualties, and all of a sudden you need ten thousand more sets of armour in a hurry. Most likely you have iron and other materials on hand and plenty of smiths who can turn out spearheads and knives, but armour and swords need specialist skills. Uh-oh.
The Roman system is wasteful because (almost) every potential legionary has armour and weapons, in total many tens of thousands of sets, even though Rome most of the time only recruits two legions at a time. But if the Romans get massively defeated, for instance as happened at Cannae, the new army can be recruited and everyone is already fully equipped.
Romans are really good at losing battles and just coming back for more, and most opponents in this time frame can’t.
“The Roman system is wasteful because (almost) every potential legionary has armour and weapons, in total many tens of thousands of sets, even though Rome most of the time only recruits two legions at a time.”
I believe they often did raise more than that. But even when they didn’t, the Roman system would seem to have been wasteful only in the sense that all reserves are wasteful.
I guess my question is how is it that Rome’s total armor production capacity is so much higher that they can support mail for their army and reserves and the Hellenistic armies can’t mail up even their standing army.
The Roman army is crowdsourced. People were equipping their own families, not just the roman citizens but the socii citizens as well. You are gonna be motivated to dig deep if it’s your own son’s life on the line. Everyone knows chainmail has a long lead time so they are buying it in advance and keeping a permanent military-artisan complex going. There isn’t much room for corruption, the blacksmith needs to deliver an individual item of chainmail in working order to get paid and there is no administration to skim off the top.
The Hellenistic system has some crowd sourcing but it also has an element of taxes being paid by a native underclass to support a foreign soldiering class. There is every incentive in that system to skimp, to skim off the top. Why should I care if some greek is going to fight without chain mail, my children is hungry and that greek’s children are well fed!
Wrong place, sorry.
The Late Medieval infantry revolution relied on different social structures, though. There was urbanization, but the soldiers were still commoners and not elites; of course the best pike of the Renaissance came from republics, namely, Switzerland, but 16th-cenutry absolute and absolute-ish monarchies were building infantry-centric armies like the tercios.
The elites were not serving in those armies in the same way the commoners were – they were officers, held to be a class apart from the plebs. The role of the officer was to boss around the common soldiery rather than to serve with it; that role remained the same well into the modern era, to the point that there’s a lot of culture that gets rediscovered on Tumblr and other parts of social media periodically about just how far apart the officer and enlisted classes were, on land and at sea.
One of the strengths of the tercios was the gentleman-ranker – the hidalgo (“son of somebody”) trailing his pike. Also, the aristocratic junior officers of all European armies were expected to display courage – by standing out the front, leading the charge and so on. Hence they usually suffered disproportionate casualties.
Urban pike etc are “commoners” in the sense of “not legally nobles” – but there are significant differences between “wealthy citizen burghers with militia obligations and the means to pay for equipment” and “peasant #43”. Late medieval infantry forces are the former, not the latter.
Not particularly relevant to this post, but I quite liked your kit reviews. Would a metal lamellar tube-and-yoke style cuirass and kettle helm, with a two-handed glaive and backup dagger for weapons, make sense for a “middle infantry” flank guard in an expansionist legion fighting mostly knightly armies? Asking for a larp.
Answer will most likely be the same as “are the knights dismounted or mounted?”
Similar equipment was used by 15th C English billmen, brigandine and bill (halberd type polearm); and by Japanese ashigaru in the early 15th C, lamellar armour and naginata (long bladed polearm). Both were used as support troops for more heavily armoured infantry (dismounted knights and samurai respectively).
Against mounted knights, admittedly unlikely for LARP, the infantry probably want a longer weapon. Some medieval infantry (Almughavars, Frisians) carried short pikes, Japanese ashigaru largely re-armed with short pikes although not necessarily because of cavalry threat.
Thanks! I think horses are rare in the setting, and obviously not present at the larp itself, so that makes sense! Ashigaru in particular seem an excellent comparison for the gear I’m putting together.
You might also look at some of equipment changes of the Byzantines c. 600 ce.
Question: How did the Romans get so much armor for their heavy infantry? I mean, they’re loading up on mail and the Hellenistic phalanx is using textile armor for most of their ranks. They’re conscripting it instead of paying for it out of the treasury, but that means a full mail loadout is affordable for a decent percentage of the infantry class.
Also, out of vague curiosity, did Romans tend to keep armor in the family or did the people who’d just gotten back from service sell their gear off to the newly-conscripted?
Given that at least once they had to abandon an iron mine because they’d denuded the landscape of trees for fuel to smelt iron, I think they just had *that* many blacksmiths.
That just pushes the question back a stage — why were the Romans apparently able to support so many more blacksmiths than comparable societies?
@guy, they got some much armour because they wanted heavily armoured infantry and had the money to pay for it. As discussed in other comment threads, it’s what their society and culture chooses to put resources into.
As for keeping in the family, I’d say almost always. Doing one term of service didn’t mean you were immune from future conscription, so you would want to keep your gear. This wouldn’t stop people doing a favour for their friends if it was really necessary, but remember that part of the conscription process is classifying potential recruits by how much wealth they have and therefore what equipment they can be expected to own.
I think I can chip in here: During conscription, I had a pair of superb leather underpants. They were lamb or deer skin, nice and smooth, and when worn on top of woollen underpants, right under the uniform, they kept the wind out, and you were comfortable even at -35 degrees Celsius. (In fact, they are unnecessary if the temperature is much above -20, making you a bit too warm.) Those pants had been bought by my grandfather after WWII. And they had been used by my uncle and father during their conscription. After me, my brother used them. And because they are well made, I still have them, because it was decided after my brother’s conscription that I should have them, having a more demanding war-time duty as a reservist. They are still packed in the rucksack where I keep my kit for mobilisation.
I think that those pants have a good chance of serving my kids during their conscription, unless a war comes first.
So, while those leather underpants are not armor, this shows how you actually treat a priced artifact useful for military service.
I mean this with the greatest respect, but I don’t think it is even theoretically possible to have a more Finnish story than that one.
One possible part of the explanation is “virtuous cycle.”
As we see in Dr. Devereaux’s series on pre-industrial iron production, the main limit on a society’s metal supply is its ability to harvest the sheer amount of timber it takes to smelt the ore into metal in the first place. Capturing already-refined metal is thus a fairly effective way to increase production, at least in the short term, even if the metal in question isn’t in a form your soldiers can use directly.
If your army loses a battle, a lot of your soldiers are killed, and their armor and weapons are looted by the enemy and go to arm the enemy’s society. Even the survivors may well be captured (same result) or forced to discard their bulky armor to flee (and, conveniently, to give the enemy a valuable and heavy prize to distract them from chasing you).
Conversely, if your army wins a battle, you control the battlefield. While some of your soldiers are dead, you keep control of all the good weapons, and can loot the enemy’s kit.
If you have a system for winning battles fairly consistently, you have a system for preserving your own supply of good body armor, relative to your opponent. Over time, the flow of looted metal armor into your society will exceed the flow of armor lost. Even armor your soldiers can’t wear personally can at least be used as scrap iron to make more armor for your soldiers.
> “virtuous cycle.”
Hah! 🙂
“Question: How did the Romans get so much armor for their heavy infantry?”
Broad social mobilization.
I believe there was a good source of iron ore in Etruria, not very far from Rome.
“Now of course, Hellenistic armies don’t have a forward-thrown light infantry screen; their light infantry is deployed on the flanks”
Hmm. I realize that we’re talking 300+ years of history across multiple different nations, but how common was this? I get the impression that Hellenistic armies did indeed stick light infantry skirmishers out front of their phalanx in a similar fashion to the Velites, just they’d be Rhodian slingers or the like.
I am mostly going off Bar-Kochva here, who says in “Judas Maccabeus” p. 6 that “light infantry who served as ‘skirmishers’ were deployed in the centre in front of the heavy foot soldiers,” and attributes this to Hellenistic armies in general, not just the Seleucids. But obviously he’s just one guy. p. 24-25 he says that the intent of the Hellenistic skirmishers was pretty much the same, to break up the formation of the enemy phalanx in the ideal case, but in practice both sides would have skirmishers, which would result in the skirmishers probably spending their limited “ammo” on each other. Then they’d withdraw behind the phalanx.
So the response to the question of how to beat a roman army if you had to is to stack your best units against a flank and to roll over the army or to ride around/ambush it with cavalry (hoping the center doesn’t collapse before)? If I remember that’s what hannibal did every battle and he never break a legion upfront in a head to head match up. I assume no special advantage like massive numeriacal superiority or the roman commander blunder by beeing out of logistic but you are not.
You mean basically do what the Hellenistic armies did, but make sure that your cavalry actually stays in the battle instead of haring off chasing defeated enemies?
A commander or officer with good battlefield awareness could potentially counter that with the reserves (turn the third line around/shift it to the broken flank). Difficult, but not impossible.
The examples I know of are from later eras: Aurelian saw his cavalry struggling at the battle of Emesa and detached infantry from the rear lines to help them. And Ceasar did a planned version of this tactic at Pharsalus, hiding some cohorts of infantry behind his cavalry to then surprise the enemy cavalry when they thought they had won.
Dr. Devereaux, and other commentators:
I think it’s rather overstated, and not particularly accurate, to assert that Rome’s cavalry wasn’t very good.
The historical basis of this assessment seems to be that Hannibal routed the Roman cavalry in his three great victories over the Romans during the Second Punic War. Since the defeat of the Roman cavalry led to the defeat of their armies in these battles, Roman cavalry was therefore deficient in battle.
At a surface level, this may seem to be a sensible assertion but I don’t think it bears deeper scrutiny.
For starters, I think it’s indicative that Hannibal’s battle plans for defeating Roman legions hinged on first defeating their cavalry. He took pains and special cares to ensure that he outnumbered the Roman cavalry through the recruiting of Numidian and Gallic cavalry for his army, peoples traditionally well regarded as skillful cavalry. If the Roman cavalry was somehow weak or deficient in battlefield performance, I don’t think Hannibal would have put special effort into ensuring a cavalry superiority. When he didn’t have a marked superiority in cavalry, as at Zama, Hannibal was much less successful.
Secondly, if you look outside of those famous defeats at the hands of Hannibal, the Roman cavalry’s record suddenly becomes much better! The Roman cavalry routs the Seleucid cataphracts at Magnesia. During the Pyrrhic War, Roman cavalry fought head to head with Pyrrhus’s Macedonians and Thessalians, famed cavalrymen, and by all accounts were able to match them on even terms. During the Gallic War of 225 BC, Roman cavalry routed Gallic cavalry at Telamon, and later routed an entire Gallic army on their own at Clastidium in 222 BC! For cavalry alone to rout an army of infantry in Mediterranean Antiquity is quite a rare feat. During the Second Punic War, Roman cavalry defeated Carthaginian cavalry at the Metaurus in 207, at the Great Plains in 203 BC, and finally at Zama in 202.
So I really don’t think their battlefield record merits the assertion that they were deficient or weak in combat performance. They weren’t all that good at general cavalry duties, reconnaissance and screening and all that business, but that’s really no surprise for a force socially made up of the kind of arrogant aristocrats who, during the Middle Ages, would become known as knights. Proficiency in combat and deficiency in general non-combat military duties is par for the course for the kind of people the Roman equites were.
Another point to consider is this: Among the Hellenistic armies, the cavalry could fail and the battle still be won if the phalanx prevailed. At Raphia for instance, although the Ptolemaic cavalry failed, the Ptolemaic phalanx won the day regardless. But I can hardly think of a Roman battle in which their cavalry lost and their infantry subsequently saved the day. The outcomes are usually either that the Roman cavalry prevails, and the Romans win, or the Roman cavalry loses, and the legions are subsequently outflanked and routed. Which suggests to me a military system very much reliant on having dependable flank support from strong cavalry forces! This is further supported by the Roman tendency to demand large amounts of cavalry from their allies, which would suggest a great demand for cavalry in Rome’s wars.
The role of the Roman cavalry in the Roman theory of victory as far as I can tell was to directly attack the enemy’s cavalry and rout them. If they are successful in this, then the ideal is to wheel inwards and destroy the enemy’s infantry from the flanks. But if they only succeed in holding the enemy’s cavalry and neutralizing them, well that’s okay too because the Romans trusted their infantry could prevail in front to front combat as well.
I also think it’s untrue that the Romans didn’t value or regard their cavalry as a worthy and formidable military asset. Roman society was pretty aristocratically oriented in general, and the cavalry was where the aristocracy served in the Republic’s armies. Most of the consuls would have been cavalrymen in their youth, and many of them also engage in combat personally with the cavalry (Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Scipio the Elder, Paullus the Elder, Gaius Atilius Regulus, for some examples). Livy is full of instances of heroic Roman cavalrymen fighting single combats with enemy champions to inspire the legions, which I think attests to a social glorification of the cavalry in the narratives of Roman culture, and that they did not regard themselves as inferiors in arms or courage to anyone, on horseback or otherwise.
My source in this is Jeremiah McCall’s work on the Roman cavalry, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic, which I think is a very effective reassessment of the Roman cavalry’s military role, record, and social significance.
To some extent, it hardly matters whether the Roman equites were actually adequate cavalry either as individuals or due to deficiency of their weaponry, if they kept losing battles. Or, to be more precise, if they were the part of the Roman tactical system least likely to prove decisive and “least unlikely” to falter. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and while the overall ‘chain’ of the legion was quite strong, the equites may well have been merely average and seemed weak by comparison.
…
We can imagine three separate statements:
“Roman cavalry was objectively inferior, man-for-man.”
“The Romans thought their own cavalry was inferior, man-for-man.”
“The Romans knew that when their armies were defeated, it was usually because the enemy had won a cavalry engagement, so they sought to bolster their own limited numbers of cavalry with plenty of socii and other allies, that is to say, they prepared for the idea that their own cavalry, by itself, would not suffice.”
These are all different, and in principle any one of them can be true without the others being true.
…
Furthermore, there is the observation that nearly every culture glorifies the specific form of warfare its elites engage in. Homeric champions fought on foot or from a chariot; Homer duly glorifies that kind of combat. Roman elites fought on horseback except the specific individual Romans of the highest-ranking families who were in command of entire legions; Roman authors will inevitably praise the equites who do well and emphasize (or even exaggerate, in theory) their impact on the battles being fought.
And they will inevitably minimize any implication that the Roman equites are individually inadequate on the field of battle, if there is (hypothetically) any ground for such an accusation in the first place (there may not be).
I’m thinking about the U.S. military. The most glorious positions (or at least those most likely to impress a civilian) are special forces and fighter pilot. And those are, to the best of my knowledge, the only places where you have a commissioned officer shooting people.
Clearly you didn’t come from a marine family.
The Finnish military has an interesting parallel: the infantry platoon leader is a rather prestigious position, as that is the typical role of a reserve officer, and reserve officers make up a disproportionate part of the upper class and upper middle class males. And a platoon leader should be, ideally, if not the most capable fighter of his platoon both in physical and intellectual sense, at least on par with his men as a fighter, while being their superior in intellect and mental stability. The platoon leader is, after all, the one who rises first to make an assault, and draws the platoon forward by going in the point, if the attack is faltering.
And, to be frank, knowing you are able to kill at least as efficiently as the next man, is part of getting the self-confidence required for mental stability.
those are, to the best of my knowledge, the only places where you have a commissioned officer shooting people.
A platoon commander in a normal infantry battalion is expected to shoot people if necessary, though ideally he should be spending most of his time commanding his platoon, rather than getting sucked in to acting as a rifleman and losing his grip on the bigger picture.
As for special forces, this varies hugely from unit to unit, but in some at least it’s very rare for officers to be kicking in doors etc. The basic unit is the patrol which is 4-6 soldiers led by a senior NCO – officers are planners and commanders, not combat leaders.
That depends on the army – the IDF believes in personal example and charismatic leadership, and therefore expects officers to be the first to kick down the door.
And separately, tank doctrine everywhere that I know of has the platoon leader’s tank do a lot of shooting. NATO doctrine is that the platoon leader and the platoon sergeant’s tanks lead while the other two tanks act as wingmen; the IDF has two-tank platoons these days, so the NCO-led tank is wingman to the officer-led tank.
I suppose with tanks one could be very pedantic and say, yes, the platoon leader’s tank does a lot of shooting, but the platoon leader *himself* doesn’t; his gunner does. (And maybe his loader does a bit too.) The platoon leader is commanding his tank and his platoon, he isn’t actually pulling a trigger.
With the Hastati, Principes rotation, is there any evidence of the Hastati being rotated back in again if the fighting goes on for a long while or does it always seem to be a one way progression of Hastati -> Principes -> Triarii?
> when you are about twenty meters out from the enemy line, a storm of those heavy pila come in, thick and all at once. Each one masses around 1.3kg (just short of three pounds) so even if the tip doesn’t bite, one of these things clanging off of armor or a shield is going to hurt,
Do we have some sense of how likely is is that a pilum will stick in a shield, in battlefield conditions? The tests I’ve seen in videos make it seem fairly likely, and that if it does, even if the person holding the shield isn’t injured, the shield becomes mostly useless for advancing or maneuvering (but still useful when standing still or retreating). And if the front ranks of a phalanx lack shields, I doubt that they’d do very well when heavy infantry close to sword-range. (Although the Macedonian front rank seems to have had heavier armor than normal.)
I’d imagine this is part of the reason why Roman heavy infantry had a body-size shield that could be held out at arms-length, and wore heavy armor?
If we’re in a Macedonian phalanx, in one of the front ranks that gets to use our sarissas, what happens when an enemy gets underneath our point? Let’s say we’re in the front row, and some pesky Roman manages to get their scutum underneath our sarissa and pushes up and charges in. Our sarissa-point is in the air, we don’t have a lot of leverage, so what next? Try to maneuver it to one side and stab someone in the Roman back rank, and hope that the 4 ranks behind us have better luck at stopping the guy coming right at us?
(Is this what the Roman testudo formation developed from? Bulldoze past the spear-points and start killing the column leaders at the front?)
As I understand it, the Testudo could barely move. It wasn’t a formation you charged at enemies with. Instead, it was a formation that was principally designed for sieges, specifically protecting the guys making a ramp up to the enemy fortification so you could climb up and attack.
I’d drop the Sarissa and try my luck with the sword.
Well, a big part of it IS “hope the four ranks behind you have better luck stopping the guy.” He may have wrestled past your pike, but he’s going to have a hard time wrestling and prying his way past 3-4 pikes all at once. Especially since if he’s using his shield to lever one or two of them out of the way, it’s not ideally positioned to block the next ones. He may also potentially have to deal with a pike or two from the neighboring file, besides.
And, as Adam notes, if you really feel like this isn’t working out for you, you drop your pike and draw your sword and hope for the best.
I’m not sure how much “wrestling” there needs to be? The sarissa tips are going to be spaced roughly as far apart as the rows in the phalanx, so no legionnaire will be dealing with more than 2 rows of tips at once. Obviously the lead legionnaires aren’t going to move their shields completely out of position, but if the horizontal single grip of the scutum leads toward an upward-sloping face anyway, having the front line charge in and keep their heads down seems like it would deflect the tips upward? We’ve got two hands on our pike, and they’ve only got one on their scutum, but the leverage seems like it would be awful at that distance. Maybe we can puncture their shields, though?
Attacks from the side may slow them down, but if the legionnaires stay close enough to keep the edges of their shields together, that would cut down on openings for side-attacks. And that’s the front part of a testudo right there, which is why I brought it up. Also, I have to wonder, how much maneuvering for side attacks would be possible for people not in the front rows of the phalanx? How tight are we, and how much visibility do we have? Do rows 3-5 just make repetitive stabby motions in the gaps between columns?
If we’re in the lead row of the phalanx, and the front line of hastati make it past our tips and are working their way past the next four, yeah, at some point we drop our pikes and draw our swords. Depends on how fast they’re closing. (Does the 2nd row drop their pikes, too?) And maybe there’s some sword-and-shield fighting; the legionnaires are better kitted out for it, but our comrades in rows 4-6 may still be able to use their pikes. But then the hastati back away, and we don’t have our pikes any more, and now the principes show up. (Maybe our rear rows pass their pikes forward?)
Plutarch says that the Paeligini and Marrucinians “rushed upon the strokes that met them, and a certain death”.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0003%3Achapter%3D20
But Livy says that only 100 Romans were killed which doesn’t sound like “certain death”
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0168%3Abook%3D44%3Achapter%3D42
While the casualties were worst among the Paeligini, they had been fighting other troops before the sarissa phalanx and seemed to have charged in poor order.
I wonder if everyone might not be overstating the difficulty of the approach and under appreciating the danger close contact. In the approach there are a lot of pikes to deflect but the leverage does not favor the pikeman. The Paeligini seem to have done this successfully to get their standard. But then the phalanx does not collapse and the Paeligini withdraw. Close to the phalanx you’ve got a spearhead or two to your right and guys with xiphoses in front of you and to your left. The guys with xiphos have 10 spare ranks of pikemen behind them so them dropping their pikes doesn’t remove the pike barrier, it just moves it back slightly. The guy with a xiphos to your left might not have a legionary in front of him to keep him distracted and he is an officer with the best armor and experience. If you kill him then so long as morale holds you’ve just got the same problem a rank farther back. And they’ve got the enmomotarchs and hemilochites at every quarter so even if the lead officer falls and there is a cascading failure of the non officers you have natural rally points. The subofficer stands his ground with a xiphos and the guys behind him need to back him up. The pikes by themselves aren’t harmless, just like how arrows aren’t harmless to well armored troops, but the real danger seems to be that they force close quarter combat under adverse conditions.
So when the writers are saying that the sarissa wall is very resilient from the front, it’s not that it’s mechanically resilient because the pikes are an unstoppable menace. It’s resilient from the front in the cohesive sense. Grinding this thing down frontally means having to sequentially eliminate the exact elements of it that are designed for cohesion. And if you dont grind it down you are stuck at pike range where the danger isn’t extreme (only 100 Romans killed at Pydna) but it’s not negligible. It’s like standing there and taking arrow fire that never ends.
That’s all speculation by a complete non-expert though, so take it with a grain of salt!
Richard Taylor quotes a primary source, below. That’s probably as good as we’re going to get. It seems like it was in fact difficult to close with a sarissa phalanx, even for legionaries, and I suppose we have to assume that if there were a clever trick, someone would have figured it out by then.
I don’t have personal experience with real spears or pikes, so it’s hard for me to visualize. And I’m still puzzled by how the javelins didn’t have any effect, but maybe the lead row of the phalanx had heavy enough armor that their smaller strap-on shields weren’t a weakness. Or maybe the pikes were used to deflect incoming javelins.
I don’t have personal experience with real spears or pikes, so it’s hard for me to visualize. And I’m still puzzled by how the javelins didn’t have any effect, but maybe the lead row of the phalanx had heavy enough armor that their smaller strap-on shields weren’t a weakness. Or maybe the pikes were used to deflect incoming javelins.
That’s probably part of the reason, but also, the phalanx had five rows of spears sticking out in front. Even if your javelins manage to take out a large number of enemies, they won’t take out five ranks’ worth, so you’ll still be facing several rows of spearpoints.
But then the hastati back away, and we don’t have our pikes any more, and now the principes show up. (Maybe our rear rows pass their pikes forward?)
Depending on how far the lines have moved, you might be able to just pick your pikes up off the ground.
Off topic – I enjoyed seeing your new video with Drachinifel over on his channel today. Even though the main topics were things you’ve already posted about here the examples and tangential discussions were well worth the watch.
A little bit o/t, but not totally irrelevant.
The only complete surviving legionary long shield on display at Legion: life in the Roman army at the British Museum review | The Week
https://theweek.com/culture-life/art/legion-life-in-the-roman-army-british-museum-exhibition-review
If you are in the vicinity, you might want to nip by.
Unfortunately our spring trip to Europe this years is to Hispania. No stop in Londinium.
Do we have any indications of how Livy’s seven javelins were supposed to be carried? Lucilius says five javelins for the velites, which seems more reasonable – one in the throwing hand and the others in the shield hand (along with the grip for the shield).
I know in some eras they had big quiver-like pouches to carry spare javelins in, but I’m not sure if those were used in Republican Rome.
I am reluctant to post o/t twice, but this one was, too me as a Roman History enthusiast, really exciting:
“The World’s Smartest Young Minds Just Cracked a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery These ancient papyrus scrolls went unread for millennia. Then came a $1 million competition for AI geeks.”
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/vesuvius-challenge-ai-herculaneum-scrolls-b27c2e30
By Ben Cohen • Feb. 9, 2024
“These scrolls known by the seductive name of the Herculaneum papyri have been unreadable since Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. and they were buried under mud and ashes at a private villa near Pompeii. For centuries, they were lost to history. Even when they were discovered in the 1700s, the carbonized scrolls were too fragile to handle.
“The quest to unroll them began not with a volcanic eruption two millennia but two decades ago, when University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales devised a method of applying modern technology to crack an old mystery.
“Then tech investors, billionaire quants and Silicon Valley luminaries decided to fund the Vesuvius Challenge, a $1 million competition with the crazy goal of using AI to recover a few passages from the Herculaneum papyri. And it actually worked! This week, the Vesuvius Challenge trumpeted a monumental technological breakthrough: The scrolls have finally been opened.
***
“The winning team consisted of three students, including Farritor, 22, who investigated ruins of antiquity from his University of Nebraska dorm room. They didn’t know each other before the Vesuvius Challenge. They still haven’t met in person. But they built on each other’s work and did something together they couldn’t have done alone—something that many thought couldn’t be done at all. And by looking so far into the past, they’re offering a peek into the future.
“The quest to unroll them began not with a volcanic eruption two millennia but two decades ago, when University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales devised a method of applying modern technology to crack an old mystery.
“The process of virtually unwrapping the Herculaneum papyri involved three steps: scanning, segmentation and searching for ink. It sounds basic, but it’s really bonkers. “It seems like a magic trick,” Seales said. First the scrolls had to be scanned at high resolution by a particle accelerator. Then the sheets had to be identified, separated and digitally flattened. Only then could the machine-learning models find ink. Stephen Parsons, a graduate student in Seales’s lab, published a dissertation last year showing this was theoretically possible.
“Friedman is a tech investor, entrepreneur and the former chief executive of GitHub. In the early days of the pandemic, something odd happened to him: He fell down a rabbit hole into ancient Rome. When he learned about the existence of the Herculaneum scrolls, he became obsessed. When he learned about Seales’s effort to read them, he wanted to help. He wasn’t sure how. But once the professor responded to his email, Friedman pitched him on an unconventional idea: a contest.
***
“The contest was started by Seales, Friedman and his investing partner Daniel Gross, and they crowdsourced the funds to dangle a tantalizing grand prize: $700,000 for the first team to recover four legible passages of 140 characters each by the end of 2023. They knew the Vesuvius Challenge would attract a legion of AI geeks. What they didn’t know was how much progress money could buy.
“When he thought about how to structure the contest, Friedman made a crucial discovery of his own: He believed it would be essential to blend competition with cooperation. That’s why the Vesuvius Challenge offered another $300,000 in prizes that rewarded milestones along the way—an incentive for participants to share their progress and code. “If it was just a competition, you’d have teams or individuals work on it and make a little progress, but then give up because it’s way too much work to do for a small chance of success,” Friedman said. He wanted to make that small chance of success much bigger.
“Now that the seemingly impossible was becoming probable, Farritor and Nader made the strategic decision to join forces. Instead of competing against each other, they would collaborate with each other. In the days before the Dec. 31 deadline, they also teamed up with Schilliger, whose impressive work extracting sheets from the scrolls fed their models with more data. Their entry stood out among the 18 submissions that the Vesuvius Challenge organizers sent Janko and other papyrologists to review—and reveal what people had been waiting thousands of years to see.
***
“The first year of the Vesuvius Challenge unearthed 5% of one scroll. There’s another six-figure prize attached to this year’s goal: recovering 90% of the four scrolls that have been scanned. And they hope that’s just the start. Classics scholars also believe there is a bigger library of hidden treasures waiting to be excavated from Herculaneum that could keep them busy for the next 2,000 years. ”
If you can get around the WSJ paywall, open the article and look at the graphics. They are awe inspiring.
Linking to the thread reader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1678404679326203904.html
instead of the tweet directly is convenient for those who dont have a twitter account and IMHO just a more readable format in general.
Reading this thread leaves me with a vital question. Is Joxer’s armor in Xena Warrior Princess actually both period appropriate and high qualtiy armor for the 7th or 8th century BCE?
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/84/de/8f/84de8f9a5a0a950f0f434bd9c00f3dd7.jpg
He’s got the metal cap (plus decorative strips riveted on outside the cloth), the shoulder plates, a single large disc on the front and back and a thick protective belt. Is this what we should expect from pectoral armor before the shift to three plates? Are the Scythians and Greeks blinded by cultural chauvinism when they dismiss his superior Italian military technology as silly looking?
For a less vital question, are formation rotations the only rotations? If a legionary is in the front rank of the hastati, are they going to stay there until the whole unit withdraws? It seems like that would be very exhausting.
I’m curious — has anyone ever examined the relationship between a Roman legion and a Zulu impi? I was struck by several things when I read this post — how both the classical Roman legion army and the Zulus of the Shaka and later eras emphasized — and found success with — infantry armies that centered around battalion-sized tactical units rushing into the attack with armed with large shields, throwing javelins/spears, and short spears/swords to overwhelm an enemy. The central tactic being to close with an opponent as rapidly as possible, deliver a “softening” storm of thrown missile weapons, and then charge in with a stabbing weapon (assegais/gladiusii) with enough inherent discipline to overpower a foe.
“Gladii”, sorry, Maximus Dickus, it won’t happen again!
What bothers me is the cavalry thing. The guys with the sarissas are not there to win the battle. Even if they recibe much more damage than usual if they stand till the cavalry arrives they performs as intended. So why the cavalry didn’t arrive?. And then one wonders about the quality of the late hellenistic cavalry. Alexander could control his to save Parmenion. Antiocus III goes out of the field twice.
In a spirit of pedantry:
“The maniples are their own semi-independent maneuvering units (note how much smaller they are than the equivalent taxeis in the phalanx, this is a more flexible fighting system)”
Taking ‘taxeis’ here presumably to mean those units of Alexander’s army, 1500-2000 strong? But the manoeuvre unit of the Hellenistic phalanx was the speira or syntagma, 256 strong, so there’s not that great a difference from the Roman system. The difference being of course that the Roman maniples were genuinely tactically independent units, while the speira/syntagma was just a building block for creating larger formations.
“Now of course, Hellenistic armies don’t have a forward-thrown light infantry screen; their light infantry is deployed on the flanks.”
This is not really true – the Greek and Hellenistic practice was often to have light infantry deploy and fight in front of the main phalanx, in much the same style as the Romans. Though there might also be light(er) infantry on the flanks.
“One Very Bad Day”
This is a nice account of the Roman ideal. Yet, when it came to actual battles between legion and phalanx, despite all these Roman advantages, the phalanx always won (until something else, something outside of the theory of low level fighting techniques, changed things). So in fact, the phalanx was the better tactical system, in straightforward face to face combat, it’s just that straightforward face to face combat didn’t happen very often, and wasn’t decisive when it did. You will no doubt get to this in Part 3 (or is this Part 3? Then in Part 3c perhaps).
Yeah, this time I’m not very convinced by our host’s text.
I have no doubt that the Romans thought they were going to break the phalanx just as they had broken the other spears and shields infantry units.
In practice, how effective are javelins and even pilums? I suppose that, in reality, shields, armour and even sarisses were sufficient to protect the phalangists effectively.
As for charging into contact by deflecting the spear with one’s shield, this works best when there aren’t several spikes to deflect.
Finally, as for hoping that the phalanx will break under the violence of the impact, I doubt that the Romans had a decisive advantage in terms of morale, since both sides were free citizens, relatively well-to-do and well regarded in their societies, fighting in relatively prestigious formations.
On the contrary, in the frontal assault, I’d tend to believe that it was the legion that would exhaust itself against the phalanx, since each legionary had to try to make contact, thus risking his own skin very directly.
In fact, frontal battles between legions and phalanxes seem to favour the phalanx. However, it’s enough for the legion to realize that it doesn’t really need to beat the phalanx head-on to win, since it can win the fight against the units covering its flanks, which are unable to withstand such an onslaught, in order to then close on the phalanx to win the battle.
Thinking of the big Roman victories over phalanx-based armies, we’ve got:
– Beneventum: Pyrrhus’ elephants stampede through their own ranks, causing the Epirotes to withdraw.
– Cynoscephalae: The Romans attack before the Macedonian army is fully deployed, routing the not-yet-ready enemy left flank before swinging round to attack the Macedonian right (which had been pushing the Romans back until this point).
– Magnesia: The Seleucid cavalry either rout or chase their opponents off the field, the phalanx conducts a fighting withdrawal until their elephants start stampeding through their own ranks, causing the infantry to collapse.
– Pydna: The Macedonian phalanx pushes back the Romans until they get to some rough ground, causing their formation to break down and enabling the Romans to cut them to pieces.
To be honest the only pattern I can really see is that elephant stampede –> defeat. Of the other two battles, I don’t think Cynoscephalae really tells us anything about which system was superior (Roman armies often crumbled when attacked from the flank, as Hannibal so famously demonstrated). Pydna does highlight an advantage of the legions, namely that they could fight better on broken terrain, but that was a situational advantage, and on open terrain the caliga was on the other foot.
I know it’s not the most satisfying explanation, but maybe the Romans simply got lucky. There were only six big legion vs. phalanx battles, which is a sufficiently small sample size that random chance can have a large effect.
I’m sure the later parts in the series will get into that more, so we will probably get a better explanation then.
(Cynoscephalae and Pydna seem to me to be connected to the superior flexibility of Roman infantry.)
” There were only six big legion vs. phalanx battles,”
The Romans just happened to be lucky six times in a row? The chances of that are 1 in 2^6 = 1 in 64. The pattern would seem to be that the phalanx always ended up being disordered by some event or other.
Four times in a row; the first two battles were Roman defeats. And assuming the two systems were equally good, we’d expect the Romans to win three of the six battles anyway.
This isn’t necessarly that improbable. Indeed, it would be improbable that no series of either good or back luck ever happened.
To quote our hosts initial post:
“On the one hand, we may note one clear historical fact: from 200 to 148 BC, the Romans win every single major land engagement fought against a Hellenistic power – most of them lopsidedly so. On the other hand, all of those victories have their own quirks. None is quite a perfect model set-piece battle, as we’ll see later in the series. And moreover, this staggeringly lopsided Roman success was relatively new: Rome had fought Pyrrhus of Epirus’ Hellenistic-style army in three major engagements from 280 to 275 and didn’t decisively win any of them, though none of Pyrrhus’ victories were anything like as decisive as the parade of Roman triumphs during the second century, despite Pyrrhus being regarded in our sources as the finest general of his generation (and we have reason to think he is, in fact, being tactically innovative).”
So we have decisive Roman victories, indecisive Roman victories, and indecisive Roman defeats. No decisive Roman defeats. That is a pattern.
So we have decisive Roman victories, indecisive Roman victories, and indecisive Roman defeats. No decisive Roman defeats. That is a pattern.
I suspect the reason is that the Roman triarii were able to conduct a rearguard action and prevent the army totally collapsing. But this is an advantage that only comes into play after the main battle is over, and doesn’t explain the result of the main battle itself.
“So we have decisive Roman victories, indecisive Roman victories, and indecisive Roman defeats. No decisive Roman defeats. That is a pattern.”
That is not a pattern if your sample size is 6. Statistically that is indistinguishable from noise.
Yeah I didn’t get a clear image of how the battles actually played out to favor the Romans in this case. Ok, they rotate to reduce fatigue, they throw pilums, all very nice in general, but are they really doing this to actual phalanxes? Just charge and hope you’ve disorganized them enough to get past the points?
I’ve seen allusions to Roman legions being more maneuverable and flexible etc but ultimately you have a wall of pikes hundreds of meters wide and a bunch of dudes with swords, how does the maniple’s ability to move 50m to the left or right help them in getting past the pikes?
The key text is Livy 32.17, describing the Roman siege of Macedonian-held Atrax. The Romans breached the walls, but the garrison, which consisted of the Peltasts (that is, elite pikemen, not Classical javelin-throwers), held on:
“For the Macedonians who formed the garrison, numerous and picked men, thinking that it would be a most noble exploit to defend the city with arms and valour rather than with walls, in close array, strengthening their formation by increasing the number of ranks within it, when they saw the Romans scaling the ruins, thrust them out over ground that was rough and admitted no easy retreat. The consul [Flamininus] was enraged … and sent out cohorts, one after the other, under their standards, to pierce, if possible, with their attack the formation of the Macedonians – they themselves call it the phalanx. But in addition to the limits of space, only a little of the wall having been destroyed, the enemy had the advantage in character of weapons and in tactics. When the Macedonians in close order held before them spears of great length, and when the Romans, hurling their javelins to no purpose, had drawn their swords against this sort of testudo, closely-fashioned with shields, they could neither approach near enough to engage hand to hand nor cut off the ends of the spears, and if they did cut off or break any of them, the spear shaft, the broken part being itself sharp, helped, along with the points of the undamaged pikes, to make a sort of wall [vallum]. Moreover, the parts of the rampart that still stood protected the two flanks, nor was it possible either to retire or to charge from a distance, a manoeuvre which usually throws the ranks into disorder.” Livy 32.17
Face to face, Macedonians win, pila, line relief, swords and virtus notwithstanding. The key to Roman victory was in not fighting face to face (or not only face to face); it did indeed need an element of luck to get favourable circumstances, but Romans, like many successful armies, could make their own luck.
On the face of it, neither the Macedonians nor the Romans advanced in that engagement. What we need is depictions of a phalanx launching a successful attack.
> But the manoeuvre unit of the Hellenistic phalanx was the speira or syntagma, 256 strong, so there’s not that great a difference from the Roman system. The difference being of course that the Roman maniples were genuinely tactically independent units, while the speira/syntagma was just a building block for creating larger formations.
This is an administrative/organisational unit, not a manoeuvre unit. Hellenistic phalanxes don’t tend to show the ability to e.g. advance one speira while retreating the next.
It definitely is a manoeuvre unit – though perhaps we are using the term in slightly different ways. As I said, the speira is usually not tactically independent, it is expected to act in close proximity to others of its kind.
We don’t really know whether Hellenistic armies could “advance one speira while retreating the next” – or why they would want to – but just wait till Bret gets round to Pyrrhus’ army for some thoughts on that. And compare Sellasia.
You note that the total depth of the Roman line was close to that of a Hellenistic army. AFAIU, though, this system of rotating “thinner” units in and out of the front distributed the attrition better across the troops.
eg whereas in a Hellenistic 16-deep line, only a couple of rows of the infantry are directly in contact, in a Roman manipular system as I understand it, up to 2-3 effective-rows get be on the front, with additional rotations within maniples as the principii and hastatii trade off.
So the Roman system for attritional purposes gets some of the benefits of a much shallower formation.
“Romans do not built their battle plans around their weakest combat arm.”
Do you mean build?
What do the Hastati (and I guess also the Principes) do after they disengaged? There’s a mention that they reform, but there’s not really much about what their role on the battlefield is after that. Do they just hang back and chill, forming a fallback line for whoever is currently engaged? Do they prepare for a round two during their downtime (when would such a round two come? I would assume after the Triarii, but those guys are already a last resort)
I always assumed the Romans would rotate their hastati and principes in and out of the front line, with the triarii in the back chilling unless the other two groups became too worn-down to keep fighting.
I can think of a few things they’d be doing.
–Looking big and scary. This is not a small thing. If you’re on the front lines watching your buddy get his guts ripped out, seeing a large block of men you can’t get to standing there waiting for their chance to gut you like a fish is going to negatively affect your will to continue fighting. Even if you defeat this group in front of you, you’re just going to have to do it all over again.
–Drinking, eating, and dressing wounds–basically, getting ready for Round 2. Probably the guys two or three ranks back are going to be doing this; you don’t look very intimidating if you’re getting yourself patched up. That said, you’d be surprised how long you can keep fighting even after you’ve been injured.
–Looking for opportunities to jump forward and kill someone. “I saw this guy undefended and took my shot” is, after all, a legitimate reason to break ranks. And if my officer finds a weak point and exploits it, it can turn the tide. Having a unit come out of nowhere at you is NOT a fun thing to have happen.
–Pass equipment up. Those seven javelins can be augmented if we have a stockpile in the back and pass them up to the light infantry. Probably didn’t happen too much, but it probably happened some.
–Rest. This is critical for this sort of tactic to work. The whole point is that your fighters are going to be fresh for the next blow, which means they’ve got to not do demanding physical labor for a few minutes. This can be intimidating as well. If I see a group of guys chatting, eating a snack, leaning on their shields, and casually discussing how they’re going to attack me, while I watch my friends on the front lines get maimed or killed, it’s not going to do great things for my state of mind! There’s a story of a Chinese general who prevented a siege by playing a musical instrument, alone, outside the gates of a city; the enemy thought “If he’s THAT relaxed, we have no hope of victory” and went around the city. Same principle comes into play here.
Looking at the battle line show in this article and the one shown in part 1b I’m feeling like the reason for Roman victory is going to come down to not the centre (citizen solider heavy infantry v citizen solider heavy infantry) or the flank (noble cavalry v noble cavalry) but the wings (Roman subjugated population heavy infantry v Hellenic subjugated population medium/light infantry). The Roman heavy infantry don’t have to win 1 on 1 against the pikeman, they have to hold the pikeman while the Socii heavy infantry win 1 on 1 against the Arab/Persian/Thracian/Cretan medium/light infantryman.
Of your three zones of contract (flank, wing, centre) the Romans have a slight disadvantage on the flank, a slight advantage at the centre and a huge advantage on the wing. Because the Romans have culturally bought the Socii inside the tent enough that they have them operate as more core heavy infantry in a way that a successor kingdom would never have treated the non-core population of their realm. The Hellenic armies needed their light infantry on the wings because they didn’t have enough heavy infantry to staff the full line, while the Romans had Socii heavy infantry on the wings and could thus place their light infantry in front of the main line for better usage.
Which all in all gives us the answer to the initial question of the series. How do you defeat the giant pike block? You have a Socii stab the pikeman in the side after defeating the Thracian/Egyptian/Persian infantry that was meant to protect the pikeman’s side but wasn’t allowed heavy infantry gear due to the class structure.
That seems like it would have the Socii risking their own outer flank against the Macedonian cavalry. In the worst case, it creates a gap through which they can push behind the Roman line. To keep the battle line together the wings have to be a bit more passive and adjust their movement to both the infantry in the center and the cavalry at the flanks.
For this reason a Phalanx on the wings wouldn’t do for the Macedonians, even with a different class structure. You need soldiers with more freedom of movement there. And because the Macedonian cavalry is more active compared to the Romans, lighter infantry than Romans makes some amount of sense.
(The thing to do with more heavy infantry for the Macedonian states would not be to make the infantry line all heavy, but to build a second army – if the king can get a trustworthy commander for that.)
That seems like it would have the Socii risking their own outer flank against the Macedonian cavalry. In the worst case, it creates a gap through which they can push behind the Roman line. To keep the battle line together the wings have to be a bit more passive and adjust their movement to both the infantry in the center and the cavalry at the flanks.
The triplex acies would help with this — you could have one line screen against the enemy cavalry and another wheel round to take the phalanx in the flank.
That could work. It would probably require a skilled commander and some drill beforehand to pull it of well, so maybe if the Romans had fought the Macedonian kingdoms in many instead of only a hand-full of battles that would have become their preferred tactic.
I wouldn’t even say the Romans have a slight advantage in the centre. Not once do they manage to break a phalanx without some outside force doing so for them (own elephants running amok, advancing over broken ground while pushing the Romans back, or not having formed up yet in a weird rush of a battle).
Agree with the main thrust of the argument though, and if anything the above supports it yet further.
I appreciate the explanation of what ‘screening’ light infantry actually means in this environment. That’s a verb often presented without any kind of expansion, and it tends to play out very differently in different contexts.
(Like modern infantry ‘screening’ tanks by detecting hostile anti-tank infantry, or steam-age naval screening forces which more or less block the enemy by being dangerous to get too close to and not valuable enough that getting dangerously close to them is a win. Though they also do the visual screening thing sometimes.)
“how the accumulation of a lot of little wounds can sap soldiers of their ability to resist effectively, even if no one wound is lethal.” – hey, historical backing for the D&Ds concept of hit points! Cool!
Aside: finding the comment box is really difficult on a phone – have to scroll through previous comment threads, some of them wrapped to one character, but not into the massive block of tweets.
I understand why the gaps between individual units are dangerous and difficult to exploit for the enemy, but part of me still finds it puzzling because punching through an enemy line will create gaps that might well be smaller than this at first and which can prove disastrous. Is it just because a section of the line that’s been punched through will inherently be much less cohesive than two more or less intact units with a gap in between, or is there something else I’m missing?
Hrotha,
Pre-planned gaps in the line can be covered by rearward formations. In the Roman triplex acies, the gap between two maniples of hastati has a third maniple of principes covering it behind. The gap may also be full of skirmishers like the velites operating in the interstices between formed groups of men.
If you attack such a gap, you would be advancing into javelins from the skirmishers, possibly getting caught in a crossfire between the two maniples of hastati, and then get counter-charged by the principes covering that space.
On the flip side, if you punch through a line and create a gap in an otherwise solid formation, there probably isn’t the same level of coverage present there. The gaps in a Roman triplex acies are left there deliberately, and the troops plan to fight with them. An unplanned gap caused by a section of your battle line routing suddenly is a different matter. It spreads confusion and dismay, which are the sorts of things that trigger mass routs.
There’s a fundamental difference between a “punch-through” gap and a “staggered line” gap.
If you punch through, the enemy is going to be disorganized–most units only work efficiently in one direction, and attacking it from a different direction necessitates doing some maneuver to bring that unit to bear. A planned punch-through can exploit that confusion to cause a great deal of harm. (As an aside, you CAN train your unit to switch where the front is rapidly. But it’s a complicated maneuver that’s only situationally relevant. Cool when you can pull it off, but most of the time you’re facing the way you’re facing for a reason.)
In contrast, a staggered front doesn’t present gaps so much as kill pockets. If you try to exploit the gaps in the Roman lines, even without the screening troops occupying space, what you’ve really done is expose your front and sides to enemy attack. You’re now fighting on three sides, rather than one. If you advance into two gaps the Roman unit will be flanked in two places–but coordinating that will be beyond the capacity of most generals in the age of “Use horns and yelling to signal troops”.
You can also think of it this way: Attacking the gaps in a staggered line is the equivalent of a failed attempt to punch through. I’ve been part of that a few times; it does NOT go well. The fact that people aren’t actually getting killed is likely why the tactic of punching through the middle is more common in modern recreational combat (like the SCA and HEMA) than in historical combat–the cost of a failed push is a few more bruises and a good story in the SCA, whereas in actual combat it’s deadly. Putting yourself into a position where you’re intentionally mimicking a failed attempt to punch through the line is suicidal. (The unit I fought was was particularly stupid and usually attempted to punch through the middle, so I got a fair bit of experience in why it’s a bad idea!)
I recall seeing a series of Youtube videos recently from Tod’s Workshop with a modern Olympic(?) javelineer throwing pretty faithfully recreated pila and it seemed within a couple sessions he was able to get a 42m throw on the run, with functionally no experience behind throwing the things and being only familiar with a radically different design in the modern sporting javelin.
Seems to me like properly trained soldiers with years of experience behind a pilum, like a Princeps ought to have, would at least be able to throw much further than a lot of academic sources suggest might be the maximum range for these weapons? Seems like that would also make more sense as one expects to get not one but two pila off before drawing a sword for contact with the enemy line, and a 20-odd meter usable range seems a little close for comfort.
Is there much academic interest in this topic as of right now or are most fairly agreeable to the orthodox notion of extremely limited range for pila?
Ah, but check the tests where they put him in armor and a shield and his range dropped significantly, right back into the 20-30m range suggested by academic tests.
I was thinking about the velites and how they carry 7 pilum into battle. That doesn’t seem to me like a lot for a short battle of even an hour where groups of velites are moving forward and back depending on the flow of battle, and throwing their pilum as they get the chance. The velites are the most mobile, so it would seem to make sense that units of them would retire behind the triarii to pick up more light pilum for themselves, and maybe heavy pilum for the hastati or principes depending on how long the battle lasted. I say they would retire behind the triarii because it makes no military sense in any time period to put your major supply of weapons so far forward that the enemy could capture them. Is there ever any mention of how the resupply of pilum for velites or any of the other ranks might work during a battle?
Note that the velites do not carry pila, they use the hasta velitaris, a different, much lighter and smaller kind of javelin. Also, seven is actually quite a lot, most javelin troops tend not to carry so many.
As far as I can make out from the discussion in the replies section here, the phalanx may have been at least as good as, if not better than the legion, in head-on combat, and yet the phalanx seems to have faded away for a while, around the Mediterranean.
So: A thought/question which strikes me. Did Mediterranean civilisations run out of the raw materials to make those very long spears? I seem to remember claims coming up in discussions of medieval/renaissance England that England started running short on wood suitable for making the then favourite national weapon, the longbow, and that some kind of import duty of bow-staves got imposed to try and ameliorate this.
The Romans can just dig more iron and coal out of their ground to make their swords, and the javelins they’re throwing don’t require lengths of wood anywhere near as long as the phalanx spears as far as I can understand, but what kind of wood and how many years of tree growth are required to make a phalanx spear, and do the Mediterranean civilisations maybe have to abandon the phalanx because they’ve deforested the available landscape of all trees sufficient to support a phalanx based military?
No, they did not run out of resources. I think folks may be jumping the gun a bit drawing conclusions at this point, but we’re going to get to the battle record of the Hellenistic army and its Macedonian phalanx against Roman legions. The phalanx fades away because Roman armies spend the second century mopping the floor with them in a long series of unanswered victories, until there are no more truly independent Hellenistic states By 100, what is left of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms are effectively Roman vassals).
Everybody forgets Mithradates of Pontus, who sent a Hellenistic army complete with ‘Macedonian’ phalanx on a, for a while, successful campaign against the Romans in the first century – though the final result was of course the usual one.
It would be interesting to go a bit meta on this question. Polybius’ aim in writing his history was to a large extent to explain to his Greek readers how it was that the Romans conquered them. Part of his explanation (in Book 18) was a technical one, arising from the Roman military system – though not from the battlefield superiority of the Roman tactical system: as he says, “Many considerations may easily convince us that, if only the phalanx has its proper formation and strength, nothing can resist it face to face or withstand its charge”, 18.29.1). But this was only a very small part of Polybius’ overall analysis. Nowadays, especially at the (pardon me) nerdy end of historical analysis, technical explanations on the strengths and weaknesses of tactical systems are stressed more than they ever were by Polybius. This seems to apply particularly to antiquity – I’m not aware of explanations for Napoleon’s conquest of Europe based on the sharpness of French bayonets, or the British Empire explained as a result of superior forms of British musket.
As to why the phalanx fades away – peoples tend to use the weapons and weapons systems determined by their culture. Those cultures that used close order spearmen, having been defeated and absorbed into the Roman world, naturally then started to use Roman tactics – though only for a while. The Eastern Roman empire, I think I am right in saying, reverted more or less to a spear (and cavalry) system.
“Going from memory Cornel wood was often used for pikes” – maybe. Probably not. Ash probably yes, see part 1 of this series. But either way, it’s unlikely that there was, and there’s no evidence for, a tree shortage.
I think it would be fair to say that in 100 BC Pontus was not a “truly” independent state. Rome granted Pontus territory after the Pergamon succession and revoked it after the Cappadocian invasion. It’s hard to square independence with another nation being allowed to dictate your boders. Absent the Social War creating an opportunity maybe Mithradites would have remained a Roman ally and in a few generations Pontus would have gone the way of Pergamon.
Going from memory Cornel wood was often used for pikes, but any hardwood will do, eg ash. Presumably a gardening / horticultural expert can say exactly how fast those trees grow.
I doubt very much that Mediterraneans ran out of wood for pikes. Six metres is long for a weapon, but these societies use as long and thicker bits of wood for roof beams and other building construction, ship oars and masts, etc. A tree shortage would have hit every aspect of their societies, not just pike phalanxes.
Those guys with te sarissas were not there to win the battle. Even if they suffer much more casualties than usual, if they stand till the cavalry arrives, they perform as intended. So the main problem should be why the cavalry didn´t arrive in the Hellenistic battles against the Romans. Alexander could control his cavalry so he could help Parmenion in Gaugamela while Antiocus III goes two times out of the field. Perhaps there´s a quality loss there.
There is something I don’t understand about how deep the “typical” roman formation was. You tell us it is 6+6+3 men deep: this is with “combat spacing and depth”, with the 2 centuries in a maniple one next to the other? so that means that before engaging, when every maniples has 1 century behind the other the whole formation has a depth of 12+12+6?
Thank you!
I’ll be honest. I read this series and one of my big takeaways so far is; “I bet I can use this to make my warhammering better.”
Now I just need to figure out what the decisive arm for my dwarfs (okay its heavy infantry duh) and imperial guard are and how to leverage that into a combat paradigm i can apply to the very abstract and gamified way you win games…
I’m curious how the hastati would retreat when they were engaged with a sarissa phalanx. In particular, getting past 5 spear points when you’re charging into combat seems daunting enough, but getting past those same 5 spear points again, in reverse order, when you’re already tired and your cohesion is likely wavering, seems even harder.
How would they do it? I’m assuming that just turning their backs and running would be a bad idea, so would they slowly walk backwards? If so, how could they be sure that the people behind them weren’t running away, thus leaving them vulnerable?
The idea that the roman legionnaire is getting past 5 spear points seems kinda silly. If you could casually do that, the Phalanx wouldn’t work at all.
Realistically, the Roman is tossing two javelins, then rushing forward, then either finding a gap opened by the pilum, or more likely, not finding a gap, and pulling back once his shield is being smacked by a bunch of spear points.
he’s not getting more than 2 spear points deep in most cases. In most cases, he’s pulling back and then waiting for an opportunity – say something going wrong on the enemy line and opening a hole (e.g. rampaging elephants).